Voices from the Aboriginals: A Response from the South Aimed at Southing Language Education

Abstract

Teaching-learning languages can be a means to keep hierarchies and erasures while promoting supporting and problematizing settings. At the same time, the production of teaching materials helping indigenous subjectivities and wisdoms to overcome the walls of educational institutions can be considered as a highly significant process, with the potential to help join articulated social forces and movements aiming to change the above mentioned reality. Drawing on this assumption, we aim to analyze how aboriginal peoples and indigenous literatures are addressed in a volume of a teachers’ collection titled Critical Education Routes For English Teachers, to discuss its potential to southing language education, and to delve into the analysis of notions about language, identities and literatures informing the textbooks. Besides, we assess the depth of discussions brought about and the potential (re)production of derogatory repertoires, as well as unique narratives about aboriginal peoples. We understand this teaching material provides an innovative proposal that allows us to contribute to training socially engaged teachers, aware of different identities, wisdoms, cultures, and epistemologies. Thus, it is noteworthy that, even though the material has not been designed based on decolonial tenets, it becomes a response from the South devoted to promoting a critical approach engaged with social issues. The material suggests a broadening of movements towards identifying, claiming, and disrupting colonial hierarchizations, invisibilites, and unfeasibilites that have become part of ourselves. It also helps us build realities otherwise.