William Sughrua

In pursuit of multilingual practices: ethnographic accounts of teaching ‘English’ to Mexican children

Within the context of Oaxaca, Mexico, home to 16 officially recognised indigenous languages, Spanish and English, this paper presents results of an ongoing critical-ethnographic-action-research project in two different sites: one in a semi-urban setting and the other in a rural community. This paper uses multimodal texts (photos and videos) and narratives to present ethnographic portraits of Mexican indigenous and mestizo children from Oaxaca. Based on this research, this paper addresses three themes: (1) translanguaging practices as the norm; (2) childrens identity (re)negotiation through the creation and performance of identity texts; and (3) teachers as learners and children as teachers.

Social Class in English Language Education in Oaxaca, Mexico

This article explores social class in English-language education in Oaxaca, Mexico. To this end, first, we discuss social class in Mexico as related to coloniality; second, for illustration, the paper presents the authors’ own social-class analysis as language educators in Oaxaca; third, we discuss how social class impacts English education access, Mexican teachers of English, and the curriculum; and finally, we offer conclusions related to the prevalence of coloniality in Oaxaca and the consequential need to engage critically with social class and its connection to English teaching.

‘I don't find any privacy around here’: ethnographic encounters with local practices of literacy in the state prison of Oaxaca

In his poem entitled ‘Privacy’, Alberto, an inmate in the state prison of Oaxaca, Mexico, vividly evokes the conflictive dynamics of space and time within his living quarters. This is his way of dealing with the sadness, trauma, and mundanity of his incarceration. Albertos poem has emerged from our ongoing ethnographic project based on a creative writing workshop that we have been carrying out at the Ixcotel state prison in Oaxaca. Our objective is to analyze the inmate-students’ texts, as well as to reflect on the overall experience of the workshop, in order to interrogate the manner in which the inmate-students affectively deal with their imprisonment. Our discovery is that the workshop enables the inmate-students to maneuver within local practices of literacy as well as imagined communities in order to cross postcolonial borderlines and challenge the geopolitics of language knowledge. In doing so, the creative writing workshop serves a ‘liberating’ function, allowing the inmate-students to ‘write’ their way through ‘colonial difference’ and thereby locate themselves momentarily beyond the walls of their confinement. This discovery emerges from a co-constructed and performative ethnography based on an interpretative framework leading to borderland epistemology.

Can I Have a Voice in the Nation's Classroom?.

This article utilizes a reflexive ethnographic approach in the form of a “layered text” consisting of academic argument, literary criticism, biography, autobiography, and fiction. The dimension of academic argument involves “critical applied linguistics”; the dimension of literary criticism, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm, Blake’s “The Tyger,” and Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”; the dimension of biography, the African American activist Malcolm X; autobiography, an account of my elderly father’s visit with me in my city of residence (Oaxaca); and fiction, the story of me in an urban classroom teaching a group of students that includes Malcolm X as well as the authors of and characters from The Great Gatsby and The Man with the Golden Arm. This diverse “layered text” intends to perform its theme involving the “critical”-minded teacher in an English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom as one who regulates her/his personal “political” awareness in order to foster a “critical” classroom accessible to all students.

The Pretender A Challenge to Academic Writing

Following “reflexive ethnography” and using a “layered narrative” of autobiography, academic argument, exposition, and fictionalization set within the “story” of the author as “I” and a group of childhood friends on a summer night, this text challenges the apparent hegemony of mainstream academic writing of applied linguistics and poses alternative forms of writing. This theme is “performed” rather than “explained.” Consequently, the text engages in what Denzin and Lincoln describe as the sixth moment of qualitative research, which calls for performative narratives blurring or eliminating the divisions between data and analysis through means of “creative writing” (e.g., scene, characterization). The following text, therefore, expounds on neither its theme, reflexive ethnographic approach, nor methodological positioning (above); rather, the text “dramatizes” its theme, approach, and methodology, with this present abstract signposting such intentions.1

The Las Vegas Thesis.

Following “reflexive ethnography” and utilizing an approach of “performative narrative” and “layered text”, this article explores how Bachelor of Arts students in the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language program at a public university in Mexico successfully manage the writing of an inductive-oriented thesis in English by resisting bibliographic research. This becomes the theme that is “enacted” or “dramaticized” through a crossover narrative of fictionalization, classroom action research, autobiography, and Camusian philosophy.