Education is a contested public space where multiple claims to power, justice, equity, and equality play out. In California, the state's demands for unity and control through language promote monolingualism, legitimizing only the colonizing variety, English, as the code for transmitting knowledge. Latinx students comprise the majority of students in California's public education system, yet its post-secondary education is entirely English-monolingual.
This presentation will focus on decolonizing pedagogical techniques emerging in English college courses serving California Latinx students. The presenter's 2022 study of English professors at Los Angeles City College (LACC), a public college whose student body is 54% Latinx, provided relevant data via surveys and interviews, further corroborated by the scholarship in the field. Drawing on culturally responsive teaching theory (CRT: Gay 2000, Hammond 2021, Harmon 2012) and my study findings, I propose pedagogical strategies to facilitate inclusion in language education through the following three-fold approach:
Redesigning language teaching curriculum
Curricular content and design, the instructional practices, the social organization of learning, and the forms of student success evaluation enforce and reproduce colonial ideology (Tejeda and Espinoza 2003). To counter it, the surveyed English instructors utilized the following pedagogical approaches:
Teaching English composition through reading and writing assignments based on literary works of Hispanic American or Latin American writers.
Giving assignments addressing social, economic, or political struggles of the Latinx community in California, especially in Los Angeles.
Choosing writing topics that highlight social justice concerns, for example, the impact of violence and the military-industrial complex on the Latinx community.
Refocusing cultural foci
Culturally responsive and inclusive teaching advocates for the use of "cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frame of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning more relevant and effective for them" (Gay 2000). Some LACC English professors make cultural differences and struggles explicit in their curriculum. They, for instance, reported discussing "the imbalance between white and Latinx representations within American culture and its implications for Latinx people," "assimilation and personal and national identities from a language context," and "the acceptance of speaking and/or writing in a non-perfect or non-standard version of English."
Reintroducing linguistic diversity in language classrooms
While 85% of the study interviewees reported examples of the use of Spanish, Spanglish, or indigenous languages of Mesoamerica in some capacity in their classrooms, their use proved to cause tension and variability in English courses. Individual instructors came up with a variety of pedagogical solutions, including:
Rethinking the student's multilingualism as a powerful writing skill.
Keeping vernacular in writing, while focusing on structural aspects of compositions and clarity of the writer's message.
Tying its use to the assignment's context, writing purpose, or intended audience.
Gay, Geneva. (2000). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice. NY: Teachers College Press.
Hammond, Zaretta. (2021) "Liberatory education Integrating the science of learning and culturally responsive practice." American Educator, Summer 2021.
Harmon, Deborah. (2012). "Culturally Responsive Teaching through a historical lens." Interdisciplinary Journal of Teaching and Learning, 2 (16).
Tejeda, Carlos, and Manuel Espinoza. (2003). "Toward a decolonizing pedagogy: Social justice reconsidered." In Trifonas, Peter, Pedagogies of difference. NY: Routledge.
