Introduction to Special Issue: Translingual and transmodal complexity and innovation in English-language-dominant Southern schooling

Abstract

This Special Issue brings together a group of studies that address the monolingual and text-based bias in English-language-dominant Southern schooling contexts, in Australia, Kenya and South Africa. They are studies written about schooling sites that in one way or another are on the margins of the social order, both locally and from a global perspective. Their location means that they provide opportunities for research-based perspectives and understandings, as well as opportunities for theorisation and insight, that might be less available in schooling contexts in the dominant centres. The collection draws on a shared critique of the construction of language/s as boundaried and autonomous and they challenge assumptions around standardised and ‘big’ languages and of print-based communication which are sometimes seen to hold naturally privileged positions as resources for meaning-making and clarity of thought across all contexts. They present a critical view of a text-literacy bias in schooling and present research that pays attention to innovation and complexity with regard to transmodal semiotic resources in schooling. They recognise and elaborate on the multilanguaged and multimodal nature of all communicative activity (Bakhtin 1981). In particular, they draw on and engage with the construct of translanguaging (García and Wei 2014; Wei 2017) which recognises the heteroglossic nature of language and semiosis as communicative and meaning-making activity in situated social settings. Anglo-normative ideologies in the schools studied, along with deficit assumptions regarding the language and literacy resources of children and youths, are shown to contrast with the fluid languaging and meaning-making resources of youths and children who are learning in these different settings. The research here contributes to an argument that the monolingual and monomodal bias of predominant classroom discourse in English-dominant Southern contexts can be a deadening orientation to learning where it does not draw on students’ resourcefulness with language, image and sound nor prepare them for equitable participation in the multilingual and multimodal, or heteroglossic, communicative environments that they come from and return to from schooling. The articles variously focus on and analyse instances of creative innovation by teachers who attempt to address the challenges of classroom learning and teaching under the constraining conditions of mass schooling practices in these contexts. They present accounts of teachers’ innovative practices as examples of fluidity, creativity, border-crossing and transgression. The research studies focus on examples where students are encouraged to draw on their own language and semiotic resources, trans-semiotic imaginative constructs