Engaging in Decolonial ‘Pedagogizations’ at a Colombian Doctoral Teacher Education Program in English Language Teaching

Abstract

Decolonial engagement in education is becoming geo and body politically multifaceted across the global south and north. It is witnessing the emergence of ‘pedagogies of crossing,’ pedagogías insumisas (unsubordinate pedagogies), and ‘trans/queer pedagogies,’ among others. Thus, decolonial engagement in education constitutes a fruitful epistemological site of struggle, fracture, and healing. This plurality situates the so-called pedagogizations within the decolonial turn. Pedagogizations, on the other hand, refer to actions otherwise rather than to the hold of colonialism in a designated field: Pedagogy. Decolonial pedagogizations remain underexplored in the literature on language teacher education, however. This article unearths and discusses how they are (co)constructed for and with English language teachers at a Colombian state university’s doctoral program that claims a south epistemological stance and seeks the decolonization of language teacher education. In this vein, this article adds to the literature reclaiming decolonial methodologies, or pedagogizations, in education and proposes that they include knowledge (co)construction processes otherwise such as submerged guiding, deculonial voicing, and cultivating heterarchical relationships. Yet, it also critiques these decolonial pedagogizations in language teacher education, embracing the diverse onto-epistemological constitution of graduate educational processes.

Teacher Education. A Black Student-Teacher’s Narrative About Black Identity

“…English language teaching (ELT) and teacher education (TE) have not escaped this hegemony, causing an unquestionable dominance of the inner-circle countries (Kachru, 1990) regarding initial teacher education. In Colombia, for example, scholars are interested in decolonizing materials (Núñez-Pardo, 2020, English language pedagogy (Ubaque-Casallas, 2021), higher education from the perspective of indigenous students (Usma et al, 2018), and doctoral TE (Castañeda-Peña & Méndez-Rivera, 2022); some even have concentrated on exploring the racialization of the ELT field (Bonilla Medina & Finardi, 2022). However, studies that question, challenge, or attempt to document racist practices in ELT and TE are scarce.…”