Southern multilingual moves in education: agency, citizenship, and reciprocity

ABSTRACT

This paper contributes to southern theorization of multilingualisms. Noting the predominance of northern-generated academic debates, we discuss perspectives from close engagement with southern socio-historical and political contexts, and through prioritizing community and teacher outlooks on multilingualism. Our account is illustrated with examples of linguistic citizenship that highlight local agency and dialogue in border-crossing across multiple linguistic and institutional regimes. Drawing on examples from our research in Brazil, South Africa and Australia, we focus on four agentic multilingual moves that illustrate linguistic citizenship and challenge coloniality. Each of these moves (contestation, transgression, negotiation, and conversation) implies that teachers must situate their work within relationships of reciprocity, and ‘from below.’

Introduction

Neo-/post-colonial attempts to deny or invisibilize the linguistic heterogeneity, multilingual realities, experiences, and knowledge capabilities of people of ‘the south’ have been recycled in many ways. First, colonial empires attempted to diminish multilingualisms and replace these with monolingually-driven regimes. Fanon (2008) and Mignolo (2000) point to colonial projects that erased preexisting language formations and denied languaging practices of colonized people as real or full-fledged languages. Second, while administrative disengagement and ‘political’ independence may have removed a visible layer of coloniality, beneath this remained the ‘cognitive empire’ (Santos, 2018), a colonization of the mind (Wa Thiongʼo, 1986) sustained through imperial languages (Kusch, 1970).

We argue, therefore, for the recuperation and recognition of ‘southern multilingualisms’ that are multiple and incommensurate language ideologies and practices that serve the interests of communities who confront histories of coloniality and marginality. Despite an earlier history of linguistic research and discussion of linguistic (multilingual) border crossing in southern literature (e.g., Agnihotri, 2014; Anzaldúa, 1987; Nhlapo, 1944), discussed further below, recent debate has dwelt upon north American and European theoretical developments. The most influential theorizations, including translanguaging, are firmly grounded in the problems of bilingual Spanish-English education in the US (e.g., García, 2009) with some parallels with French-English immersion programmes in Canada (e.g., Heller, 2007). Translanguaging, in its ‘strong’ version (Lin, 2020) offers an understanding of multilingualism in terms of a unified linguistic repertoire that compellingly counters monolingual and language separation ideologies. While these address English dominant environments and contestation most obvious in relation to Spanish or French, the debates have traveled to African settings (e.g., Ndhlovu & Makalela, 2021), and Asia (e.g., Goodman, 2022; Wang, 2019).

The move, through recent conceptualization of translanguaging to a unified repertoire can be agentic but does not exhaust the ways in which agency is expressed through diverse ‘multilingual moves’ (Yildiz, 2007). A range of other terms have also been used to discuss language mixing, including translingualism (e.g., Canagarajah & Dovchin, 2019; Lee & Dovchin, 2019), emphasizing practices of resistance, and transidiomatic practices (Jacquemet, 2005), attending to the effects of globalization. Therefore, we argue that there is a need to relativize translanguaging alongside other forms of agency expressed through linguistic and political stance-taking.

The theoretical uptake of translanguaging reflects some of the wider dynamics of unequal north-south relations in knowledge production and circulation (see, also, Lau, 2020; Nascimento & Windle, 2022). The process of borrowing and appropriating the term ‘translanguaging’, in part from Maturana’s notion of ‘languaging’ (Maturana & Varela, 1987) and from Williams’s (2021) translation from Welsh of ‘translanguaging’ points to the dynamics of northern erasure. This move astonished southern scholars immersed in complex multilingual societies where horizontal modes of multilingual crossing and fluidity were documented decades earlier in Southern Africa (Nhlapo, 1944) and India (Agnihotri, 2014; Srivastava, 1990) to serve particular functions or purposes (e.g., Ayeomoni, 2012). Conviviality, conversing with care and communalities (Maturana & Varela, 1987), and practices of vertical language differentiation are characteristic of southern moves of multilingualism. Vertical differentiation has specific functions related to instruments used variously for both ‘legitimate’ and ‘illicit’ forms of exclusion. These may relate to educational and socio-political advancement or differentiation; legal and scientific precision; and expression of belief or faith. Alternatively, they may also relate to linguistic varieties developed to resist mainstream mores and ideologies, and to circumvent surveillance (e.g., argots associated with gangsters, prisoners, tricksters).

A historical and reproductive consequence of coloniality is the way in which northern thinking is often accompanied by universalist assumptions that privilege western or northern perspectives of knowledge, philosophy, and theory, whereas that of the former colonies, is assumed to be lacking in value (Connell, 2007; Kusch, 1970; Nakata, 2007; Wa Thiongʼo, 1986). This contributes to what Santos refers to as an abyssal line between epistemologies of the north and south, despite obvious historical entanglements, intersections, and interdependencies between north and south and east and west (Kerfoot & Hyltenstam, 2017; Santos, 2018). Obvious to communities in previously colonized societies, most (but not all) of which are located in the geopolitical south, is how academic and educational curricula, pedagogy and theory have come to invisibilize and erase their epistemologies and expertise (e.g. Andreotti & de Souza, 2008; Bock & Stroud, 2021; Heugh et al., 2021; Hoppers, 2002; Smith, 1999). From a universalist and northern-centric frame of reference, particularly one in which knowledge is increasingly distributed through a single language (English), even if under the mantle of social justice, the plurality of epistemes and systems of language used beyond the north are invisible and cannot be heard or understood.

Our starting point for examining ‘southern multilingualisms’ here is how agency is exercised in southern settings. By southern, we refer to a positionality within historically constructed global relations grounded in colonialism and reflected in contemporary coloniality (e.g., Veronelli, 2015). Southern experiences of pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial multilingualisms, layered with historical traces of conquest and changing ecologies of language, are many and pluri-dimensional (Heugh, 2017). If it were the case that the south is the source and home to 96% of the world’s endogenous language communities and Europe home to 4% (Eberhard et al., 2021), then it would stand to reason that experiences and understandings of multilingualism (including recent discourses of translanguaging) in the Euro-north are unlikely to be the same as those in the south.

We write as a group of scholars in conversation about our respective experiences as multilingual subjects, teachers, and researchers in South Africa, Brazil, and Australia. These conversations carry forward longer-term agendas that are tied to political movements that have resulted in perhaps the most dramatic recent social changes in the South African and Brazilian settings.

The paper is organized into five sections: first, a discussion of southern multilingual moves; then illustrations of four moves from our prior research (contestation, subversion, negotiation, and conversation. The illustrations are based on previously published work and fieldnotes, as indicated in each section.

Agency and border-crossing in southern multilingual moves

The term ‘multilingual moves’ has been used by Yildiz (2007) to examine multilingual literary explorations of ‘the connections and disconnections between languages, territories, and nations in innovative and critical ways’ (77). These moves involve shifts within and between languages, as well as shifts in perspectives on languages invoked in the work of German-Japanese author Tawada. The effects of these moves include defamiliarizing and denaturalizing language forms and linguistic ideologies. More recently, ‘multilingual moves’ has been used to describe activist positions taken up in multilingual education projects (Macleroy & Anderson, 2021). These accounts recall the notion of stance-taking (Jaffe, 2009), which marks the ways subjects position themselves pragmatically and metapragmatically in social interactions. With a somewhat different emphasis, it also recalls the notion of ‘talk moves,’ used to refer to the promotion of dialogic pedagogy in ways that promote student agency (Edwards-Groves, 2014). From these accounts, we present multilingual moves as offering a way of thinking about multilingualism that emphasizes its strategic uptake.

We use the term southern multilingual moves to center agentic stances that communities, students, teachers, and researchers adopt in promoting southern multilingualisms as practices of their own ‘linguistic citizenship’ (Stroud, 2001) or ‘multilingual citizenship’ (Lim, Stroud & Wee, 2018). These stances are theorized as modes of border crossing that are not mutually exclusive, but emerge from distinctive socio-historical circumstances in which coloniality is a shaping force. We see translanguaging as a valuable way of identifying border crossing, but it is one of many, and hence we do not see it as replacing multilingualism, and certainly not southern multilingualisms.

Political activists, teachers, and students have and continue to be caught at the interface of coloniality, inequality, race (often masked in regimes of language), and also the possibilities of linguistic and epistemic heterogeneity. We place the lens on situated scenarios of pluralities referred to by Silva and Lopes (2019) as the ‘ordinariness’ of everyday translingual and multilingual practices, and also those that pose impediments especially for marginalized, ‘poor’ and racialized bodies in their desire to ‘cross borders’ toward access and equality (see also Nascimento, 2020). Through the cracks and fissures of coloniality, the irrepressibility and unpredictability of multilingualisms bubble to the surface, sometimes contesting, transgressing, negotiating, and conversing – anticipating and urging reciprocity (see, also, Canagarajah & Dovchin, 2019). In these, we recognize the agentive characteristics of multilingual citizens, as they appropriate and seize opportunities ‘from below’ to reject and overturn the linguistic instruments of coloniality often used to mask paternalism and racism.

Contestation - erasures and mobilization

In spaces of heightened socio-political and racialized contestation, multilingual citizens engage with and employ their repertoires to challenge, appropriate and overturn restrictive regimes of linguistic and epistemic erasure (Canagarajah & Dovchin, 2019; Heugh, 2017; Nascimento & Windle, 2022). Multilinguality, deliberative use of horizontal and vertical capabilities and devices of multilingualisms, together with conversations of reciprocity that emerge ‘from below’ are the substance of liberatory and participatory citizenship.

In Brazil, a powerful strand of contestation has been uncovered, and strengthened, in anti-racist language scholarship, including in work by Lélia Gonzalez (2020) and Kassandra Muniz (2021). Brazilian teachers must navigate a strongly racialized linguistic hierarchy, in which notions of linguistic competency, credibility, and legitimacy marginalize the speech of Black and Indigenous populations, as well as rural and working-class speakers more widely. Linguistic judgments carry across colonial languages, internalized in popular sayings such as ‘I can’t even speak Portuguese properly, how am I going to learn English?’ In this hierarchy, the speech of a White urban elite is taken as the scholastic model for Portuguese, and the North American English learned by this same elite in commercial language courses is taken as the model for English. In the teaching of English, White, ‘native-speakers’ are prized and occupy prestigious positions, even without qualifications. This hierarchy disqualifies Black teachers of English (even if they can be deemed ‘native speakers’), whose competence is constantly put into question and must constantly be demonstrated (Nascimento & Windle, 2022).

Contesting a racialized linguistic hierarchy in these situations involves attending to the ways in which those who are marginalized make strategic use of their linguistic resources in order to navigate unequal interactions situations, and in order to lay claim to safe, nurturing spaces of Black and Indigenous affirmation (building on discourses of ancestrality, cosmology, and epistemology embedded in languaging).

One example of such contestation is expressed through the notion of is mandinga, which refers to the moves made in order to joust with an opponent in the Afro-Brazilian art of capoeira. Linguists such as Kassandra Muniz have adopted this term to identify the interactional positioning of Black speakers faced with White interlocutors, through metapragmatic stance and choice of register. The register of vernacular ‘popular’ Portuguese, viewed as ‘incorrect’ or slang, is an example of resignification from the stance of mandinga since it can be used to validate and reaffirm the identities and practices of Black Brazilians as central to the linguistic definition of the common speech – labeled pretuguês (Black Portuguese) by Lélia Gonzalez (2020). Teachers of Portuguese and of English can draw on the reaffirming discourses that validate pretoguês in contesting linguistic hierarchies within and across Portuguese and English.

In Brazil, spoken translanguaging involving English is largely an elite practice, and one used to reinforce social closure, since it is available only to those who have paid for many years of study in commercial courses or have traveled internationally (Windle & Nogueira, 2015). However, the outlook of pretoguês carries over into some informal contexts in which English is also used among Black and working-class populations in Brazil. Online translanguaging in particular is embraced by fans of pop and hip-hop music, most notably through citation and remixing of lyrics as part of banter in social media. This involves deliberate mobilization of registers of English understood to represent Black and peripheral identities, as in the following comment, made by a young Brazilian social media user:

The English I use is also not the traditional American, it’s English, it’s English that’s used in the ghetto, the English I learned watching movies, movies that go on in the American ghetto. I do not write correctly, either, in the traditional way. I write from, in an informal way, that it’s the same way they … that they write. […] Many people correct some posts I write there, correct below, but most of the time I write on purpose. (Windle & Ferreira, 2019, p. 144)

The rejection of attempts to ‘correct’ use of a Black vernacular register to standard English, as taught in Brazilian classrooms, is noteworthy. It speaks to language ideology as it pertains not only to a single correct form of English, but to a single national standard of Portuguese (Nascimento, 2020).

Whereas mandinga and pretoguês offer both strategies for survival in racialized interactions and models of linguistic pride for racialized speakers, there remains a feeling of shame in linguistic mixing in many educational settings. This shame is captured by the Brazilian concept of gambiarra – which refers to an improvised and stop-gap solution to a problem (Windle & Possas, 2022 ftc). Mixing Portuguese with English is understood by many teachers and students alike as a form of gambiarra: as ingenious and amusing, but also revealing some underlying inadequacy and lack of resources – which can easily slip into the metapragamatic regime of racialized linguistic incompetence.

Multilingual moves in Brazil mobilize, therefore, knowledge of racialized linguistic judgments and ways of challenging these. This knowledge is held by teachers, by students, and by a growing number of Black activist scholars. Recognition in their work that institutions compartmentalize languages and bodies results not in an ideological position that boundaries do not exist, but in the proposal of new metapragmatic regimes that re-name and resignify languaging practices.

Transgression - taal en stryd and tricksters

Southern multilingual moves engaging racialized identities, resistance, (re-appropriations) and citizenship in Brazil are echoed in South Africa. However, whereas linguicide has been a distinct feature of Brazilian coloniality, and was certainly attempted through the British colonial policy of ‘Anglicisation’ from 1820 to 1910, an overt policy of hierarchical, segregated, and unequal multilingualism (1948–1990), rather than explicit linguicide, was crafted during apartheid to counter Anglicization. Language (taal) has been synonymous with political struggle (stryd) against colonialism, discrimination, and inequality, and later associated with racialized and imagined ethnolinguistic identities. Segregation and inequality, enshrined a bifurcated and protectionist (standard) Afrikaans-English bilingual language policy for people then racially (mis)classified as ‘Asian,’ ‘Coloured’ and ‘White’ people, and a multilingual (mother-tongue/moedertaal, Afrikaans and English) policy for speakers of African languages.

Beneath the surface of a legislated bi-/multilingual regime of language, an ecology of horizontal multilingualisms thrived. Linguistic contact, hybridization, and creolization for purposes of everyday transactions and conviviality has been documented since the mid-17th CE. These morphed into symbolic forms of resistance against British attempts to deny (white) Afrikaner identity, through de-creolization of Afrikaans. This triggered Black and so-called ‘Coloured’ resistance to Algemene Beskaafde (‘civilized’) Afrikaans and assertions of ‘ownership’ and reappropriation of Kaaps (now AfriKaaps, see Williams, 2021) with overtly transgressive exertion of linguistic citizenship. Despite efforts to segregate African people along lines of language, urbanization of people from different branches of Nguni and Sotho language clusters, and migration, led to everyday ‘mixing’ or ‘blending’ of African languages (Nhlapo, 1944). Urban varieties (e.g., Tsotsitaal and isiCamtho) used by rebellious youth, assuming the role of (would be) gangsters, have become symbols of ‘exclusive’ admission to counterculture capital.

We turn now to two brief sketches of transgressive multilingual moves that pushed through layers of linguistic hegemony associated with formal education. The first, a decade prior to the end of apartheid; the second, a decade after the transition to a post-apartheid polity that privileges ‘standard’ English despite its constitutionally enshrined multilingual policy. In each, we notice a teacher undertaking transgressive multilingual moves. We see these teachers navigating a) the structural constraints and language regime of the prevailing education system, b) resistant or rebellious students, and c) multilingual repertoires and citizenship – resistant, subversive, and compliant. We recognize different multilingualisms with informal, horizontal, convivial, and transgressive features, and compliance with the vertical architecture of ‘academic’ language. In both periods, curriculum and assessment instruments required conventional teaching of languages separately. Yet, as elsewhere, when most communities and students are multilingual and use varieties that differ from that of the school, teachers and students employ multilingual repertoires that defy conventionally considered discrete language boundaries.

In the first scenario, Anton, a teacher of Afrikaans at an English-medium school reserved for ‘white’ home language speakers of English in the mid-1980s, was fluent in standard Afrikaans, English and Tsotsitaal, an urban gangster argot (lexis of several African languages and Afrikaans syntax) from Soweto, outside Johannesburg. The school, located near Cape Town had a peculiar demographic mix of migrants from different generations of L1 speakers of English with right-wing and racist affiliations. Teachers suspected of anti-apartheid tendencies were under constant surveillance of security agents posing as teachers and students who reported to an extremist right-wing group. The second scenario, in the mid-2000s, involves Zodwa, a multilingual science teacher, also a traditional healer, Sangoma, and researcher in a left-wing vanguard quasi-NGO. The students in this school were mostly home language speakers of isiXhosa and/or Sesotho, and many also adolescent experts in a hybrid urban variety of isiCamtho (similar to Tsotsitaal), associated with aspirant gangsters adopting stylized poses (exaggerated swagger, boom-box music, clothing). The students received home language literacy and numeracy in the first 3 years of school followed by a theoretical switch to English medium education (EMI) from the fourth grade. In reality, classrooms were, and continue to be multilingual, with students and teachers switching back and forth among spoken English, isiXhosa, Sesotho and sometimes with Afrikaans to accommodate students from a neighboring suburb, all the while claiming that EMI was in use.

In the first school, Anton experienced resistance from male students unwilling to learn Afrikaans language and literature as required for senior school-leaving certificates. The divisiveness of apartheid language policy had spawned resistance to Algemene Beskaafde Afrikaans among speakers of English, Kaaps, and African languages. In danger of losing his job unless he secured student co-operation, Anton turned to his ‘illicit’ linguistic capital. Through his extra-mural role as teacher in charge of the surfing club, students became aware of his youthful carousing in Soweto and expertise in Tsotsitaal, ambivalently stigmatized by most middle-class African and ‘white’ youths, but also linguistic cachet that was both exclusive and transgressive. In this context, despite endemic racism and surveillance in the school environment, access to Tsotsitaal became irresistible and a bizarre counter-intuitive reversal of linguistic and social capital in a racially divided society. Recalcitrant students, agreed to co-operate and engage with Afrikaans literature in exchange for access to Tsotsitaal (with its syntactical roots in Afrikaans), which they could use as linguistic capital beyond the school.

Nearly two decades later, Zodwa, science teacher and multilingual research-practitioner, had a not dissimilar pedagogical experience although with different students. This was a class of unruly Grade 10 youths – regarded as unteachable. Zodwa had several critical forms of capital at her disposal that were unsettling for her students: her status as a Sangoma associated with special powers and her proficiency and expertise in vertical (prestigious) registers of isiXhosa, Sesotho, and English. What was more unsettling was that students incorrectly assumed that her elevated status precluded her from expertise in the stigmatized urban argo, isiCamtho. After a particularly revelatory conversation during one lesson, Zodwa switched to isiCamtho to chastise, intrigue and unnerve the students. Her mystique and linguistic capital secured student acquiescence, and as it turned out, retention in science classes, and success in end of year assessments.

These multilingual moves illustrate that in context of struggle for equality through the intersection of language, class, race and inequality, teachers defy prevailing regimes, draw on multilingual repertoires to reindex both ‘legitimate’ and illicit language use, and upturn student expectations in multilingual moves that draw students toward linguistic and educational solidarity. In this, students and teachers demonstrate that they use multilingualism both for horizontal and vertical purposes of exclusion and access. Recognition of the pluralities, and unpredictability of what people do with their repertoires provokes thinking ‘otherwise’ (Povinelli, 2012; Viveiros De Castro, 2015) about language, multilingualism, and translanguaging.

Instead of the unknowing, partially or fully enlightened understanding of multilingualism defining pedagogical relations, the teachers here have positioned themselves under conditions of adversity to subvert and work with linguistic hierarchies. Hence, a better purchase on the knowing and agentic teacher can be gained by looking beyond language ideology per se, to subversive appropriations and maneuverings – which can be thought of through the figure of the trickster. The trickster appears in various societies as a figure who sometimes knows all languages, and joins language and situation together in surprising, absurd, and transgressive ways. Tricksters are often found at crossroads and gateways, as illustrated in a bridging of multiple spaces in the lives of students inside and beyond the school, leveraging the unique positionality of the teacher within hierarchical and racialized social relations that are further defined by generational divides and youth cultures.

Negotiation - mucking around at the margins, folding to the center

Languaging practices offer a strategic lever for teachers, but such practices are embedded in systems of knowledge and control that often escape teacher agency, even when this extends to promoting multilingual practices, including translanguaging. Border-crossing calls for negotiating norms expressed through curriculum frameworks that extend into high-stakes examinations, and for negotiations of embodied racialized subjectivities that are either exposed or erased by positions taken in relation to language (Nascimento, 2020).

The Australian example below illustrates more constrained negotiations within institutionalized linguistic hierarchies. Though multilingual practice can be given space, this may be limited to ‘mucking around’ at the margins, rather than challenging a wider system in which English predominates in social structures, classrooms, and, above all, systemic assessment. Teachers push as far as they feel they can without putting their students or themselves in harm’s way, even as their understandings of what this means are constantly shifting.

In this example, we witness Steve, an experienced teacher with a leadership position in a highly diverse girls’ secondary school close to the state capital of South Australia. Despite its characterization as a ‘mainstream’ Australian school, in which English is assumed to be the medium of instruction and everyday interaction, most students were multilingual, with over half speaking languages in addition to English at home, and from over 40 cultural and linguistic communities. Local language policy was strongly shaped by students’ multilingual practices (French, 2016). Steve contributed to an ethnographic study of this school, and through interview extracts we see contradictions experienced by a white English-speaking teacher bringing a social justice orientation to work with student diversity. Engaging linguistic citizenship in classroom practice here required multiple negotiations – between the teacher’s personal ethical stance, dominant practices of the profession, and the institution’s interests.

Describing himself as ‘avidly interested in languages,’ Steve valued his students’ multilingual practices as accomplishments. Simultaneously, he observed that multilingual students ‘hide their non-English language. And their non-English-Anglo, culture, pretty much. As much as possible.’ Steve recognized racialization of multilingual students as a problem that threatens their self-identity, ‘It’s very complex for them, I think. About what face to show.’

Racial regimes constrain teachers’ abilities to make multilingual moves outside the classroom, including interfacing between the school and public. In his leadership position, Steve had long held plans for multilingual signage around campus that he had never realized. He identified the main obstacle to this move as concern around public perceptions of the school.

Cultural signs that you make physical around the school are things which could impact on you in being seen as a particular sort of school. And the head scarves are a classic example of that. And you could even say that the African girls themselves are a classic example of that. And the negativity, we have to deal with that from staff, students, parents, the outside world, you know, it impacts upon the sort of school we are. So once you start to put up something about languages. I mean you have enough problem with that.

Here, racial signifiers including hijab and skin color have generated a particular reputation for the school. Alluding to undercurrents of racism revealed in Australian politics and media, Steve indicated that he was caught within a set of complex dilemmas. First, at the institutional level, the school’s identity and reputation presents as welcoming of diversity. This was in conflict with its aspirational socio-economic identity within a broader society that continues to exhibit a coloniality of whiteness and monolingualism. He alluded to concerns from the school administration that visible representations of multilingualism might deter ‘white’ middle class student enrollment. Steve found himself trying to negotiate the interests of multilingual students, institutional pressures that racialize and denigrate them, and his own linguistic agency and ethos. Moreover, he recognized that teachers who contest dominant ideologies and practices can jeopardize their professional agency and secure employment. Fear of consequences for those who transgress their professional roles persuades teachers to give way to problematic structures.

The classroom, a space ‘from below’, remains more open to multilingual moves. Within their own classrooms, teachers can negotiate between the multilingual practices of students and the homogenizing regimes of education. Believing that ‘culture and language and diversity’ can be ‘educationally powerful and rewarding,’ Steve sought to incorporate students’ multilingual practices into his Drama class, encouraging students to rework their parts in the class production of a Shakespearean play into their home languages. He was buoyed by the choice of one student, Victoria, to perform in her first language, Dinka (French, 2016); although initially disappointed when a Cantonese speaking student, Molly, made a different decision. ‘I wanted her to respond in Cantonese, but she, she did it in English.’

Steve recognized the different linguistic agency and citizenship enacted by individual students. He came to understand Molly’s choice of English as carefully considered, strategically aligned to her social and academic ambitions. While he characterized Victoria’s Dinka performance as ‘a crowning glory’, he tempered this triumph with his concern about the prevailing assessment regimes: ‘Well the problem is, at the end of the day, we assess in English. What else can you do?’ He was concerned that multilingualism in assessment constituted ‘alternative’ practices that posed ‘a huge risk’ to students’ high-stakes secondary school-exit credentials. Therefore, multilingual moves would necessarily remain low stakes, as ‘any mucking around is only going to be marginal’. Contending with the material reality of mainstream assessment regimes discouraged Steve from repeating experimental responses to student multilingualism in his classes.

When teachers and students negotiate language, they also negotiate race, class, school aspirations, systemic ideologies and habitus. Here, Steve, in close geographic proximity to the educational panopticon, succumbs to the ‘inevitability’ and coloniality of English in Australia as he negotiates with students and wider systemic norms. Elsewhere, in contexts of considerable multilinguality and centralized education systems, teachers closest to the educational authority and its architecture of surveillance exhibit heightened awareness of the consequences of resisting monolingual regimes. Those in decentralized systems further from ‘centers’ of control, on the other hand, may feel sufficiently emboldened to exercise their own linguistic agency and citizenship (e.g., Armitage, 2022). More hopefully and beyond easy reach of education authorities, we now adjust our gaze to two teachers in remote Australia where they are in a sensitive ‘dance’ of conversation, reciprocity, and solidarity.

Conversation - the center moves

The final multilingual move we draw attention to here, resonating with Maturana and Varela’s (1987) emphasis on generosity (love and reciprocity), is conversation. In an educational setting these conversations can reflect unequal relations between non-Indigenous and First Nations peoples, however we present an example of how roles can be adopted to support border-crossing conversation in a remote Australian school, established for the children of Anangu families. Geographic and linguistic borders have different meanings in the spaces in which multilingual Anangu families have long lived and traveled, including in expansive multilingual connections in Pitjantjatjara, Ngaanyatjarra, and other Aboriginal languages through family connections (see Oliver et al., 2021, p. 139). In this example, a White teacher relinquishes space and authority to an Anangu (First Nations) educator whose own agency prevails in choices of language and translation, and in her linguistic and pedagogical authority to coordinate transknowledging (Armitage, 2022).

Historically, language policies on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands have shifted from vernacular education in mission schools, to bilingual education in government schools, and now to an English-only (EMI) system. Without the language skills of the Anangu Educators in any school on the APY Lands, Anangu forms of knowledge and local multilingual practices of expressing this knowledge would be eclipsed. External assessment regimes marginalize student and community knowledge, removing opportunities to exhibit cultural and linguistic ‘capital’ through standardized tests in English that are the only systemic measures of success (Armitage, 2022; Wigglesworth et al., 2011). Anangu children at school are put in a position where they must simultaneously learn English and the Australian Curriculum content through English. Therefore, there is only space for ‘meaning making’ in the formal (English) literacy curriculum and as a tool when applied only to English language texts. This reproduces regimes of ‘standardization’ that characterize Western education (Spillman, 2017). The reality of language use in Anangu classrooms, however, is that the Piranpa teacher’s presence in the room is at times the only catalyst for students to communicate in English. An Anangu school can therefore never really be an English-only school, because the majority of students and educators speak Pitjantjatjara throughout the day and in most interactions. From a southern or decolonial perspective, EMI represents the Piranpa teachers’ inabilities to speak, read, write, and understand Pitjantjatjara at a level required to teach curriculum content.

In this example, two teachers working in the same classroom collaborate to develop the teaching of Pitjantjatjara through a malparara approach. Malpa is a friend and rara is the suffix to show pairs, describing ‘a person together with a companion or friend’ (Goddard, 2006, p. 67), where two friends accompany each other in teaching and learning activities in the classroom and on Country.

The Piranpa teacher in the secondary classroom has formal teaching qualifications and extensive experience working in Anangu schools, however, the focus here is the approach of Emily, who is a highly experienced Anangu Educator (AE), much respected in her family and community. Emily had some formal training through an earlier Anangu Teacher Education Program (AnTEP). Her Anangu colleagues have selected her to teach Pitjantjatjara at the school. Emily responds to her own perceptions of the learning needs of students by bringing her experience and training into her classroom work, partly from AnTEP, and more recently through her ongoing involvement in an English to Pitjantjatjara Bible translation project.

Working in a multilingual partnership is essential in this very remote EMI school, with each partner having preferred linguistic repertoires, while sharing a long-standing understanding of classroom routines and goals of each teaching activity. Emily focussed on creating opportunities for students’ use of languages in the classroom and ensured that reading and writing is learnt in Pitjantjatjara for at least a short part of the morning. At Emily’s suggestion, encouraged and taken up by the Piranpa malpa, students co-construct a simple bilingual text with their teachers in the secondary class each morning. Emily often re-words sentences to ensure that complex language structures and vocabulary in Pitjantjatjara go beyond the everyday conversational usage of students. This is extended into a writing activity where students create stories of their own with a porous sense of language depending on the student-author’s choices. The following recorded conversation serves as an example of a student’s writing as explained by Emily:

Paluru [He] he’s writing a sentence in Pitjantjatjara. When he comes back to Kalka, he’s using this ‘mala’ returning. Paluru [He] was in Alice Springs and he came back, mala . (Armitage, 2022, recorded conversation)

The malparara approach provides a valuable way of rethinking relations of knowledge and language in multilingual moves outside the orbit of the metropole, where English does not in fact take center stage, despite assumptions of Australia’s Anglocentric identity. The center of this world is Anangu land and Anangu languages, redirecting the locus for knowledge production to a different center. This is one in which solidarities between Anangu Educators and Piranpa teachers in conversation disrupt the logic of the administrative technologies of a northern-framed Australian center.

Conclusion

Instead of assuming an epistemological break produced by translanguaging, we look to southern multilingual border crossings as they are negotiated locally and as sites of struggle for linguistic citizenship involving multiple language regimes. North-south is one way of expressing global power imbalances, but we recognize there are others that attend to different histories, such as east and west or center and periphery, with alternative perspectives of crossing/traversing borders (see, for example, Anzaldúa, 1987). In each of the very different settings we illustrate, pluriversality, knowledge exchange (transknowledging), linguistic (multilingual) citizenship, and reciprocity are the bedrock of southern multilingualisms (Heugh, 2017, 2021). Together they flow as a tributary that joins the river of decolonial philosophy and praxis that delinks from neo- and post-colonial methodologies (Heugh et al., 2021).

Just as English is omnipresent in most literature on translanguaging, whether at the local or societal level, English has a strong presence in the examples we illustrate. It is tangible in layering over and obscuring local ecologies of language. It appears as part of, and apart from, each instantiation of multilingualism – intersecting with and sustaining coloniality, or its reproduction. What we witness are the multiple moves that students and teachers make – ordinary horizontal moves of conviviality, and vertical moves that break through linguistic boundaries that have been erected for purposes of exclusion (Heugh, 2022). Mostly, linguistic boundaries reflect and are entwined in divisions along lines of socio-political, faith-based or racial inequalities. These we notice in the more obvious moves of contestation in Brazil and attempted negotiation in urban Australia. The most powerful practices of linguistic citizenship are those that push through and subvert the vertical boundaries between or within languages, illustrated through moves of transgression in South Africa, and alongside contestation in Brazil.

We shift the gaze on linguistic crossings to citizens who claim their own linguistic agency, recognize co-existence, and communal responsibility, whether this is through contestation, subversive transgression, negotiation or conversation, and who navigate both horizontal and vertical moves in multilingualism. Some of our citizens demonstrate fearless linguistic agency, rejecting positionings from without (illustrated in the example from Brazil). At some points, our agents strategically ignore language regimes of education systems at odds with the multilingual reality of students, and later turn the tables on students to achieve compliance. At times a teacher’s linguistic agency may appear as too tentative and weak when overwhelmed through a coercive authoritarian regime uncomfortable with diversity (urban Australia). Perhaps this points to the limits to which some may be able as individuals to dare. We also find the unexpected, exchanging of roles and power between two teachers in a remote Anangu classroom. This is a comfortable example of co-existence, reciprocity, and conversation of generosity – away from the glare of the panopticon.

We have tried to capture some of the nuances of these crossings as part of agentic practices of linguistic citizenship as moves of southern multilingualisms. Rather than merely unknowing or knowing subjects, we see differently positioned teachers, students, and communities as undertaking complex work at the edges of institutional and linguistic hierarchies that are fruits of colonialism. Strategic construction of agency through local relations of multilingual solidarity is a reminder to researchers that our own role is not to propose a universal and normative model of linguistic crossing or amalgamation, nor to assume that the effects of linguistic ideologies and practices are stable, predictable or necessarily transferable (see, also, Lau, 2020). The considerations here can usefully contribute to programs of research on teacher-researcher collaborations (see, for example, Shepard-Carey & Tian, 2023, ftc.) and to teacher-student collaborations directed at multilingual awareness (see, for example, D’warte, 2020; French & Armitage, 2020; Mary & Young, 2017; Prasad & Lory, 2020).

The agentic multilingual moves highlighted here point to contestations and ambiguities in how multilingualism connects to social and pedagogical relations, and to how new strategies and categories emerge through political pressure and social change. A clear example of this is the linguistic category of pretoguês, emerging from the Brazilian Black rights movement as a way of describing a register of speech that formerly had no such identity. On a less promising note, in remote South Australia, withdrawal of federal funding for Indigenous teacher education in 2016 left grassroots multilingual teaching practices in a more precarious situation and subject to conservative monolingual regimes of federal and state authorities.

Researchers can play useful roles in bringing grassroots and subversive experiences into conversations of reciprocity that cross abyssal south-north divides where we tread carefully toward teacher education, we are mindful of universalist discourses that blunt teacher agency and autonomy, and scripts of the center that overwrite those of the margins. In this, Maturana and colleagues remind us of the importance of words, listening carefully, and conversing in communalities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).