Cultivating Epistemic Agency through Translanguaging: An Africanising Framework for English Teacher Education in South Africa

Abstract

This qualitative action research study examines the empirical disparity between South Africa's multilingual policy objectives and continuing monolingual practices in English teacher education. It explores the integration of African Indigenous Knowledge Systems (AIKS), translanguaging pedagogies, and Ubuntu-informed methodologies in the preparation of English teachers. Grounded in an interpretivist paradigm and an Ubuntu perspective, the study comprised 16 (n = 16) participants, consisting of 11 pre-service teachers and five lecturers. The research objectives were to (i) diagnose the policy–practice gap in multilingual English teacher education; (ii) co-design and iteratively refine translanguaging-informed pedagogies across three action-research cycles; (iii) evaluate how Africanisation and Ubuntu-informed practices shape lecturer and pre-service teacher epistemic agency; and (iv) produce a practice-facing framework for curriculum and assessment. The study employed three iterative cycles over an entire academic semester of preparation, action, observation, and reflection, generating data through focus group discussions, semi-structured interviews, and reflective practices. Through an inductive thematic analysis, the findings demonstrate that a Transformative Africanisation Pedagogy Framework promotes Africanisation not by replacing Western knowledge, but by cultivating hybrid epistemologies that affirm students' linguistic repertoires and cultural identities. Translanguaging functions as a vital epistemic intervention, augmenting epistemic agency by affording students increased cognitive and linguistic access to academic material, while Ubuntu-informed strategies redefine knowledge production as relational and collaborative. The study’s original contribution is the empirically developed Transformative Africanisation Pedagogy Framework, which bridges the gap between decolonial theory and classroom praxis in language teacher education. It offers curriculum guidelines, including multilingual glossaries, translanguaging practices, and assessment approaches that validate Indigenous-language meaning-making alongside academic English. Rooted in South Africa, the findings extend to other postcolonial higher education environments where multilingual policy objectives conflict with monolingual gatekeeping.