Classrooms are a place for learning, not for play. Teachers teach; students learn.

Actually, Professor Alison Phipps disagrees.

Alison gave an impassioned talk titled “Decolonising Multilingualism: Opacity; Justice; Joy” at Decolonising Language Studies Symposium II—a forum where scholars from a range of disciplines discuss how to decolonise the curriculum in language studies and beyond.

This post is the second part of a series where we summarise speakers’ main ideas from the symposium, which was organised by Dr Jelena Ćalić and Dr Eszter Tarsoly on behalf of PROLang.

Alison, who is Professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies at the University of Glasgow, focused on how learning new languages can be an opportunity for expressions of joy and vulnerability – if classrooms and research settings were rethought to support such emotions.

Put on a show in a new language  

On a course Alison once taught on German popular culture, she told the students that they would have to put on a play at the end of the course in German.

Students, whether studying Marx or feminist theory, eagerly prepared for the final performance through learning how to embody characters from German novels and films.

The pleasure of embodying a character and of coming together to create something was not just highly motivating, but also “great fun.” As Alison tells the story:

“They would raid all the charity shops… and they would dress up, and then they would come and perform. What I discovered they were doing through performing in the language, with the theoretical concepts, dressing up, wearing the lipstick, putting the hair up, all that adrenaline — it meant that they were taking it really seriously, they were wrapping it around, they were clothing their studies.

They were caring for [their studies] in a way that we rarely ask our students to care for their studies… It was a much wider human sense of the work.”

The students did so well that the external examiner suggested that some research should be conducted into the reasons behind their grades. In their oral exams, students talked excitedly about how much fun it was to perform and how regular rehearsal helped to structure their language learning through repetition. Some would even launch into snippets of their performances. Alison sums the experience up as follows:

“It was participatory. The whole class shared it. They really felt it was their work overall.”

Make a fool of yourself  

Another one of Alison’s stories described her volunteer work at a detention centre, where she was recruited to help translate for people housed for deportation.

To her dismay, she realised that “though I was a professor of languages… my languages were useless.” She was “way too fluent in too many colonial languages and European languages… and here I was, sitting in front of people who spoke Pashtu, who spoke Arabic…”

Instead of translating or teaching, Alison found herself becoming a student instead:

“The young guys would teach me to speak their languages and they would be helpless with laughter, because here is a professor of languages who didn’t even know their language existed, and in that moment, there was an equalising… The dignity of language was restored to a group of people utterly stripped of their dignity, and they were laughing at me. I was the learner, and I was stumbling.”

Alison says that part of the work of decolonisation is to “centre the understanding and knowledges of the communities that you are with, and this is a fundamental decolonising move.”

She adds:

“All the things I’d learned about ethnography, and language learning, and performance… is that all of them require you to make a fool of yourself. All of them require you to know nothing. All of them require you to make many, many, many mistakes. A central concept in ethnography is naïveté, the ethnographic naivety: you do not know, you are not an expert, you decentre yourself.

It’s a move that’s vital to interculturality. We are required to decentre ourselves in any intercultural framework to be able to understand from the perspective of others, and so I realised that this decentring might also be useful in the [detention] centre.”

Recognise that language is a gift

Alison recounts other stories, working in places like Ghana or the Gaza Strip where she felt — through experiences of incompetence and inarticulation — how we rely on others to speak for us, or to teach us how to speak.

She says that part of the work of decolonising the curriculum is:

“The attempt by one human being to have a go, to render themselves vulnerable, to laugh at themselves and be laughed at, to stumble through that pronunciation and to be in a place where a new set of relationships might be made and made collectively…

Because there isn’t a word I speak that I haven’t been given by other people, and if I expand that to the context of language learning and language education, then that, my friends, is how I believe we […] find what might be found when we improvise and make things together.”

Alison rounds up her talk by speaking about how she wants to create spaces that are “responsive to dignity, that are fun, and that will allow us collectively to hold that bowl of tears in ways which are safe and ethical and expand a space for joy.”

Alison’s talk was followed by Victoria Odeniyi’s reflections on the challenges and opportunities of embedding research findings into institutional practice: how a university might say things like, “not now, the staff might become confused”, or “this doesn’t align with university policy and standards”, and how we might react to that in turn.

Want to read about Victoria’s presentation? Keep an eye out for the third part of our blog post series, featuring summaries of speakers’ key points, by subscribing to our blog (link on the right) or following us on Twitter.

Watch Alison Phipps’s full talk here.

You can also read an earlier post in the blog series here:

• Let’s re-centre multilingual communities in our classrooms and research: a summary of Prof. Li Wei’s talk

This symposium was organised by Dr Jelena Ćalić and Dr Eszter Tarsoly on behalf of the PROLang (Policy, Research and Outreach for Language-based area studies) Research Group in collaboration with UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, with the support of CHE’s Education Enhancement Grant. This post was written by Kellynn Wee.