Resumen de Working with teachers to disrupt Anglonormativity: a reflective account from the South

Soraya Abdulatief, Carolyn McKinney

• The coloniality of language profoundly shapes language regimes and language hierarchies in South African schools. Linguistic competence is associated with whiteness and with monolingual proficiency in a European language, in our case (White South African) English, and linguistic deficiency with Blackness. This paper shares and reflects on our experiences as teacher educators working with pre-service student teachers to disrupt racialised colonial language ideologies and implement bi/multilingual pedagogies. We describe our decolonial pedagogies, including the strategic use of countertexts in film (Sink or Swim) and bi/multilingual learning materials created by our student teachers. Using the concept of Anglonormativity (the expectation that all children will be proficient in English, and are deficient, if they are not), as well as the coloniality of language, we show how we make visible to teachers and challenge several inter-connected myths embedded within a colonial matrix of power. We analyse the use of multilingual strategies, including translanguaging practices, in posters produced by a class of 183 student teachers in collaborative group work to gauge the extent to which they took up decolonial stances in relation to dominant colonial language hierarchies.