Learning in translation: Developing a Language supportive pedagogy for social justice

The paper draws on the two-year Language Supportive Teaching and Textbooks research project (LSTT). This project developed a language supportive pedagogy and related teaching materials for Tanzanian secondary schools. Like... [ view full abstract ]

The paper draws on the two-year Language Supportive Teaching and Textbooks research project (LSTT). This project developed a language supportive pedagogy and related teaching materials for Tanzanian secondary schools.

Like many developing countries, Tanzanian secondary schools offer pupils a complex multilingual context for learning. This is particularly acute as students transition from Kiswahili medium primary schooling to English medium secondary schooling where they must simultaneously negotiate both subject and language learning.

The LSTT research project developed a pedagogic approach to language in secondary form 1 that not only makes subject learning more accessible, but also enables subject learning to support language development.

The paper argues that a linguistic focus for pedagogic development inevitably shifts the centre of control towards the local. This in enabled not only through its recognition of and response to genuine contextual need, but also through the inescapable relocation of pedagogic expertise from the western expert to the classroom bilingual teacher. As such, it offers a more engaged, more sustainable and more tangible approach to educational development.

Foregrounding the practices of pupils working with and multiple languages enables us to see that many classrooms are multilingual spaces where, in a very real sense, it is not one language or another, but translation itself that is the medium of learning. Recognizing this offers much hope for the development of social justice, precisely because the negotiated and unfinished nature of translation creates the potential for classroom knowledge to be articulating in new and more meaningful ways