The Learner Research Network

1. Literacy practices in contexts of social, educational, gender and sexual inequities

Literacy practices have moved away lately from the concept of homogenized objectives in educational contexts and have tried to promote literacies that attend to the needs of the groups and voices from the Global South. Besides, in a world of conservatisms, racism, prejudice, and social exclusion, where the difference at all levels is being condemned and ostracized, literacy practices should seek to develop critical consciousness, among the students and in teacher education, in relation to social injustices by bringing into the classroom discussions that reflect on social, educational, gender and sexual inequities. These literacy practices might include the reading of texts that deterritorialize languages, identities, and cultures, question what legitimate knowledge is, and use the critical literacy approach to develop a consciousness of how meaning-making processes make us “read the word and read the world” (Freire, 1996). Moreover, literacy practices should develop a critical intercultural (Walsh, 2010) education that questions dominant beliefs, refuses naive ways of understanding reality, and promotes discussions on diversity, marginalization of minoritized communities and cultures, and issues of social justice and education. Being conscious of the social locus (Monte-Mór, 2010) the identity occupies, while driving this identity to processes of identity crisis through encounters with different epistemic systems by adopting a critical decolonizing view of interculturality, might make emerge the oppression, domination, and exclusion of certain bodies from social structures and institutions. This Parallel Session seeks to promote these discussions and research on the topic.

2. The epistemologies of the South and the decolonial turn in critical literacy

Given the general (trans)national scenario with violence and atrocities perpetrated against innocent people, fauna, and flora, rediscussing literacies, neoliberalism, and post-pandemic policies appears to be an imperative, not an option. In the context of Latin America, Quijano (2007) argues that the effects of the two axes of Eurocentrism have haunted people’s lives until today: coloniality and modernity. In the first case, mainly indigenous people and African slaves were considered to be non-humans by the colonizers, generating a geocultural stratified hierarchy. In the second case, these subalternate people’s knowledge and intersubjectivity were seen as irrational and, hence, favored a type of workforce to produce the logic of capitalism. Criticizing this kind of social apartheid, Veronelli (2021) contends that the coloniality of language reduced such racialized population’s potential for interpretation and meaning-making to simple communication, also erasing their religions. Such kind of apartheid was used as linguistic and epistemic strategies, such as monolingual, which places the other not as an active interlocutor, capable of creating and renegotiating complex meanings. Yet, the question of racialization needs to be intersected with ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, age, geographical origin, spirituality, (dis)ability, among other aspects, if one’s interest is to complicate the decolonial turn. Amefricanas and ameríndias in Brazil (Gonzales, 2011), for example, have struggled for spaces of participation resisting patriarchal regimes, while Lugones (2008) reclaims the intersectionality among race, class, gender and sexuality crisscrossed by the discussion of women of color and men, both as targets and accomplices of violent domination and exploitation. It has been observed that such logics has prevailed in many world contexts redrawing the abyssal lines (Santos, 2018). On one side of the line, the white, heterosexual, Christian, and upper middle-class elite in the zone of being (Fanon, 2008) and on the other, those people who do not fit such invented categories, allocated in the zone of non-being (Fanon, 2008). Contrary to this invention, but not disregarding it, the epistemologies of the South (Santos, 2018) bring to the fore the ecology of knowledges to include and legitimize the invisible minoritized people’s language, science, and ways of resisting and reexisting. For this incomplete end, new intercultural translations are called for. Counter-hegemonic discourses, post-abyssal or non-extrativistic methodologies and a revision of ontoepistemologies from the perspectives of the subalternized groups are starting points, however, they cannot be an end in themselves. To face this abyssal exclusion, counter-hegemonic globalization requires more understandings of non-western education. Far from being complete and a one-size-fits-all answer to respond to the increasing ontoepistemological diversity, critical literacy (Freire, 2005, Luke, 2019, Monte Mór, 2019, to mention a few examples) involves learning from the pluriversal forms of knowledge, beyond academic ones, from sustained and diverse social movements, from non-totalitarian language policies, curriculum design and teacher education. Critical literacy teachers can exercise their own capacity to cross boundaries, destabilize forces and reconfigure participation of the vast majority of the students, who have been marginalized, by means of teaching them to problematize their own and the others’ thinking, seeing, feelings, doing and reconfigure the collective good, with conceptions, strategies, and political tools, avoiding the risk of reproducing multiple inequities.

3. Languages and cultures in contexts of complexity and pluriversality.

In times of all sorts of crises, it is imperative that Critical Education and contemporary Critical Applied Linguistics assertively respond to the challenges put forward by this new social landscape. Recent concepts of literacy research and practice have had very favorable acceptance by some and reluctance by others. However, it is not hard to understand that recent literacies projects / proposals seek to problematize literacies and their relations with language education in multifaceted and dialogical, and agonistic ways, reviewing the dichotomies built by the paradigms of modernity (regulation vs emancipation, science vs non-science, inferiority vs superiority, us vs them). New moves from a perspective of universality toward a perspective of pluriversality, from hegemony to complexity, from modernity toward transmodernity, have emerged. Besides promoting debates and awareness in relation to border thinking, color blindness, and diverse bodies, pluriversalities have enabled opportunities for research based on multiple knowledges reflecting the multiple global forces and options. This session proposes to focus on literacies/multiliteracies educational proposals through a decolonial lens, thus inviting researchers to reflect on the potentialities and limitations of the following themes: teacher language education, language/literacy conceptualizations, and language/literacy education in their intrinsic relations to political, cultural, ideological, and technological aspects.

4. Algorithms, digital colonialism and the platformization of educational media

This session aims to bring together investigations on digital technologies and their implications for education. Additionally, it focuses on emerging aspects such as the dynamics of teaching and learning in and through digital technologies considering the functioning of algorithms and the platformization of educational media and the internet. This session welcomes theoretical and empirical contributions that analyze the implications of algorithms and platformization, taking the scenario of digital colonialism into account.

5. Decolonial digital literacies

This session aims to bring together investigations on digital literacies and their connection to decolonial practices, considering the implications of digital colonialism for education and life in general. Therefore, it focuses on emerging aspects such as the digital spaces of teaching and learning in and through digital technologies considering the structure, functioning, and use of personal data on the internet. The session welcomes theoretical and empirical contributions that analyze the implications of colonial digital practices and discuss possibilities for the development of decolonial digital literacies.

6. New literacies, platforms, environments, materials, and critical perspectives

New literacies, together with platforms and digital environments have marked the digital turn that promises that knowledge has the potential of becoming ubiquitous (COPE; KALANTZIS, 2009). Moreover, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the educational realities experienced around the world had to change and adopt digital technologies to continue educating students. After all, the common sense says that “education cannot stop”. But it became evident that while digitality has advanced and invaded various aspects of our lives, in relation to the educational area, it has not yet left the “old wine in new bottles” model. Moreover, public educational organizations, such as SEDUC-SP, the Digital School Bureau of São Paulo State, have established partnerships with Google and Microsoft showing the neoliberal tendencies on a state level as well. This privatization of education movement that promotes the selling and buying of educational services was given a boost during the pandemic. Besides, the tools offered by these technology businesses promote exchanges based on business and not educational environments. We believe that an education that, in principle, keeps bodies separated, behind the screens, needs to recover other aspects that make us human: our naive curiosity that has the potential to become epistemological (FREIRE, 1996, p. 86), the development of practices of an ecology of knowledges (Sousa Santos, 2012) that “are based on the logic of collaboration, sharing and experimentation, instead of the centrality and norm in the construction of knowledge under the paradigm of modernity” (DUBOC, 2015, p. 667) and, finally, democratic participation. Thus, this Parallel Session aims at gathering together theoretical or empirical research, completed or ongoing, focused on critical perspectives on new literacies, platforms, environments and materials articulated with critical language education practices and proposals.

7. Changes in post-covid higher education: risks and opportunities

The COVID-19 crisis and all its complexities and disparities have arisen unprecedented challenges within a neoconservative and neoliberal governance. The breakout of the COVID-19 pandemic in the beginning of the year 2020 has undeniably made us ponder whether the world has changed for the better or for the worse. Nevertheless, for Sousa Santos (2020, p. 5), when one thinks about the concept of crisis, one needs to acknowledge that “The current pandemic is not a crisis condition clearly opposed to a condition of normality”. The author goes on to argue that “Since the 80s - as neoliberalism imposed itself as the capitalist prevailing version and as the latter became more and more subjected to the logic of the financial sector, the world has witnessed a perennial crisis situation”. By questioning the abyssal lines (Sousa Santos, 2007) imbued and naturalized by the projects of Modernity and Humanism, this session intends to discuss the different readings posed by “the virus”: has nature “invaded” “this side” of modernity? Has nature responded to the idiosyncrasies of modernity by problematizing the abyssal lines of social class differences – the rich and the poor; white supremacy and black genocide? Do procedural micropolitics have the potential to construct “new modes of subjectivity” (Guattari; Rolnik, 1996, p. 30) and work on a revisited literacy/ pedagogy and an epistemic turn in the notions of “crisis”?

8. Towards critical teacher education

Current conceptions of language are grounded on situated, social, cultural, and ideological practices, which are heteroglossic in nature. Such sociohistorical situatedness assumes that language is performed instead of pre-formed or preordained, according to Volóchinov (2017). In order to perform language, its users/creators attribute meanings to texts/events, under erasure, as Derrida (1997) puts it, through establishing open dialogues with their authors and participants from localized perspectives.This occurs with the complex entanglement of the reader’s and the author’s different contexts and the texts/events in themselves. In this vein, meanings are generated by the recognition, contestation and transformation of the author’s discursive background in face of the reader’s social place and locus of enunciation. Both the reader’s and the author’s experiences and abilities are traversed by sociohistorical collective ontoepistemologies. Language, from this perspective, functions as a political tool to transform people’s reality while people also change language. Emphasis is given on the reader’s intersubjectivity, socially produced in language, and as a site to enhance his/her agential critique and strategic modes to transgress taken-from-granted world views and enactment in it. Arguably, one of the main tenets of language teacher education is the constant struggle for the circulation of the power-knowledge nexus to reinscribe expanded literacies. Pluralized literacies mean social practices (Street, 1984, among others) and larger phenomena, bringing to the scene of enactment the minorities with/from/for whom Freire (2005) mobilized pedagogies towards the transformation of their own social conditions for the better. Freirean literacy education departures from “reading the world and the word” (Freire, 2005) entrenched in the permanent reconstruction of the relationship between the self and the other, through self(critical) reflexivity, profound respect, and empathy for popular culture, knowledge, and ways of coexisting within differences in constructive and positive mode. Another key point in critical literacy is to seek to understand the social conflicts via critical comprehension, helping to empower the oppressive people to recognize, resist and undermine the oppressors’ dominant discourses and actions, bearing in mind that all of these epistemic places are subject to changes and paradoxes. Thus, politicized education has been a challenge, which presupposes working together with the schools, universities, and local communities, valorizing children, women, the disabled, indigenous, and peasants’ voices, experience, knowledge, spirituality, and agency towards sulear, that is, an orientation to reconstruct language-society on the basis of esperançar, an ecological and participatory political view of education.

9. Resisting racism through critical language education

Decolonial studies on language education look forward to eliminating historical epistemic racism (Grosfoguel, 2016), and the other way around, welcoming the different knowledge born, come, and produced in the processes of struggling that local groups in the Global South undertake within their fights against patriarchy, capitalism, racism, and colonialism (Sousa Santos, 2019). Recently, conservative movements have re-emerged in societies all over the globe to encourage discriminatory speeches and prejudiced practices, representative of an explicit attempt to revoke rights conquered by blacks, indigenous peoples, LGBTQIA+, and women, in order to restore privileges of the historical oppressors. Thus, this Parallel Session Work Group aims at gathering theoretical or empirical research, completed or ongoing, focused on strengthening strategic thinking, discussing the meanings of resistance, agency, and social justice, articulated with critical language education practices and proposals.

10. From multiliteracies to transpositions: dynamics of meanings in the digital media age

The distribution of digital technologies around the world expands the possibilities of participation in contemporary forms of meaning-making, that is, through digital media other/new social forms and practices are activated. One of the main vehicles of the expansion of these social practices of communication mediated by the digital is the cell phone. Through a small device with high computing power, one can create meaning multimodally through, for example, writing, video, sounds, and images. The initial argument of the pedagogy of multiliteracies (1996), according to which it was necessary to revise the pedagogy of literacy due to the incidence of digital information and communication technologies in societies, remains valid, but to what extent is thinking in terms of literacies, langue, and language enough to recognize, analyze, and intervene in the forms of representation and communication of knowledge mediated by the digital? We understand that it is in this perspective that Cope and Kalantzis (Cope; Kalantzis, 2020; Kalantzis; Cope, 2020) propose a reflection on the modes of transposition between the forms that meanings can assume in contemporaneity. The very socio-historical conditions of digital societies lead us to make use of resources (computers, cell phones, themselves results of historical processes) that we use to think, interact, and communicate. According to Cope and Kalantzis (2020, p. 40), "these forms of meaning are kinds of practical action, the shape of which is determined by the materiality of their media." Moreover, it is also important to take into consideration how these resources intersect with other "forms" of meaning-making proposed by the authors, in particular the "object," the "body," and the "space," while also incorporating reflections from other current fields of discussion, such as new materialism and posthumanism. Based on this understanding, we can broaden our way of thinking about the current media scenario, beyond the literacies associated with language.