Considering the prominent position of critical work in TESOL and Applied Linguistics, there is a need for detailed investigations of apprentice practitioners' formative interactions with critical ideas in graduate programs and how these affect their willingness to cultivate their own critical pedagogical repertories. Adopting a case study design, this study examines 1) the factors that may have structured two novices' situated understandings of criticality as it was constructed in a graduate TESOL course and 2) how extensively they came to incorporate critical principles into their burgeoning pedagogical philosophies. Results indicate that divergent outcomes of critical teacher education were attributable to disparities in student habitus and opportunities for praxis development more so than experiences of enduring oppression. In order to counteract the marginalization of novices who struggle to adopt vocal and disputative critical personas, the study recommends the use of simulated teaching activities and written reflective tasks in various textual genres.