Bi-Languaging Love: Bi/multilingual Students' Subaltern and Subordinated Ways of Being, Living, Thinking, and Knowing in Dual-Language Immersion Contexts

• In Event: Expanding the Terrain of Bilingual Education Research

Abstract

This paper challenges language practitioners and researchers to think beyond bilingualism as it is narrowly instantiated as a technical matter in education. Instead, we consider approaches to bilingualism-biliteracy in bilingual education contexts as hegemonic, colonial projects that reinforce notions of universality, monolingualism, and linguistic purity. Our analysis of bilingualism is informed by Mignolo’s (2012) notion of bilanguaging love: love for and embracing of the subjugated language forms and insights about the transnational world that exist primarily in the fissures, cracks, and crevasses between colonial and national languages. We conclude that through bilanguaging love, as a guiding principle, DLI programs can serve counterhegemonic ends as they explicitly elevate the epistemologies and knowledges suppressed by modern/colonial projects in the Western world.

Authors

• Mariana Pacheco, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Colleen Hamilton, National Louis University