This study seeks to develop a more nuanced understanding of how English language teacher educators navigate the tensions between and across institutional expectations, the Chilean sociopolitical landscape, the increasing diversity and their pedagogical choices as they construct their professional identities. By examining how these educators negotiate and resist the hegemonic discourses and practices embedded and embodied in language teacher education, such as the valorisation of native-speakerism, the devaluation of local knowledges, and the erasure of multilingual realities, this study highlights the centrality of cultivating linguistic ideological clarity. Such clarity is essential for challenging entrenched power structures and reimagining more equitable, inclusive, and contextually responsive language education. Drawing on in-depth semi-structured interviews with 10 English language teacher educators across diverse regions of Chile, this study examines the ideological tensions, professional negotiations, and acts of resistance enacted by teacher educators who critically engage with linguistic ideological clarity. The findings reveal that while English remains framed as a tool for social mobility, teacher educators actively problematise its association with dominant ideologies and normative systems and structures. This study advances a new term, that of ‘ideological agency’, which contributes to a growing body of work that foregrounds language teacher educators not only as curriculum implementers, but as ideological agents capable of unsettling taken-for-granted assumptions embedded in national education discourses. By making visible the ideological work undertaken by Chilean educators, this research calls for a reimagining of language teacher education as a space for critical hope, justice-oriented praxis and transformative identity development.