Let's stop a moment and examine what it is that we (educators and researchers) do together. Research is planned, designed, and carried out within the boundaries of a research paradigm. A proposal is presented to an ethics committee and defended before a group of colleagues to obtain consent, approval, support, and finally to earn a master's degree or a doctorate. We know that this is "how things work" at the university. As a Master's of Education student in the field of TESOL, I can appreciate that these structures exist to help us organize and make sense of knowledge in the most productive and ethical way possible to us. But I have always struggled with the idea that most research in the TESOL field is still positivist, a paradigm that seeks an objective and factual representation of results. In a field such as ours, where we work with people and language, I continue to have difficulty seeing how the individual personalities and experiences of the people involved in the research don't get in the way of objectivity. Educational research and practice is unique because we are human, more uncountable than countable (as nouns go). Having lived with each other in the same hallways, lounges, office spaces, meeting rooms, and classrooms, we can rest assured that researchers, teachers, and students are people, not subjects. And we thus leave fingerprints everywhere at the research scene and on the research results. To resolve this dilemma, I designed a master's thesis proposal on pictures in ESL texts under the qualitative research paradigm of critical pedagogy. Founded on the work of Brazilian Paulo Freire, this paradigm encourages us to consider with/ for our students: how the existing power structures came to be as they are, whose interests are served by these structures, and what can be done to change the situation. I chose this paradigm because I was drawn to the notion that teachers and researchers could help individual people to empower themselves and improve the material circumstances of their lives. Then again, maybe I was just plain egoistical and naIve. I had not paid close enough attention to the fact that empowerment needs to come from within a person in a social class of a particular culture. And if the people gaining the most or the least from the existing power structures don't want to confront the realities-because to do so would be emotionally painful or would require giving up a comfortable way of life-it may not be our place as researchers (in my case a white, educated, middle-class foreign