<![CDATA[Education for sustainable development (ESD) has gained increasing attention in English Language Teaching (ELT), particularly in alignment with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. While critical pedagogy (CP) offers a generative framework for cultivating sustainability awareness, its convergence with ESD in postgraduate ELT contexts remains underexplored, especially in Indonesia. This qualitative study examines how five English Education master’s students at an Indonesian public university use a critical pedagogy lens to shape their sustainability awareness. Data from semi-structured interviews were analyzed using thematic analysis. Findings reveal three key patterns: (1) participants demonstrated broadened conceptualizations of sustainability encompassing social justice, cultural preservation, and community solidarity beyond environmental concerns; (2) while CP principles were present in the program, they remained largely implicit and lecturer-dependent; and (3) engagement with CP fostered transformative teaching visions, yet institutional constraints, material scarcity, and knowledge gaps limited pedagogical enactment. Theoretically, the study extends CP scholarship by demonstrating how conscientization operates in a specific postgraduate ELT setting; practically, it offers teacher educators and curriculum designers concrete directions for embedding CP in graduate coursework, and signals to policymakers the need for institutional support, such as dedicated materials development and structured mentoring, to develop critically conscious, sustainability-oriented language teachers in non-Western higher education contexts.]]>
