The long shadow of coloniality: inequality and language policy

This event is part of the School of Education's Bristol Conversations in Education research seminar series. These seminars are free and open to the public.

Hosted by: The Language, Literacies and Education Network (LLEN)

Speakers: Carolyn McKinney (University of Cape Town)

Almost 30 years post-apartheid, participation in quality education remains an elusive dream for the majority of Black African-language speaking children in South Africa. While access to schooling in Grade 1 is near universal, only 60% of children complete schooling in Grade 12, and only 12% continue to higher education. Reasons for systemic failure are complex, including sustained under-funding and infrastructure backlogs that are a legacy of apartheid. Consistently overlooked however, is the role of language and the exclusion of African languages from formal schooling beyond Grade 3. Drawing on recent theorising of De/Coloniality as well as beliefs about language, or language ideologies, and inspired by Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Decolonising the Mind, this presentation shows the deep racialisation of approaches to bi/multilingualism and language use in education, in South Africa and broader global contexts of inequality. I will show how colonial language ideologies continue to position African language resources and multilingualism in African languages as deficient. Anglonormativity, or the expectation that all students will be(come) proficient in monolingual English is pervasive across curriculum and assessment policy in South Africa, despite the multilingual languaging that characterizes everyday life. I will trace the colonial legacy of both the ‘invention’ of African languages through missionary intervention, as well as the erasure of African languages from intellectual domains on children’s current language and literacy practices in primary schooling, restricting their opportunities to learn. Data collected from ethnographic style research in primary school classrooms will be presented to illuminate children’s practices. I draw two conclusions: firstly, continuing to exclude African languages sustains coloniality and alienation from schooling of teachers and learners, and secondly, challenging the hierarchical racialization of languages and language practices is a crucial step in the process of delinking from the coloniality of language and restoring dignity to African children.

Carolyn McKinney, PhD, is Professor of Language Education in the School of Education, University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her research and teaching focus on language in education policy, language ideologies and languaging-for-learning in multilingual education contexts of the Global South. She is an experienced pre-service and in-service teacher educator and has led a number of ethnographic style school based research projects. Publications include Language and Power in Post-Colonial Schooling: Ideologies in Practice (2017, Routledge) and Decoloniality, Language and Literacy: Conversations with Teacher Educators (co-edited with Pam Christie, Multilingual Matters, 2022). She is co-editor of the second edition of The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism (McKinney, Makoe & Zavala, forthcoming, 2023) and a founding member of the bua-lit language and literacy advocacy collective: www.bua-lit.org.za.

Host or Publisher School of Education, University of Bristol