Translanguaging as a Decolonising Approach: Students' Perspectives Towards Integrating Indigenous Epistemology into Asian Language Teaching
Date: Monday, October 24th, 2022, 4:00 PM
Location: Through Zoom
Watch: Translanguaging as a Decolonising Approach
Lecture Abstract
In this presentation, I will talk about a recent a curriculum transformation project
to acknowledge the equal status of mātauranga Māori or the Indigenous knowledge of
Māori people in our teaching and research in Aotearoa New Zealand. Specifically, I
examine how translanguaging is used as a methodological strategy for decolonising
the curriculum of an Asian language programme. It aims to understand students’ perspectives
on integrating Indigenous epistemology in curriculum development and assessment task
design. Data collection involved 155 university students from diverse cultures and
ethnic backgrounds in a beginner-level Mandarin Chinese course. Survey results show
that students broadly supportive nevertheless expressed reservations. Their digital
multimodal compositions show that they have enacted purposeful translanguaging to
enable the co-existence of different bodies of knowledge to form a holistic picture
of their identities and experience. Based on the findings, I suggest that Asian language
teaching adopts translanguaging as a decolonising approach to facilitate a pluriversal
epistemological stance and disrupt the colonial approaches to language teaching and
assessment.
About the Speaker: Danping Wang
Danping Wang is Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader in Chinese at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Danping has received the Teaching Excellence Award in 2014 and the Early Career Research Excellence Award in 2020. She has also been invited by the New Zealand Ministry of Education to serve on the Subject Expert Group to review the NCEA assessment standards for Mandarin Chinese. Danping is currently leading a Marsden Fund project supported by the Royal Society of New Zealand to explore new theoretical directions for Chinese language education through a decolonial perspective in Aotearoa New Zealand.
