Manuela Guilherme

English as a Global Language and Education for Cosmopolitan Citizenship

Due to the overriding power of World English in the global economy, media, academy, entertainment, etc., EFL education has become a crucial curricular element in the educational systems of developing societies. English language learning has therefore been portrayed either as a fundamental tool that unquestionably brings professional success or one that oppresses us under capitalism, neoliberalism and the global market. Without questioning the veracity of both descriptions, indeed precisely for this reason, this paper argues for a critical pedagogy of English as a Global Language. The use of English as a common language, but not as a lingua franca, can provide us with opportunities for acting as responsible cosmopolitan citizens, without implying the loss of our cultural and ideological roots or the transformation of the English language into a neutral, disengaged or unaffiliated medium. This paper attempts to theorise this hypothesis based upon the ideas of authors such as Santos on globalisation and the World Social Forum, as well as the statements of EFL teachers on curriculum development.

Is There a Role for Critical Pedagogy in Language/Culture Studies? An Interview with Henry A. Giroux

Henry Giroux became established as a leading figure in radical education theory in the 1980s. Not only did he revive the arguments for civic education proposed by the main educational theorists of the 20th century, namely Dewey, Freire and others such as the reconstructionists Counts, Rugg and Brameld, but he also advanced their theories by formulating the idea of a ‘border pedagogy’. His proposal can be viewed as the application of a postcolonial cosmopolitan perspective to the North American notion of democratic civic education. Giroux’s vision for education addresses the issues that demographically and politically changing Western societies are facing at the beginning of the 21st century. His guidance challenges educational policy-makers worldwide, at a time when educators at all levels feel frustrated and demotivated because they feel they have been forced backwards lately instead of moving forwards in challenging themselves, both as professionals and citizens, in their attempt to meet the needs of our fast-changing societies. Giroux has urged educators and academics to react against these paralysing pressures and to be critical, creative and hopeful about the potential that both they and their students offer. His work helps us counter the conservative political tendencies which have been imposing a definition of excellence in education that means submission to market pressures rather than educational excellence through innovative intellectual production. Giroux argues for both critique and possibility in education and advocates independence and responsibility for teachers and students; that is, he claims dignity and respect for educational institutions, teachers and students. Giroux has reclaimed the political nature of the everyday labour of educational researchers and of educators themselves. Furthermore, Giroux eloquently theorises a critical pedagogy of Cultural Studies based on the pioneering work of the educationalist Raymond Williams himself. As Cultural Studies attempts to break down disciplinary barriers, it is therefore problematical and Giroux’s rich contribution is to describe its goals and the basis of the processes that lead to its specific type of knowledge.

Difference in diversity: multiple perspectives on multicultural, intercultural, and transcultural conceptual complexities

This text undertakes an analysis of three concepts, namely ‘multiculturalism,’ ‘interculturality,’ and ‘the transcultural,’ which are scrutinized and discussed in their potential for explaining the wider scope of inequality, difference, and diversity as developed in perspectives of different north-south conceptual frameworks. The discussion draws from recently published or other made public sources from different academic and cultural traditions and, therefore, it maps different perspectives and uses of these terms. They have lately been made ubiquitous in the academic and social discourse and are often used indiscriminately. In fact, it is impossible to establish fixed and stable lines between them since they form a complex web of meanings that, to some extent, may crisscross each other. However, it is feasible, for the purpose of deeper scientific accurateness, to identify layers and regions of meaning for each of one of them and this is what this article attempts to do, against a backdrop of different types of colonialism, both from the perspective of the colonized and the colonizers, as well as against a backdrop of a north/south-south/north metaphor. The conceptual discussion on which this article relies is based upon two large projects in Latin America involving various types of higher education institutions.

European and Latin American Higher Education Between Mirrors

This paper discusses some of the analyses and proposals presented by a large network of European and Latin American researchers that developed a broad programme on institutional equity and social cohesion in higher education institutions, between 2011 and 2013. The impact of higher education expan sion and diversification has been felt and questioned differently in the various countries, due to their history and place in the world system, to their education systems, to their organization, or their ability to react, to mobilize resources and to implement relevant policies. The article has Europe and Latin America as privileged locus of analysis, but acknowledges that many of the characteristics and issues described are part of a global agenda. It is assumed that neoliberalism has failed as a model of economic development, but it is recognized that, as policy for culture, it is (still) in force, derived from having become a common sense that shapes the actions of governments and education policy-makers. The University, as well as higher education policies, may have another sense and give an important contribution to the construction of fair societies, fighting for equality among human beings, fully respecting their differences. This is the sense of the nine proposals for a radically democratic and Citizen University the paper ends with. Keywords: higher education; academic networks; Europe; Latin America; citizen university.

Freire's Philosophical Contribution for a Theory of Intercultural Ethics: A Deductive Analysis of His Work.

Abstract This article claims that Freire’s work offers an important ground for a potential theory of intercultural ethics and, for that purpose, examines his ideas at different levels: (1) the ontological; (2) the ideological; (3) the political; (4) languages and languaging; and (5) cultural identity and diversity. Freire never used the word ‘intercultural’, although it is suggested here that this is due to the fact that terminology related to cultural diversity has changed over time and in his day this term was not yet common currency. Moreover, Freire uses more often the term ‘multiculturalidade’ rather than ‘multiculturalismo’ (multiculturalism) since the former suffix ‘-dad(e)’ has a different meaning which refers to the ontological nature of the condition and is more usual in both Portuguese and Spanish. This article also argues for the relevance of a theory of intercultural ethics in the contemporary world that imprints (inter)cultural flexibility on the current hermeneutics of ethics while preventing excessive abuses on behalf of relativism, dogmatism, essentialism and fundamentalism.

“Glocal” Languages and North-South Epistemologies

This chapter builds upon the idea that there have been different knowledge-producing frameworks in the world, profiting from and resisting the unequal relations of power, which correspond to different world and life visions. Science and academia have been reproducing a successful model, one that originated in European history and was formalized during the Enlightenment, and which has since remained unquestioned, and was exported worldwide during colonialism.

Winds of the South: Intercultural university models for the 21st century

This issue of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education focuses on innovative initiatives which are emerging in different Latin-American university contexts as well as a few other experiments in traditionally established universities. Sometimes these initiatives are newly created higher education institutions that are rooted inside indigenous regions, in other cases conventional universities start to “interculturalize” their student population, their teaching staff, or even their curricular contents and methods. Despite certain criticisms, community leaders frequently claim and celebrate the appearance of these new higher education opportunities as part of a strategy of empowering ethnic actors of indigenous or afro-descendant origin. After an interview to Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Laura Selene Mateos Cortés, and Gunther Dietz, analyze the different ways in which the Mexican intercultural education subsystem conceives “interculturalidad.” The next article, by Guillermo Williamson, also “expresses interculturality polyphonically from the Latin-American perspective” and reports “the nature and condition of the academic reflection on interculturality carried out in universities, in supposedly intercultural contexts.” Then, Carlos Octavio Sandoval brings the focus back to Mexico and the Intercultural University of Veracruz; in the article that follows, Isabel Dulfano explores the relationship between antiglobalization, counterhegemonic discourse, and indigenous feminist alternative knowledge production. She bases her article on the autoethnographic writing of some Indigenous feminists from Latin America that questions the assumptions and presuppositions of Western development models and globalization, while asserting an identity as contemporary Indigenous activist academic women. Christine D. Beaule and Benito Quintana’s article adds to the topic of this special issue with the argument of interdisciplinarity bringing together both an archaeological and anthropological perspectives of indigeneity to the higher education classroom. And finally, Catherine Manathunga focuses on the issue of intercultural doctoral supervision.

Interview to Boaventura de Sousa Santos

In this interview, Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos addresses, on the one hand, the process of transnationalisation of universities and the neoliberalisation of the classical model of the European university. On the other hand, he stresses that the recognition of difference and internal pluralism of science, which have pervaded the universities during the last decades, is now losing steam. However, he believes that the emergence of the Epistemologies of the South he proposes may contribute to the re-foundation of a new university more suited to the ethos of the 21st century, since the reconstruction or reinvention of confrontational politics requires an epistemological transformation. Therefore, he proposes a new, polyphonic university (or better, pluriversity) as this epistemological transformation unfolds. This means that the political alliances of the future will have an epistemological dimension characterized by an articulation or combination of different and differently relevant kinds of knowledge.

Performing English with a postcolonial accent: ethnographic narratives from Mexico

This book presents a comprehensive study, both theoretical and empirical, based on a project on ‘learning’ English in a Language Centre in Mexico. In my view, this book provides an in-depth, serious and well-grounded analysis. It is well illustrated with examples offered by the students’ learning processes, their in-the-process reflections and their comments on their learning activities as well as on their implications for their understanding of the world, of their own community and of themselves. The link with a comprehensive, focused and relevant bibliography is skilfully and fittingly woven into the text, which gives a methodologically and scientifically sound account of the approach taken to learning English throughout the case study analysed. The authors firmly identify their research focus as ‘performing English with a postcolonial accent’ while ‘learning’ English in context, instead of putting the focus on the ‘teaching’ of English. And they explain: ‘For us, the postcolonial condition represents the political, social and cultural realities of what constitutes the everyday lives of the actors entangled in the ‘‘whirlwind of globalisation’’’ (p. 3, citing Castells, 2000). To start with, the book includes a foreword by Canagarajah that gives the reader a lot of food for thought when reading this book. He feels the need to start with the statement, ‘ . . . even communities not formerly colonised by Britain find English a significant medium of communication . . .’, although he complements it by clarifying how he defines performance in such circumstances: ‘Performance therefore means gaining voice in a language by appropriating its forms and conventions for your purpose’. And he adds ‘To gain voice is to stamp the language with your identity’. This ties in with the introductory statement made by the authors in the Prologue: ‘To establish one’s identity in respect to the language one speaks is important’. Understandably, given the fact that English is learnt here as a foreign language on Mexican soil and by members of a Mexican community, the national and local identities are each presented as tightly woven, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, as opposed to a foreign identity. Both the national and local identities seem to be carried out by the perceptions, possibly contradictory, in relation to English that these Mexican students of English bring with them. However, the text sometimes falls short in its exploration of the impact that the will to learn a foreign language, English in particular, may have on the construction of plural identities, despite its explicit commitment to ‘provide ethnography texture to the interplay between language, agency, identity and culture’. Moreover, according to the authors ‘they are doing their own performance of English with a postcolonial accent’ (p. 29), however, they are not doing it individually, that is, they communicate interactively within their own cultural group, with those who share the same mother tongue. As a result, they are using English in a way that, in its cultural connotations, Language and Intercultural Communication Vol. 10, No. 2, May 2010, 178 180