Critical literacies and the conditions of decolonial possibility

Govender, Navan; Rivers, Ian and Lovin, C. Laura, eds. (2023) Critical literacies and the conditions of decolonial possibility. In: Young People Shaping Democratic Politics. Palgrave Macmillan Cham, Cham, Switzerland, pp. 235-260. ISBN 9783031293788 (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29378-8_11)

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Abstract

In the wake of recent, renewed calls to decolonise the curriculum, English language, literacy, and literature education is called to reimagine itself: from curriculum content to pedagogical practice. In this chapter, I explore how student teachers in an English teacher education programme engaged as political and pedagogical agents by reading and re-reading place, power, and text. I explore how my own scholar-activist position and its influence on the design of a project run with student teachers at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis as an analytical and pedagogical framework, the student teachers and I critically engaged with a local artefact in Glasgow’s Merchant City through talking, seeing, reading, writing, and (re)designing. These processes of collecting texts, (re)designing texts, and placing them in socio-cultural, historical, and political contexts enabled us to assert our identities and experiences, our oppressions, and our resistances through intertextuality and intersectionality. Issues of coloniality, empire, class, heteronormativity, heterosexism and cisnormativity, human relationships to the environment, language variety, and multimodality, among others, were imprinted in the texts the student teachers produced. An analysis of these texts reveals possibilities for critical literacies as a means to create conditions of decolonial possibility in the form of political-pedagogical action.

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