As higher education providers respond to increasing financial pressures with restructures and downsizing, teacher education is often subsumed into larger faculties that result in teacher educators' work, especially related to accreditation lost in the myriad of benchmarks and measures to be achieved. Even during a worldwide pandemic, teaching and teacher education continue to be subjected to scrutiny and portrayed as problematic by policymakers. In the 50th year of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, it is timely to reflect on our role as public intellectuals and explore possibilities to engage with discussions that shift the negative gaze in both teaching and teacher education to explore and generate new sensibilities. The paper critically analyses possibilities for teacher educators as public intellectuals through their research, teaching and service endeavours to make cultural contributions to education research and practice.