Pedagogies of Inclusion Must Start from Within

Abstract

Abstract Before contact, the Americas were a multilingual pastiche of Indigenous communities. The arrival of colonial linguistic policies disrupted this biodiversity with monolingual (i.e., English-only) pedagogies. To reverse this noninclusive trend, Indigenous scholarship asks settler teacher programs to self-locate their teaching practices on the land and confront TESL’s role in maintaining settler-only linguistic futures. To explore a land-based resistance to monolingual pedagogies, the authors piloted and then conducted a two-hour online workshop with ESL instructors in a Canadian university in Québec. The first half of the workshop combined individual self-reflection and self-location activities, followed by small group discussions that located attendees’ language teaching practices and learning experiences on the land (Landguaging). The second half explored maintaining multilingual landscapes via three plurilingual teaching strategies, which attendees evaluated in small groups. Participants positively perceived the Landguaging exercises and plurilingual strategies, viewing them as helpful combinations to foster inclusion in the ESL classroom.