Decoloniality, Language and Literacy: Conversations with Teacher Educators

Abstract

Thisedited collection sets outto counter hegemonic and monolingual education and language practices, both in teacher education programmes and the schooling system where these trainee teachers will work. It developed from conversations between teacher educators at University of Cape Town during the student protest movements between 2015 and 2017, which called for both free and decolonized education(a focus of many articles in this journal;see, for example, Shay, et al., 2016; Sebidi & Morreira, 2017; Hlatshwayo, 2021). A deep sense of dialogue, reflexivity,and activism permeate the contributions, encouraging the reader to feel part of ongoing conversations for thiscollective and decolonial endeavour. Another real strength of the book comes in the inclusion of a variety of unconventional contributions, with interviews, reflections, visual essays,and poems alongside more traditional book chapters that include multimodal and multilingual data. This is entirely coherent with the decolonial praxis modelled throughout the book and points to new ways that we can allpush at the boundaries of what is considered academic writingto enable epistemic justice.