Decoloniality, Language and Literacy: Conversations with Teacher Educators(3 Studies in Knowledge Production and Participation)

Through a range of unconventional genres, representations of data, and dialogic, reflective narratives alongside more traditional academic genres, this book engages with contexts of decoloniality and border thinking in the Global South. It addresses processes of knowledge production and participation in the highly divided and unequal schooling and higher education system in South Africa, and highlights the consequences of the monolingual myth in post-colonial education, demonstrating opportunities for learning provided by translanguaging. It explores both embodied, multimodal and multilingual instances of knowledge-making in teaching and teacher education that take place outside but alongside formal classroom, lecture and seminar modes, and the positionality and learning experiences of teacher educators in science, literacy and language across the curriculum. The book is not only transdisciplinary but also captures the learning that takes place beyond the borders of disciplines and formal classroom spaces.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Contributors Prologue Chapter 1. Carolyn McKinney and Pam Christie: Introduction: Conversations with Teacher Educators in Coloniality    Part 1: De/coloniality in Schooling  Harry Garuba: Leaving Home at 10  Chapter 2. Xolisa Guzula: De/coloniality in South African Language in Education Policy: Resisting the Marginalisation of African Language Speaking Children   Chapter 3. Pinky Makoe: Navigating Hegemonic Knowledge and Ideologies at School: Children’s Oral Storytelling as Acts of Agency and Positioning Chapter 4. Robyn Tyler: Identity Meshing in Learning Science Bilingually: Tales of a 'Coconuty Nerd' Part 2: Delinking from Coloniality in Teacher Education   Chapter 5. Kate Angier, Carolyn McKinney and Catherine Kell: Visual Essay: Teaching and Learning beyond the Classroom: What Can We Learn from Participating in Struggle with our Students?   Chapter 6. Annemarie Hattingh: Learning Science from umaGogo: The Value of Teaching Practice in Semi-rural School Contexts   Chapter 7. Rochelle Kapp: Engaging Deficit: Pre-service Teachers’ Reflections on Negotiation of Working-class Schools   Chapter 8. Soraya Abdulatief: Thirdspace Thinking: Expanding the Paradigm of Academic Literacies to Reposition Multilingual Pre-service Science Teachers  Chapter 9. Carolyn McKinney: Delinking from Coloniality and Increasing Participation in Early Literacy Teacher Education Chapter 10. Catherine Kell in conversation with Xolisa Guzula and Carolyn McKinney: Reinventing Literacy: Literacy Teacher Education in Contexts of Coloniality Part 3: Conversations with Teacher Educators in Brazil, Canada and Chile Chapter 11. Cloris Porto Torquato: Teacher Education amid Centralising/Colonial and Decentralising/Decolonial Forces   Chapter 12. Vanessa Andreotti and Sharon Stein: Education for Depth: An Invitation to Engage with the Complexities and Challenges of Decolonizing Work  Chapter 13. Natalia Ávila Reyes: Transnational Connections in the Global South: A Reflection on this Book’s Reception Index

About the Author :
Carolyn McKinney is Associate Professor of Language Education in the School of Education, University of Cape Town, South Africa. She is the author of Language and Power in Post-Colonial Schooling: Ideologies in Practice (2017, Routledge). Pam Christie is Emeritus Professor of Education, University of Cape Town, South Africa and Honorary Professor, The University of Queensland, Australia. She is the author of Decolonising Schooling in South Africa: The Impossible Dream? (2020, Routledge).

Review :
Courageously following Harraway’s injunction to ‘stay with the trouble’, this important edited collection confronts the complex and complicit nature of teaching language and literacy in contexts of coloniality, while simultaneously providing possibilities for rethinking practice. Each chapter of this exceptional book offers a brave and uncompromising account of what universities must do to recognize the knowledge of marginalized multilingual students. Initially located in student protest in South Africa, the book quickly expands to address us all. It is an ethical call to action. McKinney and Christie have drawn on a wealth of experience to edit a compelling text on the relationship between decoloniality, language, and literacy. By identifying leading scholars who share their interest in language and power, the editors promote rich conversations on teacher education, multilingualism, coloniality, racism, poverty, and gender violence. Such conversations have profound relevance for teachers, researchers, and policymakers in contemporary education. I don’t have space in a review to do full justice to the various innovative ways this book will make you more aware not only of its immediate topic and context, but how it also challenges all of us to be more reflective about our own EAL contexts and reflect on our complicity in coloniality and our responsibility as educators to challenge it, within ourselves, our settings, and our system more generally. [The book] contributes to the expanding body of work on decolonising practices in teacher education that will interest not only teacher educators and teachers working in post-colonial settings, but also those preparing teachers for socially just schooling. Apart from the rich data represented in the chapters, there are also instances of poetry and reflective pieces that offer another view to language inequality in formal education and demonstrate personal accounts of authors’ own language experiences. The book is thus constructed as a cause for language activism and social justice in education in South Africa and promotes the possibility for ‘third’ space learning in engaging with the decolonial challenges of thinking within rather than about complex power relations of border conditions.