This volume is about how Eurocentric research methodologies, epistemologies, pedagogies, and language policies have continued to be ‘powerful purveyors of coloniality’ (105) in that the ‘systematic past epistemicide has distorted people's present-day views of their First Nations, heritage, and Indigenous languages and identities’ (Kerry Taylor-Leech, 103). The presumed epistemological/methodological ineptitude of the invisibilised new world Indigenous communities is premised on the terra nullius (empty land) colonialist myth and the rhetorical narrative of the great ‘cognitive divide’—the West as civiliser of the native ‘savages’ (Samuel Osborne, chapter 13). Consistent with these racist views is the imposition of monolingualism in post-colonial contexts through assimilationist-schooled literacy in colonial European languages and the devaluation of local linguistic and belief systems associated with Indigenous oral cultures and their corresponding ‘subaltern’ knowledges (Terrence Wiley, chapter 2). Therefore, while precolonial Indigenous communities in North America and Australia used to speak and thrive in many languages, their descendants’ linguistic repertoires are reduced to English monolingualism. This is despite the shy institutional attempts to promote diversity and equity through the promotion of pluralistic teacher education programs (Rubina Khanam, Russell Fayant, & Andrea Sterzuk, chapter 10).
However, as Cree scholars noted, Indigenous language revitalisation projects in Canadian universities have been mainly triggered by grassroots-driven desire to promote linguistic equity and social justice in the classroom and beyond (e.g. Cree Language Revitalisation and Reclamation). The call to ‘recentre’ Indigenous methodologies in teacher education is increasingly gaining momentum amongst decolonial academics. For example, unlike Western focus groups, ‘sharing circles’ are regarded as transformative bases for personal growth as they involve culturally appropriate protocols (e.g. smudging, prayer, etc.) that support community engagement (Belinda Daniels, Andrea Sterzuk, Peter Turner, William Richard Cook, Dorothy Thunder, & Randy Morin, chapter 11). In the same vein, Janet Armitage (chapter 12) argues that the use of ‘yarning circles’ as Indigenous pedagogical or research tools helps to foster collective learning, sustain respectful relationships, and conserve and pass on aboriginal cultural knowledge through storytelling. Indigenous literacies (e.g. songs, stories, art, graphic signs, performing, dance, music, percussion) are powerful alternative forms of knowledge production, and this refutes the dichotomy made between orality and literacy. Indigenous ‘Anangu literacies are valuable in their own right and supersede written texts in reliability and permanence’ (226). This ‘orature’ is an intuitive style of transmitting knowledge, which is situated, social (needs copresence), visual, performative, and diverse in its mediums of expression. It represents a holistic view of life, in which the oral and the literate are intertextually entwined. Hence, engaging with Indigenous ‘texts’ can open up powerful opportunities for the target audiences.
Oral literacies transferred by knowledge experts (Elders) encapsule a whole set of Aboriginal values that should meaningfully connect to what students learn in schools. Hence, as Osborne (chapter 13) succinctly argues, to stop the perpetuation of colonial misrepresentations and domination, decolonial academics should adopt Indigenous academic research methodologies to reorient and reposition research paradigms in a way that challenges the ‘mono-epistemological assumptions’ and ‘truth-making norms’ of Northern-oriented mainstream research cognition. The process of re-languaging, reframing, and re-knowledging helps in the re-centring of Indigenous ways of experiencing the world. The role of community ‘knowledge brokers’ is vital as Indigenous languages and knowledges are transmitted through oral cultural tradition, with narrative, storytelling, and songs being central to the sharing of Indigenous knowledges and experiences. Hence, during the data collection phase of a research project a ‘community-friendly narrative’ can displace Northern ways of eliciting information (through mainstream surveys). Besides, as narrative is central to Indigenous research methodologies, focus groups and workshop sessions can foster a methodological and epistemological dialogue that facilitates the generation of emerging themes and effective ways of doing research in Aboriginal contexts. In addition, the cultural protocols of sharing circles, the sacred act of smudging (burning sage), and yarning (respectful listening to community members) are part of Aboriginal ‘spiritual knowledge’.
The ‘humanising’ of the research process is also central to Southern sociolinguistic and language learning methodologies. Counter-storytelling, as an empowering decolonial approach in Global South research methodology, grants epistemic agency and voice to historically marginalised others. For example, a cohort of South Sudanese humanitarian refugee women in Australia strategically ‘masked’ their ethnic identity to shift power dynamics (e.g. facilitate mobility and overcome oppression while in the Kenyan refugee camp) or displayed their refugee ethnolinguistic background to gain some favour (e.g. jump the queue when opting for Australian multilingual social service, which involves little waiting time). What can be inferred from Necia Stanford-Billinghurst's case study (chapter 4) is that Northern perspectives would fail to predict how these women could manage to effectively appropriate ideologies embedded in institutional language regimes to transform them from ‘tools of oppression’ to ‘strategies for agency’ and empowerment. Hence, as Peter I. De Costa rightly argues in Part 3, there is a need to create more inclusive spaces for the promotion of culturally responsive and sustaining methodologies by adopting Indigenous methodologies that are suitable for a better understanding of the complex realities in Aboriginal communities and by prioritising ‘a centring of Indigenous and First Nations knowledge, belief, and sense of being’ (192).
Colonial ideologies are also entrenched in Eurocentric education systems in the Global South. Hence, academics oriented to decoloniality emphasise the need to problematise subtractive multilingualism scholarship by adopting ‘southern epistemologies as a lens’ with which to analyse colonialist monolingual linguistic ideologies that devalue local languages. For example, the use of collaborative ethnographic approaches that promote ‘dialogic engagement’ with relevant community stakeholders is a ‘decolonising process’ that grants language-minoritised Nepalese youth voice and agency to build their ‘multilingual citizenship’ by inviting them to critically evaluate and resist ‘multilingual inequality’ ideologies and ‘develop their voice and agency as “multilingual citizens”’ (Prem Phyak, Hima Rawal, and Peter I. De Costa, 156). Likewise, colonialist discourses in the Philippines that perpetuate monolingual and monocultural colonialist agendas are embedded in ‘historical and imperial forgetting’ that have created a big challenge to transformative educational reforms in that a sense of inferiority complex entrenched in people's minds and practices vis-à-vis their linguistic and cultural identities persists (Ruanni Tupas, chapter 6). Similarly, in Bangladesh, where English is the language of academic success, Arabic and Bangla are confined to religious identity and ethnic solidarity, respectively (Rubina Khanam, Russell Fayant, and Andrea Sterzuk, chapter 10). In Timor-Leste, there is an ‘intergenerational divide’ over visions of national identity and the role of national languages in education. Hence, resistance to linguistic inequalities and colonially constructed identities contributed to the interethnic violence (2006–2007). While colonial languages failed to represent the cultural identities of Indigenous communities, which is ‘built on conceptions of place that are deeply connected to Indigenous spirituality and ties to the land’ (Kerry Taylor-Leech, 126), coloniality is still sustained in the way it impacts Timorese teachers’ views of ‘Tetun as inferior in quality and status to Portuguese’ (134). In Mozambique, coloniality is also reflected in the (neo)colonial language policies and practices, which tend to legitimise former colonial languages and depreciate native languages and cultures by privileging ‘western-centred school curricula and pedagogies, while marginalizing local forms of knowledge and epistemologies’ (Feliciano Chimbutane, 138). For example, while Portuguese is regarded as the language of ‘legitimate citizenship’, the native languages are relegated to the status of mere symbol of ethnolinguistic solidarity and cultural identity, with little marketable socioeconomic value.
Therefore, the goal of this volume is to contest the colonial structures underlying schooling, curricula, educational policies, and academic research methodologies by de-linking from biased Northern thinking frames that continue to misrepresent cultural others’ pluriversal lifeworlds by perpetrating ‘brutal erasures’ of Indigenous linguistic agency, epistemological pluriversality, and methodological heterogeneity. However, to recalibrate this imbalance, the decolonisation of minds, discourses, and practices does not presuppose closing the door to Northern knowledges and methodologies (de-Westernisation). Rather, decolonial Southern theory is about bridging the chasm between Southern and Northern forms of knowing through dialogue that critically engages new narratives of departure from neocolonial single-storied centre-periphery discourses (Christopher Stroud, Part 1). The growing embrace of Southern multilingualism theory that has characterised most of the debates in this volume revolves around the nature of linguistic/cultural and epistemic/methodological pluralism required to create educational spaces for minoritised and Indigenous groups to regain epistemic sovereignty, and (re)conceptualise their world on their own terms.
However, much criticism has been levelled at Southern methods as legitimate research frameworks. For example, storytelling is regarded as unfit as a method for fieldwork-oriented research as it is claimed to lack sufficient theorising, objectivity, and rigorous inquiry by being too artistic, emotive, and cathartic (epistemic therapy). However, as this useful volume demonstrates, such ethnographic approaches have an emancipatory potential in that they provide an insider's perspective and generate an emotional resonance with the audience while tackling sensitive social issues (e.g. racism in higher education) as everyday lived experiences. Besides, telling our own stories is a form of epistemic agency. Furthermore, the uneven distribution of epistemological power between the Global North and the Global South has engendered biased theories that fail to acknowledge the pluriversal specificity of Southern contexts through the invisibilisation and subordination of Southern knowledges, perspectives, histories, and ways of viewing the world. Therefore, this timely collection of chapters helps to address these issues, providing a comprehensive illustration of the methodological underpinnings of decolonial sociolinguistic inquiry and critical theorising through an anti-colonialist lens.
