Abstract

ORTIZ MEDINA, Janeth María; ARISMENDI GOMEZ, Fabio Alberto  and  LONDONO CEBALLOS, Paula Andrea. Teaching Foreign Languages at the U-Diversity: Exploring PathwaysTowards Decoloniality and Critical Interculturality. Íkala [online]. 2022, vol.27, n.3, pp.663-683.  Epub Nov 11, 2022. ISSN 0123-3432.  https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.ikala.v27n3a05.

This article presents the findings of the implementation of a teacher professional development course carried out with 17 teachers of English, French and other foreign languages at a public university in Colombia. Its objective was to explore critical interculturality by promoting reflection on teachers’ practices and the construction of more equitable teaching proposals in their classes. This initiative, framed as a qualitative action research study, was guided by the ideas of decolonial thinking and critical interculturality. Data collection methods included interviews, recordings of course sessions, foreign language lesson plans, and participant reflections. The findings reveal that teachers developed understandings of interculturality as a process of equity building, intimately linked to the negotiation of identities and traversed by power relations. These results suggest that professional development spaces for teachers can contribute to the construction of an intercultural project in the field of foreign languages that is respectful and consistent with colombian and Latin American realities, problems, and diversities, that strengthens the production of situated local knowledge, and that dialogues with knowledges from other regions.

Keywords : decoloniality; teacher professional development; intercultural dialogue; foreign language teaching; critical interculturality.

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