At the onset of emergency remote teaching in higher education, as a rapid response to the virus pandemic, I organised an online course that focused on Game Based Approaches. The course was part of the professional development initiatives I have been designing for Physical Education teachers over the past ten years, as a teacher educator working in a modern university context. I envisioned myself empowering PE teachers to take activist roles in their practice and I worked towards increasing their receptiveness to humanistic teaching. The aim of this paper is to use the above course as an inciting moment for reflecting on the personal and cultural tensions inherent in the employment of critical pedagogy principles by novice academics. To achieve the above, I employ autoethnographic writing to describe the dimensions that may shape teacher educators' efforts to re-read both their pedagogical and their emotional knowledge.