Language And Decoloniality In Higher Education

"Language and Decoloniality in Higher Education brings together a collection of diverse papers that address, from various angles, the issue of decoloniality, language and transformation in higher education. It reflects the authors' cumulative years of experience as educators in higher education in different southern contexts. Distilled as case studies, the authors use a range of decolonial lenses to reflect on questions of knowledge, language and learning, and to build a reflexive praxis of decoloniality through multilingualism. Besides a number of decolonial persepectives which readers will be familiar with, this volume also explores a conceptual framework, Linguistic Citizenship, developed over the past two decades by scholars in southern Africa. In this collection, Linguistic Citizenship is used as a lens to 'think beyond' the inherited colonial matrices of language which have shaped this region (and many other southern contexts) for centuries, and to 're-imagine' multilingualism - and semiotics, more broadly - as a transformative resource in the broader project of social justice. Although each chapter has firm roots in the South African context, these studies have much to offer others in their 'quest for better worlds'. Of particular interest to global scholars are the authors' recounts of how they have grappled with leveraging the country's multilingual resources in the project of promoting academic access and success in the face of historical hierarchies of language and social power"--

Through the presentation of visual and textual insights, this book chronicles the experiences of Quechuan bilingual college students, who strive to maintain their ethnolinguistic identity while succeeding in Spanish-centric curricula. The book merges decolonial theory and participatory action research in pursuit of mobilizing Indigenous languages such as Quechua and depicts the ways in which these Andean college students deal with limited opportunities for Quechua-Spanish bilingual practices. It provides an overview of their collective efforts to mobilize Quechua in higher education, efforts which will help all who read it understand the maintenance of the Quechua language beginning at the grassroots level. The author advocates for engaging language researchers in critical collective forces at the core of conditions which promote Quechua in higher education, a collective effort which must reflect decolonial, non-Eurocentric, non-fundamentalist Indigenous concepts in combination with action-oriented cultural wealth for the benefit of minoritized languages and peoples.

By foregrounding language practices in educational settings, this timely volume offers a postcolonial critique of the languaging of higher education and considers how Southern epistemologies can be used to further the decolonization of post-secondary education in the Global South. Offering a range of contributions from diverse and minoritized scholars based in countries including South Africa, Rwanda, Sudan, Qatar, Turkey, Portugal, Sweden, India, and Brazil, The Languaging of Higher Education in the Global South problematizes the use of language in various areas of higher education. Chapters demonstrate both subtle and explicit ways in which the language of pedagogy, scholarship, policy, and partcipiation endorse and privelege Western constructs and knowledge production, and utilize Southern theories and epistemologies to offer an alternative way forward – practice and research which applies and promotes Southern epistemologies and local knowledges. The volume confronts issues including integrationism, epistemic solidarity, language policy and ideology, multilingualism, and the increasing use of technology in institutions of higher education. This innovative book will be of interest to researchers, scholars, and postgraduate students in the fields of higher education, applied linguistics, and multicultural education. Those with an interest in the decolonization of education and language will find the book of particular use.

Language and Decoloniality in Higher Education brings together a collection of diverse papers that address, from various angles, the issue of decoloniality, language and transformation in higher education. It reflects the authors' cumulative years of experience as educators in higher education in different southern contexts. Distilled as case studies, the authors use a range of decolonial lenses to reflect on questions of knowledge, language and learning, and to build a reflexive praxis of decoloniality through multilingualism. Besides a number of decolonial persepectives which readers will be familiar with, this volume also explores a conceptual framework, Linguistic Citizenship, developed over the past two decades by scholars in southern Africa. In this collection, Linguistic Citizenship is used as a lens to 'think beyond' the inherited colonial matrices of language which have shaped this region (and many other southern contexts) for centuries, and to 're-imagine' multilingualism – and semiotics, more broadly – as a transformative resource in the broader project of social justice. Although each chapter has firm roots in the South African context, these studies have much to offer others in their 'quest for better worlds'. Of particular interest to global scholars are the authors' recounts of how they have grappled with leveraging the country's multilingual resources in the project of promoting academic access and success in the face of historical hierarchies of language and social power.

Through a range of unconventional genres, representations of data, and dialogic, reflective narratives alongside more traditional academic genres, this book engages with contexts of decoloniality and border thinking in the Global South. It addresses processes of knowledge production and participation in the highly divided and unequal schooling and higher education system in South Africa, and highlights the consequences of the monolingual myth in post-colonial education, demonstrating opportunities for learning provided by translanguaging. It explores both embodied, multimodal and multilingual instances of knowledge-making in teaching and teacher education that take place outside but alongside formal classroom, lecture and seminar modes, and the positionality and learning experiences of teacher educators in science, literacy and language across the curriculum. The book is not only transdisciplinary but also captures the learning that takes place beyond the borders of disciplines and formal classroom spaces.

The chapters in this book highlight the possibilities and complexities of putting decolonial theory to work in higher education in Northern and Southern contexts across the globe. This book looks at decolonial work as praxis involving transformation at a range of levels from theoretical development, national policy, institutional policy and culture, academic discipline, programme, course, classroom, student and the self. Our authors argue that praxis in their contexts includes working at institutional level to undo the historical power of ‘coloniality’ in universities in the metropoles, introducing Indigenous knowledges into curricula and undoing the effects of ‘coloniality’ in embodiment, temporality and whiteness. We, as editors, argue for the need for transformation of the self as well as structures, and highlight qualities such as reflexivity on our own entanglements with coloniality, and why they occur, in this undoing. The approach offered in this book emphasises the connection between significant personal change as a pre-condition and an epistemological process to connect critical decolonial theory and our teaching practice. The book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Teaching in Higher Education.

This book reconceives the internationalization of higher education from the perspective of Global-South researchers, empowering and giving visibility to this discourse. Challenging the first assumptions of internationalization of higher education (IHE) as something overwhelmingly positive owing to the way it directly impacts the university activities and their world rankings, it instead takes a critical perspective, acknowledging that this process is associated with a neo-liberal and colonial orientation that focuses on the maintenance of historically sustained hierarchy, oppressive relations that stimulate the production of knowledge, and education as a commodity and not as a factor of social transformation. As such, it challenges recent trends towards an increase in internationalization strategies within higher education that privilege Global-North outgoing mobilities and research collaborations to sustain the position of the educational institutions in the international rankings. From this locus, IHE is seen to evolve not only in the fields of teaching, research, and service of an educational institution but also to boost the world’s social development. The book thus illustrates how IHE should be guided by Critical Applied Linguistics (CAL) and Global South’s principles: applied linguistics, praxis, critical thinking, micro and macro relations, critical social inquiry, critical theory, problematizing givens, self-reflexivity, preferred futures, and heterosis. Comprising chapters that discuss academic, political, and administrative issues arising specifically from the internationalization process of Global-South higher education institutions as well as themes such as critical language education and language policies, it will appeal to faculty, researchers, and scholars with interests in higher education, international and comparative education, and the decolonization of education.

Language and Decoloniality in Higher Education brings together a collection of diverse papers that address, from various angles, the issue of decoloniality, language and transformation in higher education. It reflects the authors' cumulative years of experience as educators in higher education in different southern contexts. Distilled as case studies, the authors use a range of decolonial lenses to reflect on questions of knowledge, language and learning, and to build a reflexive praxis of decoloniality through multilingualism. Besides a number of decolonial persepectives which readers will be familiar with, this volume also explores a conceptual framework, Linguistic Citizenship, developed over the past two decades by scholars in southern Africa. In this collection, Linguistic Citizenship is used as a lens to 'think beyond' the inherited colonial matrices of language which have shaped this region (and many other southern contexts) for centuries, and to 're-imagine' multilingualism – and semiotics, more broadly – as a transformative resource in the broader project of social justice. Although each chapter has firm roots in the South African context, these studies have much to offer others in their 'quest for better worlds'. Of particular interest to global scholars are the authors' recounts of how they have grappled with leveraging the country's multilingual resources in the project of promoting academic access and success in the face of historical hierarchies of language and social power.