Abstract
Higher education is an important space for increasing the status and use of minoritized languages, and for building professional identities among students. In this presentation I trace the trajectory of a university-based language teacher education program in a region of Mexico characterized by multiple Indigenous languages and an increasing presence and pressure from Spanish and English. Despite shifts in policy and social discourse around Indigenous languages in Mexico since the turn of the century, Indigenous languages are still often labelled as ‘dialectos’, less-than-language (López-Gopar, Morales, & Jiménez, 2014), and many people are surprised to find them included in a teacher education program. Based on participant observation and interviews conducted between 2013 and 2022 as part of a larger ethnographic study, I highlight how the program has included ‘local’ (Indigenous) as well as ‘global’ (typically European) languages. Program coordinators have aimed to provide new language teachers with the capacity to work effectively in their local context, while also aiming to change some of the colonialist power dynamics that characterize the local language hierarchy. I discuss the choices of the program coordinators and young language teachers, and the ways that they are crafting new group identities for language teachers despite limited support from the wider socio-economic environment.
I conclude with a discussion of what the University of Oslo can learn from this case, and invite discussion and debate around the exclusion and/ or inclusion of Sámi languages at our university.
References:
López-Gopar, M. E., Morales, N. J., & Jiménez, A. D. (2014). Critical Classroom Practices: Using “English” to Foster Minoritized Languages and Cultures in Oaxaca, Mexico. In D. Gorter, V. Zenotz, & J. Cenoz (Eds.), Minority Languages and Multilingual Education (pp. 177–199). Springer.
Bio:
Haley De Korne is professor of Multilingualism at the University of Oslo.