What Is Critical American Language Praxis?

• In Event: Critical American Language Praxis: Teaching, Navigating, and Resisting Global English

Abstract

The first paper offers an overview of the conceptual threads that connect the other papers in this symposium. It discusses CALP as an epistemological stance at the intersection of decolonial theory, critical pedagogy, and translanguaging theory. Further, it presents three qualitative case studies of CALP in the context of university teacher preparation partnerships in the US-Mexico borderland area, Mexico, and Colombia. The first example demonstrates how bilingual education programs are impacted by linguistic minoritization, racism, social exclusion, and the struggle to develop bilingual educational practices with cultural relevance. It draws from testimonies of a group of elementary teachers from Austin (Texas, U.S.) and Oaxaca (Mexico) during a collaborative symposium to exchange transnational classroom pedagogies. It shows how, through transnational collaboration, bilingual teachers can foster critical consciousness that will impact the construction of a social justice curriculum.
The paper puts this in conversation with another empirical example of critical language teacher preparation in Oaxaca, Mexico, showing how future language teachers reposition the Zapotec and Mixe indigenous languages in a collaborative tutoring project, centering teachers’ own perspectives and experiences with both using and teaching language. Findings show how the participants cooperatively teach indigenous languages and create their own pedagogical practices in an English teacher preparation program where colonial languages dominate. It concludes with a reflection on how the findings can inform teacher education across American contexts with the objective of preparing teachers to disrupt epistemological racism and support language teacher activism.
Finally, the third example explores how teachers and school administrators in the Wayuu community, the largest Indigenous people in Colombia, perceive and navigate this coloniality in a middle-high school. This study contributes to a greater understanding of how Indigenous peoples, and how teachers, schools administrators, and community members envisage possibilities to resist these impacts by building school-community collaborations, and by centering Indigenous epistemologies in the school curriculum through land-based pedagogies. It concludes with reflection on how English language policies impacts Indigenous communities and schools in contexts where a second colonial language dominates the schooling experience of Indigenous peoples, and how teachers, schools administrators, and community members envisage possibilities to resist these impacts.

Author

• Fernando W. Milmo, University of Texas - Rio Grande Valley