This is the first in a series of dialogues I want to engage on why decolonization or thinking outside of the colonial invasion is a worthy cause for language and literacy education. We live in an era where literacy rates, levels, skills, practices are considered low- a very basic form of human existence. As a result, many African children are surviving through a harsh educational pathway, believing that they are stupid, unintelligent and not worthy. The ultimate result is not only being excluded from opportunity mobility in the capitalist world [eat or be eaten], they are removed gradually from a sense of who they truly are; they pose and live a false life until they hate themselves. Fathers are economically emasculated and there are no models to raise the future generation of boys and girls. Schools wane them down through the myths that one needs only one language to learn and that their own languages are useless! Self hatred is guaranteed. The colonizer can relax at a beach, knowing that the cursing has happened and will continue until 'minds are decolonized' and 'consciousness' kicks in their souls so they unmask the shades of falsehood.
As for me, it was accidental that I became acutely aware of the
relationship between language, literacy and ways of knowing that are indigenous
to speakers of African languages. Growing up in a remote rural village under
the care of a mother who was not able to make sense of the Roman Alphabets and
what they represented, I struggled to come to terms with the literacy
programmes used in schools. I went through learning programmes where teachers
used to drill us into singing letters, memorizing and regurgitating without
real content of what these stood for and what reference they had for our lived
experiences. Many friend-children struggled to connect dots of knowledge at school and
failed dismally at every examinations opportunity. While the one language
schooling system [yes it is one language posing falsely as 11) pushed many learners out, I had the resilience to stay on and
take on the literacy journey while asking myself the question: Why is there so
much gap between school and our lived community experience? But even Plato said those who master the curriculum master themselves- why is this not so obvious in the so-called post-colonial world?
I
decided to study languages not only to understand how languages do not only
represent ideas, but also how they embody ways of knowing. On this account, I questioned
learning in a foreign language before one had at least 6 years on induction in
familiar languages and considered alternatives. My scholarship looked at the
possibility of valorizing the African cultural competence where there is a
fluid intersection of languages as a normal linguistic behavior, a way of being
and making sense of the world. When I started work on translanguaging as an
alternative pedagogy for multilingual learners, I was responding to the
well- researched, but obvious fact that learners do not understand what teachers are saying in
most African classrooms. This is the one and the real challenge for African education systems. Stop talking about anything else fancy and deal with this foundational problem. In this way I found
translanguaging, defined as a pedagogical strategy where there is complex
alternation of languages of input and output in the process of meaning making
close to my the type of communication
I experienced in my village, which is situated at the border of two provinces
in South Africa, Limpopo and Mpumalanga. In other words, my journey of
questioning monolingual (aka colonial) bias found resonance with my own lived
experiences. I am connected to the subject and thus my research makes sense first and foremost to me. It took a long journey of being lost and found until I understood that "charity begins at home", but also learning how to move away from being a village chief to a global education disruptor, taking leadership roles and making world education systems and lives of people better!
website: www.leketimakalela.co.za
Tiwitter: @leketimakalela
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