Description:
Using data from multilingual settings in universities and adjacent learning contexts in East Asia, North Africa, Central and North America and Europe, this book provides examples of the heuristic value of translanguaging and epistemological decentring. Despite this and other theoretical and empirical work, and ever stronger calls for the inclusion of other languages, epistemologies and constructions of culture in higher education, decentring and translanguaging practices are often relegated to the margins or suppressed in research and education because of the organisational structures of education institutions and prevailing language norms, policies and ideologies. The authors draw on research on pluri- and multilingualism within education studies, as well as post- and decolonial theoretical contributions to the research on the role of language in education and knowledge production, to provide evidence that decentring cannot happen until learners have been given the tools to identify which sorts of centring dynamics and conditions are salient to their learning and (trans)languaging.
Brief description:
Karen Risager is Professor Emerita in Cultural Encounters, Roskilde University, Denmark. Her research field is language and intercultural education from a transnational and global perspective. She has published widely, including Representations of the World in Language Textbooks (Multilingual Matters, 2018).
Review Quotes: While multilingual scholars are dazzled by the creativity in communication at local contexts of classroom and society, they overlook the larger epistemological shifts promised by translingualism. This book is timely in addressing the resistant knowledge embodied and enacted in language diversity through speech communities we don't often hear in translingual scholarship.