Questioning our impact: Educating through colonial languages for anticolonial praxis — The Association Specialists

Questioning our impact: Educating through colonial languages for anticolonial praxis (20252)

Shayna Brissett-Foster 1 , Rachel Marika Kunnas 1 , Sonia Martin 1 , Myrtle Sodhi 1
  1. York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Canada encompasses a vast linguistic landscape with more than 200 languages, 70 of which are Indigenous (Galante, 2021; Gallant, 2022). Only two languages, English and French, hold official status. Canadian schools teach both official languages, though how much varies from province to province. We are four settler Canadian researchers: one secondary school French immersion teacher, one former elementary school teacher, one adult educator who teaches English to international students, and one primary school French teacher. Three of us were born in Canada and one was born in the Caribbean. We are an interracial, interdisciplinary group who share the experience of using colonial languages even as we strive toward anticolonial praxis (Patel, 2016). Our research question is: (how) can we be anticolonial when we continue to use and prioritize colonial languages to the detriment of Indigenous ones? To address our inquiry, we adopt a multiethnographic methodology. Multiethnography is “a process of critically juxtaposing lived experiences in relation to a common intersection and chosen theme in order to arrive at multiple, contextualized understandings of a shared phenomenon” (Schmor et al., 2023, p. 4). Together, we develop critical questions for reflexive interviews, and we collectively analyze our textual responses. We draw on African Indigenous (Somé, 1999), Black feminist (hooks, 1994), settler/colonial resistance (Rice et al., 2022), and raciolinguistics (Rosa & Flores, 2017) theories to inform our analysis. Through this collaborative process, we consider how our diverse languaging experiences throughout our lives come to inform our educational practices. We identify how our approaches do and do not support and/or hold space for epistemologies and ontologies held by “non-official” immigrant and Indigenous languages. We conclude with a stop/start/continue approach to some of our educational practices and offer a reflection on the usefulness of multiethnography for anti-oppressive praxis.

  1. Galante, A. (2021, February 22). Much more than a bilingual country. Education Canada, 61(1). https://www.edcan.ca/articles/much-more-than-a-bilingual-country/
  2. Gallant, D. J. (2022). Indigenous Languages in Canada. In Indigenous languages in Canada. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/aboriginal-people-languages
  3. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203700280
  4. Patel, L. (2016). Decolonizing educational research: From ownership to answerability. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315658551
  5. Rice, C., Dion, S. D., Fowlie, H., & Breen, A. (2022). Identifying and working through settler ignorance. Critical Studies in Education, 63(1), 15–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2020.1830818
  6. Rosa, J., & Flores, N. (2017). Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective. Language in Society, 46(5), 621–647. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404517000562
  7. Schmor, R. (2020, March 1). Informed Use of Learner L1: Plurilingualism as a Macrostrategy for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. TESL Ontario | CONTACT Magazine, March.
  8. Somé, M. P. (1999). The healing wisdom of Africa: Finding life purpose through nature, ritual, and community. Tarcher/Putnam.