Who Benefits From Western Forms of Language Teacher Education?

• In Event: Curriculum Research Lines From the Global South: Toward a Dialogic Encounter With Southern Places

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
This presentation aims at discussing how modern Western epistemicides work in language teacher education. Teacher narratives on the education of bilingual/bicultural children in public schools in Portugal are analyzed, highlighting the difficulties and dilemmas experienced and the way the dreams and possibilities for a better future for these children are severely restrained.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
This presentation draws on critical theory and pedagogy (Darder, 2012/2015; Paraskeva, 2016) to analyze how the received field in language teacher education needs to be deterritorialized in order to properly address the roots of oppression that naturalizes the invisibility of bilingual/bicultural students in Portuguese schools.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
Working through the notions of critical teacher education (Zeichner & Flessner, 2009), the study aims at exploring new ways of seeing the world and of producing knowledge that “expos[es] social, cultural, political, psychological, and educational forces not discernible at first glance” (p. 20). Resorting to a purposive sample of the narratives of two groups of language teachers, the study looks at how the prevailing Western European knowledge paradigm colonizes reason and produces distorted views of the bilingual/ bicultural Other.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
The narratives of 8 beginning and 12 experienced language teachers, produced within pre-service and in-service teacher education programs at a university in Portugal, were analysed. Critical discourse analysis (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997) was used to analyse how teachers’ narratives are not only embedded in a particular professional and pedagogical culture, ideology or history, but also connected intertextually to other discursive paradigms that bind them to oppressive teaching practices while imagining more liberating and more democratic ones.

Results or substantiated conclusions
The results show that teacher education in Portugal needs to be deterritorialized, as it still is held hostage to neoliberal, colonial, and techno-rational Western ways of thinking. In their narratives, teachers reproduce hegemonic representations of languages and cultures and also disclose the high jacking of public school education by the neoliberal movements of standardization and marketization of education.

Scholarly significance
The critique of the Western epistemology that feeds the metaphorical abyss that renders invisible and silences the ‘otherness’ in its non-Western side (Paraskeva, 2016) is not only necessary but required. The invisibility (and thus non-existence) of bilingual/bicultural students today can no longer be acritically accepted. This paper aims at contributing to the ongoing international debate on the way teacher education has been reinforcing the hegemony of a Western epistemology.

References
Darder, A. (2012/2015). Culture and power in the classroom. Educational foundations for the schooling of bicultural students. New York: Routledge.

Fairclough, N., & Wodak, R. (1997). Critical discourse analysis. In T. Van Dijk (Ed.), Discourse as social interaction (pp. 258-284). London: Sage.

Paraskeva, J. (2016). Curriculum epistemicide. New York, NY: Routlege.

Zeichner, K. & Flessner, R. (2009). Educating teachers for critical education. In M. W. Apple, W. Au, & L. A. Gandin (eds.), Handbook of critical education (pp. 296-311). New York & London: Routledge.

Author

• Maria Alfredo Moreira, Minho University