Decolonizing EFL Teacher Education: Epistemic Contribution From Colombia

• In Event: Rebel Epistemologies: From Theory to Assignments

Abstract

This presentation synthesizes long-standing personal-political-pedagogical decolonizing projects to reimagine foreign languages teacher education (with a focus on English) through a cultural production (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013) and a queer-dissident decolonial pedagogical approach (flores, 2020; Valencia, Arenas, Arredondo & Buriticá, 2020). It showcases two projects (one muralization project and an iterative performance) carried out with pre-service student teachers of the Foreign Languages Program at Pacific-West University (pseudonym) in Colombia.

The first project seeks to challenge the written academic text as the highest form of cognitive achievement (Robinson, 2006); the linguistic bias/verbocentrism (Cameron, 2002; Álvarez Valencia, 2019) in communication; and the teacher as the possessor/conveyor of the episteme and techne in the language classroom (Valencia, in press; Darder & Kirylo, 2020). Students painted a mural, a collective, multimodal public text as “final paper”; it advances indigenous epistemologies to help synthesize the mini-projects carried out during the course and to engage in decolonizing practices mediated by the arts. The second project showcases an iterative performance staged to interrogate and denounce the femicides in the province of Valle del Cauca. In the performance, male students dressed as women and female students dressed as men; while indigenous students dressed as settlers to decolonize the gender and sociopolitical identities imposed by the white-mestizo mainstream society.
The projects follow a Participatory Action Research design (Fals-Borda & Rahman, 1991). They articulate a double-lensed framework examining neoliberalism (Mirowski, 2009) and mobilizing an anti-colonial participatory politics approach (Desai, 2015). Findings point that murals, as multimodal symbolic public texts, challenge the primacy of the written argumentative essay, mobilize hypotheses about reading away from reading as a skill, and enable teachers to become real learners, healing the “ontological wound” (Haraway, 2011; Freire, 2000[1970]) that positions the teacher above the student. The iterative performance interrogates identity and gender politics, helping students to move from a curricular to a pedagogical stance (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2012).

These projects recast foreign language teacher education away from anthropocentric views, interrogating and undermining the institutions and cultural production practices that constitute the field: language, communication, reading/writing, and text, advancing decolonial ethics based on coexistence and mutuality (Rivera, 2010, 2012, 2019) to fight off neoliberalism as well as new forms of colonization (Tuck & Yang, 2012). As part of the decolonial turn in Abya Yala and the Tawantinsuyu (Latin America and the Caribbean), it decenters and reterritorializes teachers and students as the center of knowledge production practices away from Anglo-European epistemologies; it deals with the arts not as a way to foster learning by as learning (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013) acknowledging the role that place holds in the coproduction of identities and emphasizing the turn from curriculum (individual learning experiences) to pedagogy (solidary, collective, mutually shaping practices, (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2012).

Author

• Andrés Fernando Valencia, Universidad del Valle