Emancipatory and critical language education: a plea for translingual possible selves and worlds

ABSTRACT

Language is the main resource for meaningful action, including the very formation of selves and psychosocial identities, shaped by practical norms, beliefs, and values. Thus, language education constitutes one of the most powerful means for both social reproduction and social production and ideological maintenance and utopian innovation. In this paper, we attempt to emphasise the invaluable psychosocial, political, economic, and cultural function of language education in order to propose a critical view of the current transition from the monolingual to a multilingual paradigm. We maintain that multilingual approaches tend to serve the neoliberal framework and reproduce its systemic inequalities. Therefore, we argue in favour of emancipatory multilingual practices that could embody a translingual pedagogy capable of promoting the development of capabilities, the recognition of otherness, and the cultivation of diversity. Rooted in critical theory, namely in Foucault’s notion of subjectification and Freire’s view of conscientisation, an emancipatory translingual pedagogy would enable and empower every learner to synthesise a contextually creative field of new semantic and pragmatic relationships. Critical language education would enhance the ethos of biophilia that fosters what we term the poetics of communality and selfhood, that is to say, the proactive commitment to expanding symbolic and existential novelty.

KEYWORDS:

• Capabilities approach
• emancipation
• Foucault
• Freire
• globalisation
• language education
• Multilingualism
• philosophy of education
• Translingualism
• utopia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Medical Research Council: [Grant Number xxxx, xxxx].

Notes on contributors

Maria Formosinho

Maria Formosinho has graduated in Philosophy (Coimbra University, Portugal), obtained a DEA in Education (Geneva University, Switzerland), a DEA in Linguistics (Paris/Sorbonne University), and a PhD in Educational Psychology (Coimbra University). She was a full professor at the Faculty of Psychology and Sciences of Education at Coimbra University. Presently, she is a senior researcher at CEIS/20 (Coimbra University) and teaches Education at Portucalense University (Porto). She has published widely in scientific journals of Education.

Paulo Jesus

Paulo Jesus BA in Philosophy and Theology (Portuguese Catholic University, 1995), MA in Psychology (Coimbra University, 2000), PhD in Philosophy and Social Sciences (EHESS, Paris, 2006), visiting scholar at NYU and Columbia (2007–2008), postdoc trainee at CREA (E. Polytechnique, Paris, 2009–2010). Currently researcher at Philosophy Center of the U. of Lisbon, Principal Investigator of the Research Project ‘Poetics of Selfhood: Memory, Imagination, and Narrativity’, and an assistant professor at Portucalense University (Porto, Portugal).

Carlos Reis

Carlos Reis, is currently an auxiliary professor at Coimbra University, has a PhD in Education Sciences, specialty in Philosophy of Education, a Master Degree in Education Sciences and a Graduation in Philosophy. He was director of the Superior School of Education, Communication and Sport, of Guarda Polytechnic Institute, where he achieved the rank of coordinator professor. Now he is an integrated member of The Coimbra’s University Centre for the 20th Century Interdisciplinary Studies – CEIS20. Among other subjects, he imparted Philosophy of Education, History of Education, Epistemology and Educational Innovation in Education Sciences and Teacher Education in Graduation, Master as well as in PhD programmes and was supervisor of Teachers’ Internships for 23 years. He has been organising international conferences and belongs to the board of several scientific journals.