From this perspective, Praxis overcomes the Pedagogies focusing on What we need is a

Decolonization as pedagogy: a educational institutions and the aforementioned binaries by

norms and grammars pedagogy of
state set developing in
praxis of ‘becoming’ in ELT up policies that constrain what the interstitial spaces between for communicating one ‘becoming’ by means of
transpires in the classroom. If action, policies, reflection, and language at a time are which students creatively
Suresh Canagarajah there are relearning. negotiate communicative
pedagogic practices that resist This cyclical process spans unhelpful when diverse
dominant ideologies and practices for emergent
society and classrooms, languages work
policies, they institutions and repertoires, contexts, and
defines pedagogy as expanding beyond the classroom and knowledge concerns to accommodate are powerless to challenge the together p8 meanings. p8
discourses, knowledge and
embodied affective, social, and cultural learning that draws from and institutions p2 practice, and mind and body
transforms environmental and geopolitical spaces. It defines pedagogy as
a ‘praxis’, involving the reflexivity of action, reflection, and relearning, thus
challenging the condescending view of ‘practice’ as secondary to research, policy,
and scholarship. This perspective enhances the political stakes in pedagogy When students translate or
by contesting the micro/macro binary that relegates pedagogic resistance to codeswitch, they are Adopting reflective
ineffectual local changes p1 . A pedagogy influenced by these shifts will developing metalinguistic
teaching, teachers
give more importance to the adaptive and generative dispositions that awareness. The practice of
drawing from their have to develop their
students can creatively use for the diverse unpredictable communicative
The learning agendas are even more complex for the decolonial environment for their practices, beliefs, and
situations they encounter. In fact, such a pedagogy will require preparing communication develops
project. We have to relearn the knowledges and languages that have
students for lifelong learning, rather than giving them the false hope that identities in relation to the
undergone centuries of systematic suppression; analyse contemporary strategies for negotiating
historical and contemporary geopolitical processes that create inequality, a set of grammatical norms will help them p5 embodied resources and
changing contexts and
discrimination, and domination through ever more subtle and invasive emplacing oneself in one’s needs of their
forms; imaginatively construct pluriversal social, communicative, and full material context communities. p9
educational institutions that will prove to be more inclusive and fair for for communicative
everyone; and strategically engage with dominant social and educational There has never been a greater tension between what is taught in the
outcomes. These learning
structures to transform them when there is no neutral space for this classroom and what the students will need in the real world once they and communicative practices
struggle. Beyond transforming institutions and structures, we have to have left the classroom. In the last decades, that world has changed to foreground relationality and
develop new dispositions, ethics, spirituality, knowledge, and lifestyles such an extent that language teachers are no longer sure of what they are develop ethics for negotiating
to suit an inclusive social and geopolitical life. Such learning will be meanings with
supposed to teach nor what real world situations they are supposed to There are often cracks when the
unceasing, because ‘coloniality as we know it will probably never disappear’ all parties in the environment.
(Walsh 2018: 81) p3 prepare their students for. (Kramsch 2014: 296) p8 predefined pedagogies we bring to our classrooms do not fit the diverse
Deviating from language
resources, knowledges, and interests of our students. In fact, social and
purity, native
For me, this notion of pedagogy and of the pedagogical intertwines with speakerism, and language
educational spaces are always more complex, diverse, and unpredictable
intellectual militancy, activism, and action, forming an inseparable whole ownership, they help than reductive policies and prescribed curriculum. Such cracks provide
constitutive of and constituted in praxis, a praxis that I construct and students develop critical wiggle room for teachers to invent creative strategies in relation to dominant
assume both outside the university and within. (Walsh 2018: 83) p4 thinking p8 norms. It bears emphasizing that decolonial scholars consider it an ‘enabling
A pedagogy of becoming cannot focus on the mastery of representational contradiction’ (Santos 2016: 238) that the colonized must work with the
Rather than privileging the knowledge constituted by norms, structures, and rules. What stands a dominant ideologies, languages, and norms for pluriversal alternatives. p10
knowledge of other peoples (who claim ownership of that language), she better chance of helping negotiate unpredictability are non-representational
works with and from her land, lives, and customs. She is cultivating an dispositions, strategies, and processes. The latter are resourceful to
ethic of interdependency and ecological sustainability that go against the facilitate communication in an adaptive and generative manner in
colonizing ideology of self-interest, instrumentalism, and materialism diverse contexts of communication. p8