Decoloniality, Language and Literacy

Conversations with Teacher Educators

Carolyn McKinney, Pam Christie, Carolyn McKinney, Pam Christie

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781788929264
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Colonialisme et post-colonialisme

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.

1Introduction: Conversations with Teacher Educators in Coloniality

Carolyn McKinney and Pam Christie

This book began as conversations between colleagues involved in teacher education at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in a period when student protest movements calling for Free Decolonised Education forced a thoroughgoing engagement with the continuing coloniality of university spaces. In reflexive conversations on knowledge production and participation over the following years, we came to understand how contestations that highlighted coloniality, racism, poverty and gender violence brought moments of heightened learning for ourselves as teacher educators as well as the students.

Written against the backdrop of intense experiences of campus protests and shutdowns, the book grapples with what is required to prepare student teachers to enter a highly divided and unequal schooling system shaped by coloniality in the Global South. The book reflects on: how we as teacher educators and educational researchers grapple with the colonial matrix of power in our daily practice; how we make decisions about what counts as ‘knowledge’; how we teach ‘canonical’ disciplinary knowledge while at the same time challenging this and acknowledging the epistemic violence wrought by the partiality of this knowledge; how we challenge the monolingual myth and enable multilingualism; and how we explore the possibilities and constraints of conducting research and scholarship in times of instability.

Our aim in this book is to build and broaden professional conversations that explore possibilities for alternative engagement in teacher education in conditions of coloniality. Alongside academic genres, the book uses a range of unconventional genres, representations of data and reflective narratives of teaching and teacher education. It sets out examples of multimodal, multilingual and embodied interactions between and among teacher educators and student teachers in science, literacy and language across the curriculum, showing our/their learning experiences and positioning. We encourage curious readers to use an automatic translation site like Google Translate for some of the reflective text that is written in isiXhosa, Afrikaans and SeSotho. In using a range of genres, the book aims to shine light on the power of participation in knowledge-making that takes place beyond the borders of disciplines and formal classroom spaces, without simply disregarding these. Significantly, the book shows that it is through the disruption of transmission modes of teaching in formal classrooms that the knowledge-making shared in this book took place.

While the research informing the chapters of the book is grounded in South Africa with its highly unequal education systems, the issues explored have relevance well beyond this context. The book contributes to broader debates about achieving social justice and equity in historically unequal contexts, particularly those of the Global South. And it opens possibilities for third space learning in engaging with the decolonial challenge of thinking within rather than about the complex power relations of border conditions.

In this introductory chapter, we address the coloniality of education in South Africa in the context of the student protests of 2015–2017, providing a brief account of issues and events. Next, we outline some of the major tensions and dilemmas in educating teachers in conditions of coloniality, considering the coloniality of knowledge and language as well as the conceptual tools of third space and pluriversality. Finally, we provide an overview of the chapters and contributions in this book, written to show a range of responses of teacher educators in schools and universities in South Africa and other places – which we describe in different ways as the border conditions of coloniality.

Our Starting Point: Education and Coloniality in South Africa

The first formal conversations that began this book project on education and coloniality took place at the end of 2017 when, for the third year running, student protests had shut down formal classes on campus towards the end of the academic year. In response to shutdown, the university had adopted a range of dispersing practices to complete the academic year, such as off-campus sessions and blended learning, and students were given the option of completing their end-of-year assessment or deferring it until the start of the next year. In what was increasingly becoming a binary choice for students and academics across the campus, we experienced competing pulls between supporting students who chose to complete their studies as well as those who favoured deferral and those who struggled with their uncertainty. A confronting symbol of the university’s ambivalent response to the conflict was a large tent prominently erected on the rugby field on campus at the end of the year – fenced in and patrolled by armed security guards – to enable students who chose to write exams to do so.

As teacher education academics responsible for delivering an accredited programme under circumstances of protest and boycott, we were directly affected by student protests. Our responsibility was to complete the course accreditation requirements within the academic year for students who selected to graduate, while supporting students who chose to boycott formal classes and/or defer assessment. As a group of colleagues whose work engaged with schools as well as the university, we felt the need to create a space for dialogue across our theoretical and professional differences in order to work creatively and ethically with the complex conditions that student protests brought into focus. These protests highlighted ‘decoloniality’ as a rallying point, challenging academics such as ourselves to question the ways in which the culture of the university and its curriculum and language practices contributed to persistent inequalities that lingered despite the formal demise of apartheid and the launch of a new democracy in 1994.

Student protests and campus shutdowns at higher education institutions across the country during 2015–2017 shone the spotlight on experiences of coloniality. As defined by Maldonado-Torres (2007), coloniality is that which survives colonialism – the multiple unequal relationships that persist after the formal administrative structures of colonisation are dismantled. In his words:

Coloniality … refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations. Thus, coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and every day. (Maldonado-Torres, 2007: 243)

The demand for Free Decolonised Education made visible the limitations and stress points of the negotiated settlement that formally ended apartheid in 1994. Very briefly, the 1994 settlement brought political democratisation and formal equality before the law but did not fundamentally restructure the economy or shift the distribution of resources. South Africa is judged to be one of the most unequal countries in the world, and violence – particularly violence against women – is at shocking levels. The burdens of poverty and unemployment continue to be skewed towards black people, ‘race’1 has not diminished as a major predictor of social and educational outcomes, and the spatial geography of apartheid persists. Overall, political democracy has not fundamentally shifted the social and economic inequalities associated with apartheid and colonisation before that.

In education, systemic changes after the 1994 settlement ended the formal divisions of apartheid, but with limited reduction to the inequalities it had wrought. The field of higher education was restructured through a process of mergers, incorporations and closures, teacher colleges were shut down, and teacher education was brought under universities in a single national system for the first time. As Gillespie and Naidoo (2019) point out, the massification of higher education took place without proportional public funding, leading universities to seek revenue elsewhere, including through ‘outsourcing’ service workers (such as cleaners, maintenance workers and gardeners) and increasing student fees. While financial austerity has been a common experience for universities globally, what brings particular complexity in South Africa is its timing with the formal dismantling of apartheid. In effect, the removal of racial barriers to student access happened at the same time as financial barriers (fees and other costs) were raised. As Bangeni and Kapp (2017) note:

South Africa is a particularly interesting case because in post-apartheid South Africa, considerable resources have been directed towards changing the racially-skewed pattern of university participation. Nevertheless, the participation rates for African and coloured students (in the 20- to 24-year-old cohort) have remained ‘persistently very low’ (14 per cent in 2011), and generally under a quarter of that of white students with ‘under 5 per cent of African and coloured youth succeeding in any form of higher education’ (Council on Higher Education, 2013:15). This pattern has in turn had a considerable impact on access to postgraduate studies for this demographic. (Bangeni & Kapp, 2017: 1)

In schooling, the post-apartheid policy framework replaced the multiple racially divided education departments with a single national and nine provincial departments. Fees were introduced into the public system, and extensive powers were given to school governing bodies. However, the system as a whole performs dismally, with South Africa ranked at the bottom, or close to the bottom, on all international comparative scales (see Christie, 2020). Performance patterns in the system are bimodal: there are distinctively different results for students attending different schools, and these results differ according to the poverty classification and former apartheid departments of schools. In these bimodal results, nearly 80% of students attend the poorly functioning part of the system, with a small minority (8%) attending the fee-paying schools (mostly desegregated) that achieve good results (Mlachila & Moeletsi, 2019). Almost all of the poorly performing schools are black schools in rural areas and townships. Given that these unequal patterns of resource allocation and achievement are deeply entrenched, it could be argued that they are co-constitutive, illustrating the promise of modernity together with what Mignolo (2011) calls its ‘dark side’ (Christie & McKinney, 2017). The curriculum exemplifies the Western episteme and its ‘powerful knowledge’, showing scant regard for other knowledges. Although there are 11 constitutionally recognised languages (including nine Indigenous African languages), schools provide African language as medium of instruction for the first three years only, after which all students must learn through the medium of monolingual English or Afrikaans – an issue we return to later in this chapter. As Gramling (2016) points out, the imposition of language is an innate aspect of modernity/coloniality:

Whether we opt to call it a myth, a pathology, a paradigm, a relic, or a sham, monolingualism is woven into modernity’s most minute and sophisticated political structures, and it is clearly not yet inclined to be waved off the stage by a university professor, nor even by a ‘multilingual turn’ in one or another discipline. (Gramling, 2016: 3–4)

These contextual conditions provide the logic for student protests and campus shutdowns across the country, 20 years after the end of apartheid. Protests point to the difficulties of shifting deep-seated inequalities – entangled intersectional inequalities of class, race, ethnicity, gender, language, geographical location and more – within a neoliberal economic policy framework. In addition, protests highlight the continuing inequalities between historically black and historically white institutions, as well as their apartheid spatial heritage, colonial knowledge hierarchies and exclusionary language practices (Editorial Collective, 2017; Mzilene & Mkhize, 2019; Xaba, 2017).2

Student Protests: RhodesMustFall (#RMF) and FeesMustFall (#FMF)

The protests and shutdowns of 2015 were sparked off at the historically white universi...