Reimagining Foreign Languages Teacher Education: Painting Murals for Political Engagement and Students' Activism

• In Event: Transnational Decolonial Praxis From Kemet to Abya Yala: Connecting Latinx, Black, Mestizo, and Indigenous Research

Abstract

This presentation sets out to reimagine foreign languages (with a focus on English) teacher education through a cultural production approach (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013, 2017) and explores literacy practices for pre-service student teachers as symbolic creative processes (Willis, 1990) embedded in specific cultural and political contexts to counter the received notions of culture, language, and identity imposed by neoliberal principles that conceive teacher education as a scientific endeavour. What is at stake not only in a foreign languages teacher education program but in any educational experience is the pervasive issue of human difference. Like other subjects or domains (e.g., the arts), EFL has become another agent to differentially position students along with hierarchized categories of race, class, gender, and ability; so, the challenge is to decolonize such institutional arrangements with alternative practices of education. This presentation seeks to contribute to this ongoing dialogue of the ends of teacher education in Latin America and the Caribbean by reclaiming education as part and parcel of cultural production practices, tied to processes that are at once pedagogical, political, and aesthetic.
To this end, a double lens framework that draws on differential social movements (Sandoval, 2000) and decolonizing scholarship was constructed to analyze a two-year long muralization project carried out with pre-service student teachers in the Reading in English VI, Seminar of Pedagogy II, and Education Research Seminar I courses of the Foreign Languages Program at SWU (pseudonym) in Colombia. This framework engages EFL literacy pedagogy and practices along the lines of language, race, and gender by challenging notions of what an academic text is, the heteronormative space where EFL is taught, and the affective illiteracy and “bloodless” violence (Restrepo, 1996) that characterizes EFL public education in the city of Cali. Particularly, we make use of the embodied concept of Chi’xi (Rivera, 2010, 2019) to set out bilingual and multimodal practices with different media.
Ch’ixi means coexistence. It is a space, identity, mindset, aesthetics, politics, ethics, and bodily disposition where multiple, differing, heterogeneous and oppositional political, linguistic, racial, aesthetic and cultural realities coexist in parallel, antagonizing, complexifying, problematizing, and complementing one another. As a social construct, it seeks to engage internal colonialisms as well as the colonial horizon (Rivera 2010, p. 56), by unleashing the oral, the pictorial (image), and performative potential of Indigenous epistemologies (Author B, 2018, pp. 51-52).
With this concept in mind as well as with three modes for a pedagogy of solidarity (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2012), we rearranged our EFL literacy pedagogy practices and painted two murals and created a logo that was painted all over SWU to raise awareness of Othering practices, to engage people in dialogue, and to challenge the white-mestizo, phallo-logo-ocular-centric (after Hélène Cixous, 1986) university campus organization. As a political project, pre-service student teachers as well as we, teacher educators, have exercised culturally differentiated identities that have enabled us to construe our learning realities in a way that foregrounds culture as contingent, writing as a “borderland,” EFL teaching as activism, and teacher education in general as a narrative, shared process.

Author

• Andrés Fernando Valencia, Universidad del Valle