Twisting Paradigms in Bi/multilingual Education: Dreaming Out Loud Linguistic and Pedagogical Futurities

• In Event: Latinx American Scholars and Teachers Making the Decolonial Turn a Reality

Abstract

Using an epistolary format (Freire & Guimarães, 2014; Freire, 2007, 1994), this duo ethnographic exploration (Sawyer & Norris, 2013) examines our work with language pre service and in service teachers in two different Midwestern states and describe it towards materializing “pedagogies of unlearning” (Dunn & Seery, 2016). We mobilize a Freirean-based perspective on bilingual/multilingual education (Author, 2020; Darder & Cronin, 2018; Darder, 2011; Freire, 2005), as a pedagogical process of de-identification with language as a settler colonialist concept, related to standard language ideologies (Valdez, 2020; Alfaro & Bartolome, 2017; Bartolome, 2010; Kroskrity, 2004). We zero in on decolonial pedagogical moves (Author, in press; Fregoso Bailón & De Lissovoy, 2019; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018; De Lissovoy, 2010) that teacher educators and university students can engage to dis-invent and reconstitute language by twisting linguistic, ideological paradigms in curriculum and instruction to envision entropic spaces for reflecting about language as social transformation.
As two language teacher educators and multilingual individuals ourselves, we discuss the processes through which we have sought to deconstruct monolingualism and multilingualism representations in the curriculum throughout this paper. Having worked/working in Second languages, bilingual, English as a second language, and world language education throughout our careers, we also examine the futurity of bi/multilingual education in the U.S. to delve into its resignification within institutional spaces.

As we argue, bi/multilingualism can be seen as a spiritual and material enterprise akin to what Anzaldua calls “magical knowledge” (Anzaldua & Keating, 2015, p. 45) that transcends dichotomist notions of language and culture reinforced by curricular technologies and demands from within teacher preparation programs and public schools.

Authors

• Blanca G. Caldas Chumbes, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

• Sandro Barros, Michigan State University