Bilingualism, multilingual pedagogies and the coloniality of language in IBE higher education

Abstract

What are the opportunities and tensions that arise from the use of multilingual pedagogies in linguistically and culturally diverse contexts of higher education? We consider this question through the case of a multilingual (in Spanish and three Indigenous languages) teaching experience in an intercul-tural bilingual education teacher program in Peru drawing on critical, decolonial and Southern perspec-tives. Based on practitioner research, we describe how students’ appropriation of multilingual pedagogies provided opportunities to reclaim individual and collective voices, ways of languaging and knowledges, develop intercultural stances towards difference, support collective paths of language reclamation, while also reproduced dominant ideologies which questioned the communicative and epistemic capacity of all students. We offer reflections on how multilingual pedagogies can support broader efforts to identify, challenge and transform the coloniality of language in higher education.