‘Our language is our power’: reclaiming languages, reframing identities through countertexts and decolonial practices across the global divide

Valdiviezo L.; Eid L.; Jee W.; Rodríguez L. · Language Awareness (2025) · DOI: 10.1080/09658416.2025.2547842

Resumen

Language practices and pedagogies within multilingual K-20 classrooms in Peru, Egypt and the North East USA constitute the focal point for our analysis of texts and countertexts as essential tools for unsettling entrenched educational inequities. Our paper integrates three qualitative and comparative ethnographic case studies where we utilize a decolonial framework to comparatively interrogate how language mediates identity, agency, and power across Indigenous bilingual classrooms, heritage language schools, and community spaces. Our observations of practice and semi-structured and informal interviews with educators, students and parents from Indigenous and minoritized linguistic backgrounds reveal profound ideological overlaps that propel education actors to contest linguistic dominance and revitalize suppressed ethnocultural and linguistic identities. In the heritage language schools, countertexts challenge the commodification of languages and deficit views prevalent in Global North narratives, valorizing linguistic and cultural investments for identity security in a racially stratified society. Simultaneously, in the Global South, the preferential treatment of foreign and dominant languages in educational curricula perpetuates colonial legacies by marginalizing local languages, cultures, and identities. Our analysis illuminates pedagogies that disrupt colonial legacies and racialized structures, thus contributing to envisioning decolonial, antiracist, and justice-oriented pedagogical praxis.