Decoloniality

In a pursuit of a more critical education, in which students’ languages, cultures, and ways of being are valued, a significant number of researchers and educators globally draw on the Decolonial Turn. According to ^{Grosfoguel (2007)}, the decolonial turn lays on the argument that there is no single epistemic tradition nor universality; it questions the effect of colonization and challenges the supremacy of white communities. The decolonial turn aims to “epistemologically transcend, decolonize the Western canon and epistemology” (p. 211). Decoloniality, on the other hand, is a way of being, thinking, and doing that acknowledges unbalanced relations of power intertwined with globalization and coloniality, and strives to deconstruct them (^{Mignolo & Walsh, 2018}). As defined by ^{Hernández-Zamora (2019)}, “En términos simples, el pensamiento decolonial o pos-colonial no es otra cosa que el mundo visto desde la mirada de los otros colonizados, inferiorizados, silenciados, ignorados o negados” (p. 378). Decoloniality is, then, an unavoidable option to dismantle hegemonic power structures (^{Kumaravadivelu, 2016}). At its core, decoloniality strives to challenge colonial ways of thinking to recenter ethnic communities in the Global South: their existence, their languages, cultures, and their knowledges. This implies decentering Western ways of knowing as the only serious epistemic tradition from which knowledge is produced, thus centering local knowledges and perspectives as lenses necessary to read the world. Put differently, decoloniality validates the knowledges and experiences of marginalized groups that have historically resisted and suffered the impact of capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy (^{Santos, 2014b}; 2018).

To engage in this decolonial work, ^{Rivera Cusicanqui (2019)} warns us that “there can be no discourse of decolonization, no theory of decolonization, without a decolonizing practice” (p. 100). This implies the incorporation in the curriculum of other knowledges, ways of knowing, languages, and methods that challenge mainstream state-sanctioned standards for education. In addition, it requires an epistemological shift “to clear the way for new intercultural communication, for an interchange of experiences and meanings” (^{Quijano, 2007}, p. 177). This intercultural communication is not conceived as the mere contact between cultures or the uncritical learning about the Other (^{Walsh, 2009}) but as the continuous questioning of how some cultures, languages, and literacies came to be in power at the expense of others (^{Janks, 2000}) and how those relations of power can be disrupted; a disruption central to critical interculturality.

Critical Interculturality

Interculturality has long stopped being conceived as a mere encounter among cultures (^{CRIC, 2004}). Instead, it is an intentional, critical dialogue among cultures and languages, that questions and dismantles hierarchical relations. In this vein, critical interculturality becomes a political project committed to the achievement of a just society founded on respect and dialogue (^{Godenzzi, 2005}). It aims to eradicate imbalanced power relationships (^{Tubino, 2004}) and to interrogate our colonial understanding of race, language, ethnicity, gender, and culture within societies, both in and outside of school settings. Indeed, it contests discourses of anti-Indigeneity and anti-Blackness and the deficit views associated with those discourses (^{Alim & Paris, 2017}). In this sense, critical interculturality maps a path for the construction of a just society by making visible and strengthening the ways of being, knowing, and doing of those historically oppressed by coloniality.

The aims of critical interculturality are not new in the field of education. In fact, for some decades, scholars from the global south have advocated for the transformation of education, which, according to them, plays a significant role in perpetuating unequal relations. For instance, ^{Valenzuela (1999)} has called attention to the fact that students’ linguistic and cultural resources often find no place in the school setting. Similarly, ^{Tubino (2005)} has insisted that education can no longer be founded on the assimilation of minoritized communities into the dominant ones. However, this issue is not only a concern for scholars in the Global South. Several authors in the Global North have questioned the lack of incorporation of ethnic and cultural diversity in school curricula (^{Gay, 2002}; ^{Landson-Billings, 1995}) as well as the alienating nature of schooling (^{Ladson-Billings, 2014}). These authors contend that teaching would be more meaningful and effective “when ecological factors, such as prior experiences, community settings, cultural backgrounds, and ethnic identities of teachers and students are included in its implementation” (^{Gay, 2000}, p. 21).

Similarly, ^{Gay and Kirkland (2003)} underscore the need to include students’ linguistic identities in the classroom and to strive for education which results in students’ development of knowledge and skills necessary to become critical in the analysis of inequalities in their communities and to act upon them. Finally, ^{Alim & Paris (2017)} contend an education committed to social justice should ensure students’ access to dominant literacies and cultural practices while striving to foster and sustain their multicultural and multilingual repertoires. In this sense, language education, which has historically served the purposes of coloniality, is called to contribute to the recognition, respect, and sustenance of ancestral languages and cultures, even if through a colonial language such as English, as this can be used in the English classroom through the embracing of translanguaging.

Translanguaging

Due to its intimate relation with culture, foreign language teaching cannot be alien to the aims of critical interculturality. In fact, the field of ELT cannot continue to ignore that “Literacy education for multilingual students typically has focused on obligating them to use only the language practices authenticated by schools and school texts” (^{García & Kleifgen, 2019}, p. 8). But, can interculturality really be critical without encouraging students to use their linguistic repertoires and ways of communicating their knowledges and ways of being? Translanguaging proponents claim it cannot.

Just like the tenets of critical interculturality, the notion of translanguaging is not new. Initially introduced as “Lenguajear”/languaging” (^{Maturana & Varela, 1984}), translanguaging is a process in which interlocutors’ social, cognitive, historical factors, and lived experiences interact (^{García & Kleifgen, 2019}). It is not just the act of switching between two separate linguistic codes. Instead, it is the deployment of multiple semiotic resources, such as gestures, words, sounds, among others, that encompass social and cognitive processes, and make use of multimodal resources to communicate meaning (^{Kleifgen, 2013}; ^{Pennycook, 2017}). This approach to literacy development pushes the deficit view associated with “mixing” languages and transgresses the political and ideological boundaries that legitimize some languages and literacies over others (^{Canagarajah, 2014}; ^{Pennycook, 2017}). In other words, it invites language learners to leverage their full range of linguistic and semiotic repertoires to convey meaning. Furthermore, it disrupts theories of bilingualism and multilingualism which tend to ignore the racial and ethnic tensions in language learning, particularly those of multilingual learners from minoritized communities (^{Rosa & Flores, 2017}).

Although this approach to bi/multilingualism is beneficial for all language learners, regardless of their first language, it carries tremendous significance for speakers of ancestral languages who have historically been forced to leave their languages and cultures outside of the classroom door (^{Valenzuela, 1999}; ^{Mignolo, 2000}). As claimed by ^{García and Kleifgen (2019)} “Translanguaging decolonizes these understandings about language, literacy, and bilingualism and incorporates thinking from, and being/listening with, racialized/minoritized multilingual bodies” (p. 5). This decolonization is paramount in the field of ELT given that systematic schooling in dominant languages is implicated in the disappearance of local languages and cultures around the globe (Fishman, as cited in ^{Tochon, 2019}).

Decolonizing the English Classroom

In this section, we report our experiences when striving to decolonize our teaching practice, by drawing on the theories described above. After stating our positionality, we will provide a brief description of the context and participants in this teaching experience. We will then elaborate on our learnings and challenges during the planning stage and we will describe what we learned from the implementation of this English course. Finally, we will draw some conclusions and implications of this experience for the field of ELT.

Undoing Teaching and Learning Traditions in ELT

In the field of ELT, there has long been a tradition of separating and sequencing grammar notions and functions (^{Crystal, 1986}). This is how the present tense is often introduced and practiced before any other tense with English beginners. This simple present tense is expected to allow students to “describe” themselves and their surroundings. With it, teachers ensure that students maintain their learning within the boundaries of this tense to “avoid confusion” and to “practice enough” and “wait until they master this tense” and “are ready to learn another one”.

Although the rationale behind this sequential order of grammatical concepts has been challenged (^{DeGraff, 2001}; ^{Macedo, 2019}), still, nowadays, when students first come to an English class, all the linguistic notions and functions they will learn and practice are already identified. In fact, students’ attempts to communicate ideas about their communities’ or their own past experiences or aspirations for the future will often encounter teachers’ advice to wait until they get to a higher level, when they will learn to say that. In the context of this public university, this means waiting for at least one year to learn these needed grammar structures. This prescriptive use of language leads students to talk and write about their communities as if they were devoid of history. It also diminishes students’ possibilities to account for their political and historical existence and that of their communities.

This brief context summarizes the way we were taught as English learners and accounts for the way we were taught to teach English. The context also signals our first challenge when planning this space: undoing this long-held idea of what learning and teaching English should look like. That is, it shows our challenge to decolonize our teaching practices (^{Tochon, 2019}), so filled with restrictive pre-set grammar structures and vocabulary.

For us, decolonizing this practice did not mean leaving aside linguistic notions and functions, nor did it mean disregarding the acquisition of basic grammatical structures. This would have done a disservice to students, as they needed them to comply with the university requirement for graduation. Instead, this meant fostering organic grammar and vocabulary learning (^{Tochon, 2019}) in which learning English became a means for meaning making and students’ communication could take place not only in various tenses, but in whatever language students were able to express their ideas. It also implied anticipating certain grammatical structures and vocabulary, but also being ready to provide students with multiple linguistic resources in English, as they needed them. This unfixed curriculum created a sense of lack of control, which was necessary as we truly wanted students to express their unique experiences and those of their communities without feeling restricted by a grammar tense or by their emergent English knowledge.

Selecting Content Themes

Unsurprisingly, in English classes at this university, prescriptive grammatical structures were coupled with generic, supposedly “neutral” themes, such as daily routines and physical appearance. As evinced in previous research reports (^{Gutiérrez et al., 2021}; ^{Ortiz et al.,2019}), students from ethnic minoritized communities in this university often felt those themes did not represent them. In the previous research reports, they recounted that these classes did little to create spaces for them to talk about their communities and their ways of being. Similar concerns have been raised by scholars in the ELT field, who believe this trend treats languages and cultures as prepacked unchangeable chunks of knowledge (^{Tochon, 2019}). These scholars also critique the abundance of “multicultural” themes that revolve around depoliticized, stereotypical cultural features (^{Alarcon, 2007}).

Challenging this tradition in ELT became our next goal in this planning stage. In this process, we attempted to follow Freire’s suggestion of using generative themes in which the students explore topics that truly matter to them (^{Freire, 1998}). In our first version of this English course, we engaged students in conversations around identity, the hegemony of languages and knowledges, and resistance in their communities. These topics varied in the second implementation of the English course, as we understood there was a need to challenge the notion of ethnicity and intersectionality in Black and Indigenous communities. This understanding emerged from having students voice how their overlapping identities -e.g., being both Black and Indigenous, being queerpositioned them in some in-between spaces rarely accounted for in schools.

The selection and adaption of themes had three different aims: (a) to engage students in critical questioning of dominant languages and cultures, (b) to inspire them to take a socio-political stance toward the hegemony of English (Scollon, 2004) and, by raising their historical and socio-political consciousness, and (c) to have them recognize how coloniality in ELT was tied to discourses of globalization, which reduced national cultures and languages to mere exotic attractions (Vinall, 2012). These aims, which strive to disrupt the marginalization of ancestral languages and epistemologies (^{Motha, 2014}) are often absent from the English classroom, and are replaced with a trivialized approach to content (^{Pennycook, 1990}).

Attempting to connect these aims to our students’ realities and those of their communities, we realized that our knowledge about Indigenous and Black communities in Colombia was extremely limited. To us, this reality seemed to stem from the systematic marginalization of ancestral ways of knowing and doing across all levels of the education system in Colombia, which privileges western knowledge. Since “we cannot teach what we don’t know” (Malcom X, nd), it became evident that our classes could not attempt to teach students about themselves and their own communities. So, instead, we designed English lessons to create spaces for students to unveil the ways in which ethnic communities had historically resisted coloniality. We also created spaces to uplift and celebrate Black and Indigenous communities’ self-determination to sustain their languages, literacies, cultures, and ways of being, while students heightened their sociopolitical consciousness.

Finding and Designing Teaching Materials

For English teachers at our university, multimedia and multimodal teaching materials are readily available. These materials, however, mostly focus on allowing learners to practice discrete grammar items or to explore topics about the “target” culture. When these materials do incorporate local cultures, they do so in the form of uncritical homogenizing facts and cultural celebration, such as stating that Black people are good dancers or Indigenous peoples make Colombia a diverse country, but little do they do to address the material conditions of these communities or the diversity within them. Hence, finding materials to support English learners from ethnic communities without invisibilizing our local languages, cultures, and epistemologies was a challenging endeavor.

For a long time, the field of ELT has filled language learning with texts and materials implicated in the reproduction of language and culture ideologies that perpetuate the idea of an ideal English speaker and of an English culture to which students should aspire (^{Pennycook, 1999}). To decolonial scholars, these texts and materials perpetuate a colonization of being, knowledge, and power (^{Núñez-Pardo, 2018}; 2020), fail to engage students in critical literacy development, and prevent them from disrupting the status quo. They need to increase ethnic, cultural, and linguistic representation so that students’ academic development finds a connection between school contexts and their own communities and literacies (^{Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008}; ^{Gay, 2002}; ^{Gregg et al., 2012}; ^{Ladson-Billings, 1995}, 2014; ^{Núñez- Pardo, 2020}; ^{Alim & Paris, 2017}) ^{Vasquez (2004)}, for example, suggests using everyday texts for critical literacy development given that they carry ideologies and the authors’ implicit intentions, regardless of the mode or medium in which they are presented. While we agree with this statement, we believe that representation matters and thus, allowing students to see themselves and their realities portrayed in the materials explored in class became our goal in this planning stage. Because such materials did not abound, we mostly resorted to the creation of our own multimedia and multimodal texts. Given our limited knowledge about Black and Indigenous communities, we relied on students from ethnic communities, who shared their own insights on ethnicity, identities, their territories, and their lived experiences, to inform the creation of those materials. This collaborative design enabled us to realize it was necessary to lead students to critically question their biases about their own and others’ communities (^{Alarcon, 2007}). Similarly, it made evident that fostering an inward gaze to students’ communities was necessary (^{Alim & Paris, 2017}) to identify ways in which their community practices could be oppressive.

This process of finding, adapting, and creating our own materials was hard, though. It was time-consuming and we constantly faced the challenge of falling into reductionist portrayals of our students’ communities that would have ended up perpetuating common stereotypical or homogenizing representations. This would have certainly been the case had we not collaborated with students from different communities. We also wrestled with ensuring that these materials allow for conversations in the classroom that moved beyond the celebration of cultural differences. To fight this, we constantly revisited the theoretical principles that grounded this implementation to explore themes and materials in a way that enabled students to question relations of power in ELT.

Implementation: Translanguaging and Literacy Development in ELT

Decolonizing our teaching practices during the lesson implementation was not just a matter of being open to providing linguistic support in English as needed. This small step was insufficient without holding a space for students to display their full linguistic repertoires: Spanish, ancestral languages, and English, coupled with all their semiotic resources that allowed them to enact their cultural and linguistic identities in the English classroom. Incorporating translanguaging was our attempt to surpass monoglossic language ideologies rooted in neoliberal, colonial agendas in ELT (^{Kubota, 2014}; ^{McKinney, 2017}; ^{Rosa & Burdick, 2017})

This incorporation of translanguaging is not an easy one in the field of ELT, where English teachers are encouraged to employ multiple strategies to prevent students from speaking languages other than English in the classroom. These strategies range from small “innocent punishments,” such as leaving them without candy, to academic consequences, such as getting points subtracted from their grades if English is not used consistently during classes. This is just an example of a long tradition in ELT that treats languages as if they “could be ‘added’ as separate wholes, without taking into account that true multilingual speakers never behave in this way” (^{García, 2019}, p. 152). Treating languages this way results in the reproduction of ideologies that attribute languages a hierarchical power, while enforcing the idea that the language classroom should limit to the separation of languages to advance language learning (^{García & Kleifgen, 2019}).

The dynamic has been challenged by scholars who contend English learning does not have to take place at the expense of students’ home languages, whether these are labeled first, second, or heritage languages (^{Wright et al., 2000}). Instead, they become assets as language teachers leverage students’ linguistic repertoires and attempt to disrupt the language hierarchies perpetuated by colonial discourses and teaching practices (^{Mignolo, 2000}). From this perspective, language teachers are not in charge of policing students’ use of English only in the classroom. Instead, they are responsible for ensuring that English learning is not “disconnected from culture, politics, and its colonial history” (^{Pennycook, 2019}, p. 174). On the other hand, learners are resourceful speakers who are at the same time aware of “the politics of language and education and seek to address and transform social, cultural, and economic inequalities” (^{Pennycook, 2019}, p. 178).

In this experience, translanguaging took the form of open invitations to students to communicate their ideas through multiple languages and modes. That meant encouraging students to express their ideas in their ancestral languages, Spanish, and English and through their multiple modes: writing, speaking, drawing, dancing, knitting, singing, or any mode in which they felt comfortable. We made these invitations albeit we knew we would not be able to understand their ancestral languages. By doing this, however, we ensured students did not feel they had to leave their languages and literacies out of the classroom door (^{Valenzuela, 1999}), to assimilate into dominant cultural, linguistic, and literacy practices.

Disrupting ELT and the static notions of language and culture it perpetuates (^{Tochon, 2019}) did not mean ignoring conventional literacy development (^{Bacon, 2017}; ^{Huang, 2011}) since these dominant literacies were necessary for students to demonstrate their English proficiency and obtain their diplomas. It meant enabling them to learn English in an organic and progressive manner. This was possible by exposing students to the multimedia and multimodal texts we had previously designed and by guiding them to create their own texts. Hence, after analyzing such texts, we highlighted some linguistic features, but let students determine the vocabulary and grammar they needed to teach us about their communities and to be able to contribute to the discussions proposed for each session. Encouraging students to articulate their ideas in different languages and to incorporate various English sentence structures and vocabulary, according to their needs and desires, not only challenged our previous teaching experiences of direct prescriptive grammar instruction but also allowed each class, in terms of language acquisition, to take life on its own.

Decolonizing teaching practices this way required finding a balance between holding spaces that centered students’ cultures, languages, and literacies while critically teaching a colonial language. This implied a commitment to critically educate English learners who did not have to lose their languages and cultures in the process of acquiring mainstream academic skills (^{Smith, 2012}). Although we were aware that by using the “master’s tools” we would not be able to dismantle “the master’s house” (^{Lorde, 2007, p. 35}), this attempt to decolonizing ELT allowed us to use English against the English hegemony that displaces ancestral languages and cultures entirely from English classrooms.

Undoing Coloniality of Being

Our attempts to decolonize ELT at our university created spaces for conversations in our classes that led students to reaffirm their systems of knowledge and ways of being as they interacted with other Indigenous and Black students. However, as we explored questions around the way knowledge is conceived, both in their communities and in academic settings, we learned that questioning the role academic spaces have played, and continue to play, in the marginalization of certain knowledges and languages did not come naturally to students. In fact, most students seemed to have naturalized the fact that academia was meant to embrace and foster Western-centric knowledge, languages, and literacies, even if that meant theirs were not seen as assets.

The endorsement of these hierarchical relations of power has been defined as coloniality of being which refers to the way lived experiences of colonization impact multiple dimensions such as authority, knowledge, economy, and language (^{Maldonado-Torres, 2007}; ^{Mignolo, 2003}). This brings the production of ontological colonial differences that give way to the creation of symbolic realities. Fanon relates these expressions of coloniality of being to racialized colonial experiences (^{Fanon, 1967}), such as establishing certain social roles and places according to race and power structures, and disqualifying cultural practices. This means that the encounter with the racist Other also shapes the way we give value to certain knowledges, languages, and literacies (^{Mignolo, 2003}). According to ^{Maldonado-Torres (2007)}, consistent efforts to unveil this coloniality would lead to a critical exploration of language, history, and existence.

This realization contributed to our understanding that the lived experiences of indigenous and AfroColombian communities are permeated by how they have historically interacted with colonial power structures. Very often, these interactions have resulted in the internalization of colonial beliefs about their own identities (^{López-Gopar, 2016}), as mentioned above for Indigenous and Afro-Colombia communities. This internalized colonization posed a challenge for us as educators as we struggled to deconstruct those discourses and ideologies. At this point, we drew on the tenets of decoloniality which states that “concepts need to be conceived as invitations to dialogue and not as impositions” (^{Maldonado-Torres, 2007}) and that this dialogue is possible as people’s manifold colonial experiences and epistemic positions find spaces to converse.

As we held these spaces, we strived to make visible the subtle ways coloniality operates in education at large, and in ELT in particular. We also provided opportunities for students to critically analyze the mechanisms that render certain languages, literacies, and knowledges invisible, through systematic epistemic racism (^{Kubota, 2020}). Moreover, we attempted to provide instances of how colonial ideologies influence the production of language and education policies, such as the one that required them to demonstrate English proficiency to graduate. These conversations were coupled with activities that repositioned students’ languages as assets, as we leveraged their full linguistic repertoires to talk about themselves and the ways their communities have resisted coloniality. This teaching practice, which has traditionally been banned from language classrooms, was a small action to contest those colonial discourses of being and knowledge (^{Lander, 2000}; ^{Maldonado-Torres, 2007}; ^{Mignolo, 2003}). This practice continues to privilege Euro-American forms of knowledge erasing the knowledge produced by people of color and minoritized groups (^{Kubota, 2020}).

Positioning Students as Cultural Experts and Text Producers

Another attempt to decolonize ELT in our classrooms consisted in switching the roles teachers and students have traditionally played in the language classroom, which position English teachers as the ones that hold the knowledge students need to advance in their academic life. Shifting this power dynamic in language teaching and learning led us to reflect on how we, consciously or unconsciously, had been implicated in the perpetuation of language and cultural power discourses (^{Scott, 2022}).

The powerful industry of ELT has a strong interest in upholding discourses of correctness and expertise that “privilege the knowledge, language and culture of dominant groups and oppress that of minoritized and/or colonized ones” (^{Scott, 2022}, p. 182). To try to revert this, we positioned ourselves as non-experts while positioning students as holders of knowledge and as cultural agents. We knew that, aside from the pressure or eagerness to learn English, students already came to the classroom full of cultural and linguistic knowledge, along with a wide range of literacies, that would contribute to their academic and critical consciousness development (^{Izadinia & Abednia, 2010}; ^{Alim & Paris, 2017}), so we decided to explore those knowledges and literacies.

^{Freire (2005)} addresses this shift in power dynamics in the classroom when he states: “the teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn, while being taught, also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow” (p. 80). This mutual growth was precisely what occurred as we positioned students’ voices in the classroom. Students’ multifaceted identities shaped their lived experiences and expertise on their communities. Hence, holding spaces for students to display that expertise, enabled them and ourselves to interrogate our own understanding of the ways multiple identities, associated with gender, sexual orientation, religion, intersect and shape what it means to be Black and/or Indigenous. ELT rarely reflects this intersectionality (^{Kubota, 2020}) and continues to reproduce homogenizing portrayals of Black and Indigenous communities, on textbooks and teaching materials, which are, in many cases, used as a prescriptive and fundamental element in the curriculum.

Bringing Indigenous and Black students’ full selves to the classroom created spaces for students to unearth painful stories of oppression and discrimination, but also of resistance. This turned the language classroom into a space of solidarity, as we understood that these stories were not isolated instances. Instead, these systematic acts of oppression and discrimination were the result of harmful discourses against Indigenous and Black communities that abound in Colombia. ELT reinforces these discourses by positioning whiteness and failing to disrupt racialized, imperial narratives that dehumanize Black and Indigenous people, such as sexist, racist and classist ideas about their identities (^{Santos, 2014a}). As we grew even more aware of how oblivious we had been to these realities, as language teachers and teacher educators, we committed to raising students’ awareness of the responsibility for the field of ELT in sustaining racist and oppressive policies and practices seemingly neutral, colorblind, and meritocratic (Wong, 2018). Subsequently, we provided students with the linguistic and analytic tools to critically read their own realities and transform them (^{Comber, 2001}).

In the second version of this English course such tools had to do with the creation of multilingual and multimodal texts that portrayed their stories and lived experiences. These texts (see the examples below) intended to educate others about their communities and to contribute to the contextualized production of materials in ELT. ^{Núñez-Pardo (2020)} contends that the creation of contextualized texts, learners’ languages, cultures, and lived experiences infuse the language classroom with myriad opportunities to advance their academic skills development while interrogating the power dynamics at play in their communities and in the global context. Inviting students to bring to life their representations of themselves and their communities, in their own languages and on their own terms, became our contribution to fight the erasure of Black and Indigenous peoples from ELT (^{Ibrahim, 2008}; ^{Scott, 2022}). Following are some examples from some of the multimodal and multimedia texts created and presented by these students in our classes:

For us, long hair is like having that strength and it is the extension of our thoughts. Our elders used to say that when we cut our hair, we also cut the dreams we had. Before our elders dreamed a lot and in their dreams they planned how to live more in community, in unity, then they said that those are the extensions of our thoughts, our long hair. That is why it is important to have it long and keep it like that because it is vital to maintain our inner strength. For us who are part of the indigenous communities of the South, our cheekbones are very marked... on our face we carry our grandmothers, our grandfathers and we have a little bit of everything, and we have a little bit of our ancestors.” (Ana, class session, our translation)

Example 1 Story work presented by a member of the Pastos people in Nariño

Yach’Akushun means the unit, teamwork to create knowledge and transform our minds. Yach’Akushun is a word from the Quechua that means let’s learn. Lachai is a word from the Inca indigenous community that means knowledge. So, Yach’Akushun building and sharing lachai means let’s learn while sharing knowledge. I would like to learn more about both native and foreign languages. I want to learn foreign languages not as a way to appropriate them and impact my identity, but as a knowledge tool that will allow me to know about the outside world, how the world works, which are the laws that govern outsiders. What we seek, as members of a community, is to learn and spread the knowledge acquired in our territories. We do not want the colonization history to be repeated. Understanding foreign languages will allow us to understand the intentions of those who approach our territories (multinational companies, corporations, foundations, etc.), and to be able to defend ourselves in their own words (Yason, online magazine, 2021, our translation)

Example 2 Video created by a member of the Embera people in Antioquia

There are always the looks, the comments that people make, the whispers, like the looks of astonishment, and when one establishes a relationship with the members of the university community, one begins to see how prejudices and stereotypes: “I thought that like you you were gay, you were more vain”, many stereotypes that people have and I think that happens to all of us, to people like me from the black community, from an indigenous community ( J. J., class session, 2021, our translation)

Example 3 Guest speaker: Student whose intersectional identities conflated Black, Indigenous, and Queer, among others.

This production of texts became an act of resistance against the uncritical reproduction of portrayals of Black people as a homogenous entity deprived of individual expression (^{Fanon, 1964}). It also constituted an act of resistance against portrayals of Indigenous peoples as uncivilized or exotic (^{Sabzalian, 2019}). By positioning students as cultural experts and text developers, we enabled them to make visible the ways in which ethnic communities have historically resisted coloniality, while uplifting their self-determination to sustain their languages, literacies, cultures, and ways of being.