Infusing critical pedagogy in language-skill classrooms: A critical autoethnography of a teacher of color as a praxis of decolonization
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33474/j-reall.v7i2.25210Keywords:
critical pedagogy, decolonization, English language skills, Indonesia, pedagogical praxisAbstract
This study responds to concerns about the scarcity of teaching materials (and methods) because a classic tenet of critical pedagogy often discourages English teachers from applying the philosophy. In this critical autoethnography, the author presents his lived experience as an English student and teacher-educator of color in Indonesia, a multilingual country, through eleven narratives focused on language-skill classrooms. The data were collected using the critical incident procedure and analyzed using content analysis. Through this study, the author found that English-language-skill classrooms are so positivist, prescriptive, and formalistic that they leave no room for knowledge-making activities, nor do they cultivate students’ critical thinking. Thus, the author proposes three teaching strategies to infuse critical pedagogy into English language-skill instruction: providing sociohistorical contexts, offering alternative narratives, and exposing various grammatical conventions of World Englishes. These teaching strategies are the author’s transformative praxis, believed to be applicable to teaching language-skill subjects in multilingual countries whose students’ first language is not English and in post-colonial countries where the trace of colonialism still influences educational practices. As a critical autoethnography, this study solely highlights the author’s experiences, and therefore the findings are not generalizable. This is the study’s main limitation. Yet, the author hopes this work provides verisimilitude that resonates with other English students, teachers, and teacher-educators, so that more autoethnographic work in the same vein can manifest.
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