Introduction and decolonial pedagogies, multilingualism and literacies

Abstract

This Special Issue of Multilingual Margins brings together a number of creative, reflective and academic writings and artefacts that emerged from a new interinstitutional postgraduate module, Re-imagining Multilingualisms, hosted by the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research (CMDR) at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), and the Department of Linguistics at Stellenbosch University (SU) in 2018. The module has as its central focus the notion of ‘multilingualism’ and how this can be ‘re-imagined’ as a ‘transformative tool’ within a higher education context. It emerged out of a Mellon-funded research project which seeks to respond to the current calls for broadened epistemic access, decolonised curricula and transformed institutions. The module engages with this challenge by exploring how pedagogic approaches, which centre multilingualism and diversity, and which use a variety of creative writing and arts-based pedagogies, can facilitate access to knowledge, and deepen our understanding of how higher education can become more inclusive and democratic. By encouraging student participants to imagine and engage with their linguistic resources and histories in different ways, it aimed to help students re-think their notions of language and multilingualism, and the historical power relations which legitimate and amplify, or silence and mute, particular voices, identities and ‘ways of seeing’. In this introduction, we first discuss why we need to re-think (or re-conceptualise) multilingualism, and then reflect on the module as a way to understand more deeply how language and multilingualism can become a transformative tool in both teaching and learning, and in building a more integrated, just society.