Introduction: A Tweet Goes Viral in the U.S.

“Like many students, I grew up thinking that the most important books were written by white men,” writes Texas-based U.S. American literary scholar and educator Yvette DeChavez in the Los Angeles Times. Her 2018 op-ed describes her experiences as a recent literature PhD, elaborating upon her viral tweet from earlier the same year (see Figure 1). In that social media post, DeChavez went public with her call to “decolonize your syllabus.”

In recent years, a related proliferation of decolonizing discourse has gained currency among applied linguists, language educators, and others. But what do calls to “decolonize your syllabus” or “decolonize our schools” or “decolonize our thinking” really mean in practical terms, particularly in the arena of language teaching? And how might language educators meaningfully support and respond to the language needs and concerns of learners and their communities?

In this chapter, we will explore examples of language as used in course syllabi, classroom dialogue, as well as statements on the Indigenous provenance of an institution’s location, otherwise known as land acknowledgments. Such statements have become a more prevalent practice in North America, a continent historically occupied by outsider populations who remain reluctant to restore control and visibility to Indigenous nations.

Below, you will find a sampling of two land acknowledgments currently in use by U.S. colleges and universities. You are encouraged to return to these example land acknowledgments as you work your way through this chapter. Use these examples as sources to consider the multiple configurations and impacts of colonization around the world, and the roles that language—and language teaching—can play in shaping our response to previous harms and also our collective futures and understandings. For example, note the common use of unceded in these examples, a term connoting how lands were claimed and occupied on behalf of the U.S., Spain, and/or other colonizing interests without consent of the nations in primary possession. What do you think of these land acknowledgment statements? What words would you put into a statement of your own? We will return to these statements at the conclusion of this chapter, with two further examples for your consideration.

Land acknowledgment example #2:

Now, if we return to the insights that Yvette DeChavez shared in her viral tweet and newspaper op-ed, we may better appreciate how she invokes decolonization within the context of education.

“In my role as a postdoctoral lecturer,” Dr. DeChavez explains, “Decolonization manifested as a syllabus and classroom that centered on the writing and perspectives of Native Americans and people of color, including classic texts by Leslie Marmon Silko, Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros. This wasn’t an attempt to diversify; I wasn’t simply sprinkling in indigenous and person of color works. Instead, these voices were dominant” (DeChavez, 2018).

Dr. DeChavez’s personal insights build upon scholarly and popular observations of how the featured authors, voices, and perspectives considered normal and expected in today’s language and literature curricula stem from choices empowered during earlier periods of colonialism and nation-building (see, for example, Wiley & Lukes, 1996 on the US; Anyidoho, 2003 on Ghana; Irvine, 2008 on Sierra Leone; Dzahene-Quarshie & Moshi, 2014 on Ghana and Tanzania; Makoni et al., 2023 on Sudan). Seizures of land, natural resources (e.g., chromium, cobalt, copper, diamonds, gold, platinum, sisal, tantalum, uranium), and human labor accelerated under colonial rule were accompanied by seizures of control over languages, educational systems, and course curricula (Pugach, 2012; Heller & McElhinny, 2017; López-Gopar et al., 2021).

The sociopolitical and economic control exerted by colonial powers was mutually buoyed by imposition of outsider languages on local populations. For example, European colonialism throughout the Americas led to varying rises in dominance and prestige of Dutch, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish—all outsider languages. Or, as esteemed Ewe poet and literary scholar Kofi Anyidoho (2003, p. 8) describes of English: “strange language of strangers”. Having come of age under British colonial influence in 1960s and 1970s Ghana, where he primarily spoke Ewe as a child, Dr. Anyidoho later reflected on his experience as a graduate of local schools through to the University of Ghana (p. 8-9): “After middle form two [grades 4-6 of the U.S. school system], Ewe language and literature dropped out of the syllabus, their place taken by this strange language of strangers.”

Reflecting further, Dr. Anyidoho goes on to disclose: “As an undergraduate in the University of Ghana, I went through a serious crisis with the knowledge I was presumably acquiring. […] Here I was in an English department that was to be observed even a decade later, in 1986, as the least decolonized in all of Anglophone Africa. Following a survey of the content of syllabi of about thirty English departments in Anglophone Africa, Benrth Lindfors [1995, p. 48] concluded: ‘The most radical reorientations of literature study have taken place at universities in Kenya and Tanzania, while the staunchest conservatism has been maintained by English Departments at the University of Ghana and the University of Cape Coast, resulting in only minor alterations of the old colonial curriculum’” (Anyidoho, 2003, p. 9).

Dr. Anyidoho’s insights provide a preview of how European colonialism resulted in lasting changes to education in African countries, as well as the prestige of West African languages such as Ewe, even after formal colonial rule had ended. For example, although Ghana gained independence from Britain in 1957, Ewe languages and literatures remained excluded from the curriculum; literature authored by Ghanaians in English was also excluded. By limiting students’ abilities to develop expertise in Ewe language and literature, the persistent exclusion of African languages and perspectives helped to further perpetuate the belief that Ewe (among other languages) was not worth studying.

“I tried to drop English and take up Ghanaian language studies for my graduate work,” Dr. Anyidoho shares. “To my utter disappointment, the then head of the Linguistics department pointed out that there was no faculty member at the time with enough specialization to supervise my research work in Ewe literature. I went back to English […] even though my lecturers in English insisted African literature in English was a waste of time…” (Anyidoho, 2003, p. 9).

Put into conversation, Dr. Anyidoho’s candid reflections on 1970s university study in Legon, Ghana, and Dr. DeChavez’s personal observations of 2010s university teaching in Austin, Texas, U.S., indicate that some of the same issues of language study and language-in-education persist to this day.  Both scholars pose decolonization as the antidote to colonialism. Decolonization in education is a commitment to reorienting what students and colleagues consider the literary canon—the established and celebrated core curriculum of her academic discipline.

Moreover, decolonization invites critical reflection on the how and why of a language’s social prestige and our personal and collective roles in upholding that status. When we pause to consider the broader context of influences on education worldwide, what we can begin to take notice of, is that Dr. DeChavez’s more recent struggles in the U.S. and focus on the course syllabus are not new. In fact, some 50 years prior, in 1968—even earlier than Dr. Anyidoho’s attempts to formally study Ewe at the University of Ghana, a similar debate was heating up in the halls of the University of Nairobi in Kenya (see Figure 3). “Why can’t African literature be at the centre [sic],” East African professors then asked, “So that we can view other cultures in relationship to it?” (Ngũgĩ, 1986, p. 89).

In this chapter, I invite you to join me as I draw upon my background as an applied linguist, experienced language instructor, and linguistic ethnographer in the examination of how decolonization movements and decoloniality, in both practical and theoretical terms, continue to hold important insights for language-focused practitioners. I introduce the theoretical approach of language socialization, a perspective originating with linguistic anthropologists and applied linguists (e.g., Schiefflin & Ochs, 1986; Moore, 1999; Duff, 2010; Li Wei, 2018; Anya, 2021; Thomas, 2021), to underscore how people across global and local contexts of family, school, work, and elsewhere communicate values and expectations through language, while also inculcating beliefs about language itself. With this theoretical approach in mind, I present language-focused examples arising from personal interrogations of my subjectivities as a lifelong learner of Swahili, a Black and African American woman, and an educator in settings inclusive of study abroad, community colleges, small liberal arts colleges, and research universities (e.g., Thomas, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2024).

Although Kenya had declared itself independent from Britain in 1963, the University of Nairobi’s leading faculty were British, including the head (Chair) of the English Department. The university curriculum therefore remained patterned after how the subject was taught in London, with a goal of graduating an elite Black bourgeoisie that would speak/read in English and uphold British values. And with European voices at the beginning, middle, and end of the syllabus, European and English-language approaches to language, culture, and life were presented as reasoned, universal, and superior.