ABSTRACT
Throughout the world, more attention is being paid to ways of teaching racialized students in contexts with much diversity. The problem, however, is that many of these pedagogical practices continue to have been constructed with theories of language and bilingualism that have been products of colonialism and today’s continuing coloniality. This chapter, written by scholars/educators whose work has straddled many multilingual contexts, takes a decolonial perspective in imagining what it would be like to teach bilingual children who have been racialized and minoritized through existing raciolinguistic ideologies. What would teaching look like if people were free from the constructs of named languages that were tools of colonization, as well as academic language, a prevalent tool for domination in education today? Taking the contexts of South Africa, Nepal, Hong Kong, Peru, as well as the US, including Hawai’i, the authors consider multilingual pedagogies that, rooted in translanguaging theory, acknowledge and leverage the students’ linguistic/semiotic repertoire without reifying named languages. Different scenarios in which teachers are doing multilingual pedagogies from a decolonial perspective are described; and the authors point to how these differ from the common approaches to multilingualism in education that most commonly include bilingual/multilingual education and language awareness projects. The multilingual pedagogies highlighted in this chapter meet the racialized students in their entre mundos/borderlands, as teachers and students engage in co-learning in a translanguaging/transcultural space that does not respond to the interests of the nation-states, but to the interests of the racialized linguistic communities.
