Anti-discriminatory Practices in/for Language in Teacher Education
摘要
In this chapter, Andrés Valencia showcases an iterative performance staged by preservice teachers in a foreign language teacher education program in a public university in Colombia to confront the deep chauvinism and structural discrimination against women in the province of Valle del Cauca. Specifically, the chapter interrogates and denounces the femicides in the province. Drawing from a politics of cultural production and an anti-discriminatory framework, the chapter advances a twofold argument: (1) Enacting anti-discriminatory cultural production projects implies a pedagogical-ontological movement to overcome the teacher-student divide, especially to transform the teacher into a real learner, the owner of neither episteme nor techne. (2) Anti-discriminatory practices involve a movement from a curricular view of education (individual learning experiences) to a pedagogical one (collective, mutually shaping experiences), to overcome what’s known as the “economy of the gift” and the “pedagogy of gifting” whereby teachers aim to “politicize” students by engaging hot topics like gender violence, embodiment, or sexual identities in their courses yet without disclosing their identifications. Methodologically, it departs from the principles of participatory action research approach. Findings are presented in dialogue with the five orders of cultural production: the symbolic, material, spatiotemporal, relational, and affective orders. In tandem, they explain how places coproduce identities; they expound on how students developed new understandings of their selves and others; they interrogate how social constructs such as gender(ized) identities operate in a language teacher education program.