Negotiating a diverse orientation to critical pedagogies: an interview with Suresh Canagarajah

ABSTRACT

This article draws on the Language Learning Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence Program 2012 thanks to which Dr. Suresh Canagarajah from Pennsylvania State University lectured at Universidad de La Plata in Argentina in May of that year. He delivered a talk open to language teachers, students and the community in general and also taught a postgraduate seminar at the School of Humanities and Sciences of Education. He kindly agreed to be interviewed by me after the event was over and this article presents this interview.

KEYWORDS:

• Language education
• intercultural and cosmopolitan citizenship
• political dimensions
• critical pedagogies
• English language teaching

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Anahí Pesci, Mariela Riva and María Fernanda Crespi for transcribing this interview. I am also sincerely grateful to Suresh Canagarajah for his intellectual generosity and for the time and effort he has devoted to helping me with this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Universidad Nacional de La Plata and CONICET [H783 and PIP CONICET 0281].

Notes on contributors

Melina Porto

Melina Porto is a researcher at the National Research Council (CONICET) in Argentina, Professor at Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP) (Argentina) and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of East Anglia (2019–2021). She was Visiting Academic at the University of East Anglia from 2012 to 2018. She holds an MA ELT (Essex University, thesis supervised by Henry Widdowson), a PhD in Sciences of Education (UNLP, thesis supervised by Miguel Montezanti and Michael Byram) and a posdoctoral degree in Humanities and Social Sciences (Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina). Her research addresses the intercultural dimension of English language teaching and intercultural citizenship education in the foreign language classroom.