Towards a Decolonial Language Teacher Education

Abstract

In this article, we discuss the challenges of teacher education for the 21stCentury, taking decoloniality as a possible way to resignify our praxis. One of the challenges in decolonial thinking is to problematize the coloniality of knowledge (LANDER, 2005), which is established through the privilege of scientific knowledge and the invisibilization of other forms of knowing. In this respect, Castro-Gomez (2007) affirms that the university is an institution that contributes significantly to the maintenance of this logic. As university teachers directly involved in language teacher education, we have sought different ways to develop our praxis as a decolonial project (WALSH, 2013). In this article, we discuss decoloniality and present three praxes in which our objective was attempting to live language teacher education otherwise.

English Language Learners, Labels, Purposes, Standard English, Whiteness, Deficit Views, and Unproblematic Framings: Toward Southern Decoloniality

“…This is more so since there is not just one SE, but many varieties of SE. To this effect, the paper supports the provincialization/localization (see Borelli, Silvestre, & Pessoa, 2020) of English, or the deparochialization (Chaka et al, 2017) of English.…”

Global English: Neither a “Hydra” nor a “Tyrannosaurus Rex” or a “Red Herring” but an Ecology of Approaches Towards Social Justice

“…These two animals/views of Global English suggest that academics in general and applied linguists in particular should be more critical of English, accused of being responsible for many linguistic and social injustices perpetrated under the hydra heads of colonialism, racism and imperialism. As such, the metaphors of the hydra/tyrannosaurus rex are closer to the decolonial calls for a change in the terms of the conversation rather than just changing the contents of the conversation (e.g., Mignolo, 2009;Borelli, Silvestre, & Pessoa, 2020). This critical/decolonial view of English is in turn questioned by another animal, that of the red herring, introduced in the next section.…”

Raciolinguistic policy assemblages and white supremacy in teacher education

“…This article has joined demands for the decentring of whiteness in teacher education (e.g., Aronson & Meyers, 2022; Baker‐Bell et al, 2020; Borelli et al, 2020; Carter Andrews et al, 2021; Croom, 2020; Johnson, 2022; Kholi, 2008; Picower, 2009; Souto‐Manning, 2021; Walton & Osman, 2018) in placing a focus on language and how the contemporary teacher education policy assemblage in England reproduces raciolinguistic ideologies. Whilst my critique has examined various components of this policy assemblage, it should be clear that the problem is not necessarily the policies themselves but the broader structures of white supremacy which subordinate racialised populations on the basis that they exhibit linguistic deficiencies which require fixing.…”

“…All of the above requires teacher educators to center diverse language patterns and usages within their own pedagogies and curricula, and to center the experiences and knowledge of those who have long been positioned and perceived as linguistically and biologically inferior through centuries of colonial oppression (De Sousa Santos, 2018). This work is part of a broader social justice and decolonial agenda in teacher education which has long been practiced in parts of the Global South (e.g., Borelli et al, 2020; Persky & Viruru, 2019). In connecting these wider socio‐economic and political struggles with the lived realities of classroom interactions and curriculum design, only then might teacher educators begin to widen the cracks and see the spaces for resistance in what is an undoubtedly oppressive policy assemblage.…”