Reframing Language in Education: Where Identity Takes Root 🌱
Speakers
Hosted by Sonder Edworthy, Teacher (Calgary Board of Education)
Co-hosts:
Sophia Thraya, PhD Student, Learning Sciences, University of Calgary
Liana Wolfleg, Siksiká Nation Knowledge Keeper, Education Assistant
Anita Chowdhury, Master’s Student, Learning Sciences, University of Calgary
Episode 2: How Translanguaging Helps Identity Grow in Decolonial Ways
This episode examines translanguaging as a subtle, yet significant, form of decolonial practice within educational and community contexts. The discussion illustrates how inviting the full range of communicative resources individuals carry – whether spoken, signed, gestured, or sensory (i.e., through Land-based materials, as soil) – disrupts, colonial assumptions that legitimate learning can only occur through a single standardized language. The co-hosts, re-conceptualize language as relational, embodied, and inseparable from identity, culture, and the Land, through recounting personal experiences and histories. The discussion centres on the natural and fluid nature of multilingual identities to fragmentation, and thus suppression of aspects of self, to fit a mono-linguistic cultural norm. That each individual’s linguistic repertoire is recognized as equitable, and a valid and critical source of shared knowledge-creation, learning, and pedagogy is emphasized.
“I often felt like I had to leave my languages at the door…”
–Sophia Thraya
A Listener’s Reflection
Being invited into this gathering of educators from diverse backgrounds – and hearing the challenges they have faced, yet worked through, to foster belonging for voices often unheard outside of a predominately monolingual culture – has been deeply illuminating. Their conversation prompted me to reflect upon the privilege of never having to question whether I was asked to subdue parts of my identity to fit a dominant language, culture, or way of knowing.
In education, inclusion and diversity become both more meaningful and informative only when understood through the lived experiences of community. Soil Camp offers such a space: a place where multilingual racialized children, Indigenous Knowledge Keepers, and educators meet on the Land and learn from one another. Here, language is not reduced to a tool for communication. It is something far more expansive – it is memory, relationship, and for many, a sense of home.
– Diana Larrivee (Librarian, Calgary Board of Education)
Produced with support from CJSW Campus & Community Radio (90.9 FM | cjsw.com)
Soil Camp 