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Introduction
Literacy has been traditionally and narrowly defined as the ability to read and write. However, a broad body of ethnographically and socio-culturally oriented research has contributed to expanding the meaning of literacy to encompass myriad social practices heavily dependent on context, culture, values, and power relations, thus, forwarding the plural term literacies (e.g., Heath, 1982; Street, 1984). Despite the expansion of the meanings of literacy, its traditional definition continues to orient and inform educational policies and practices worldwide, thus, excluding non-dominant yet valuable literacies from schooling (The New London Group, 1996; Comber, 2015b). This exclusion is indicative of colonial ideologies that have universalised Eurocentric literacy practices. In this sense, literacy has been commodified by coloniality to erase and disregard non-hegemonic literacy practices, thus keeping them out of school and labeling them as deficient (Gee, 2008; Villegas et al., 2021; Souto-Manning et al., 2021).
This coloniality is also evinced in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) literacy research and policy. For instance, in Colombia, EFL literacy research upholds Western, alphabetic literacies (e.g., reading and writing) for instruction and maintains a deficit view of learners’ literacies. For example, it emphasizes youth’s low engagement with written texts and measures literateness by the amount of canonical literary works youth read or the number of hours they spend reading (García Vera, 2015). These characterizations of youth’s reading and writing habits as negative often serve as the starting point for interventions aimed at “fixing” EFL learners (Basallo-Gómez, 2016; Cardona-Puello et al., 2018). Furthermore, EFL literacy policy (e.g., National Bilingualism Plan) promotes an agenda that centers contested, neoliberal notions of development, such as acquiring EFL literacy skills to become a functional member of the globalized world and achieve economic upward mobility (Government of Colombia, 2006; 2018).
The colonial logic dominant in EFL policy and research also drives the exclusion of non-dominant literacies and constrains opportunities for addressing inequity and inequality through education. For instance, this coloniality is reflected in language teaching materials, the recruitment of foreign teachers, and literacy instruction that prioritizes whiteness and Western imperialism (Bonilla Medina & Finardi, 2022; Nuñez-Pardo et al., 2022; Sagre et al., 2023). Colombian EFL scholars have also warned that bilingual policy like the National Bilingualism Plan is decontextualized and alien to the local needs and cultures of students from non-elite communities as it reflects the social discourses, practices, and values from the elite groups that historically have had access to international education, especially bilingual schooling (Fandiño-Parra, 2021; Usma, 2009).
Thus, I align with recent calls for decolonial frameworks to transform EFL language policy and practice (Heugh et al., 2021; Macedo, 2020), especially to support the inclusion of local literacies. This inclusion may render the learning of foreign languages, like English, more meaningful and relevant to students from non-elite and marginalized communities.
By drawing on decolonial principles of border-thinking, relationality, and design (Escobar, 2007; 2018; Mignolo, 2007; 2018), I describe the potential of “Pluriversal literacies” (PLs) for expanding meaning-making practices in ways that honor the myriad epistemologies, ontologies, and cultures that co-exist in our world, contributing, as a result, to calls for decolonizing foreign language education (Browning et al., 2022; Heugh et al., 2021; Macedo, 2020)
The Pluriverse and Pluriversal Literacies
Western modernity created its own, pretentious system of knowledge built upon the phallogocentric logic (i.e., “the male Eurocentric consciousness”) (Escobar, 2007, p. 182). This system claimed ownership over all knowledges and classified them according to their gender, race, culture, and location (Escobar, 2007; Mignolo, 2012). Inspired by the ideal of countering the destructive universalism imposed by Western modern views of the world, decolonial scholars from Abya Yala have forwarded the pluriverse as an epistemic proposal. The pluriverse is framed within the Zapatista’s decolonial ideal “Un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos” (a world where many worlds fit) (Escobar, 2018, p. 16), which is a decolonial response to the patriarchal and colonial ontologies that currently pervade the social, cultural, and economic layers of the world.
I believe that an epistemic change, as proposed by the idea of the pluriverse, is urgently needed to transform literacy education, especially in EFL. Learning English has become a key element of educational systems worldwide (e.g., EMI in China, dual language education, bilingualism in Colombia); however, its importance has been reduced to EFL literacy learning for utilitarian, profit-making purposes, thus upholding Western ways of knowing and being. I agree with Perry’s (2021) argument that the epistemology of the pluriverse requires a PLs framework to impact literacy education policy and planning in ways that shift away from universalized literacy models founded on Western logocentrism.
“Pluriversal literacies” is a decolonial literacies framework that aims to center the epistemological and ontological foundations of the meaning-making practices that emerge and are enacted within communities. In what follows, I describe three main tenets of PLs: Relationality, border-thinking, and design. I discuss their potential for transforming EFL policy and practice in ways that center and honor the practices, knowledges, and literacies of non-dominant, historically oppressed communities.
Relationality
Relationality is a fundamental principle that underscores how our worlds, or pluriverses, are the product of the interconnections among numerous human and more-than-human beings (Escobar, 2018; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018). Relationality is also an indigenous value that entails engaging in conversations about sustainable relationships with the land (Kimmerer, 2013; Patel, 2016; Smith, 2012; Styres, 2019). Thus, PLs foster understanding and acknowledgement of indigenous epistemologies that center the land as a key element for learning from and relating with the world. This understanding enhances one’s respect for all beings, communities, and pluriverses, especially those that have been marginalized or oppressed.
A PLs perspective thus may make explicit the intention of respecting all forms of human, non-human, and more-than human lives and worlds. This is a pressing need, especially when human and non-human lives are threatened by wars (e.g., the Israel-Palestine and Ukraine-Russia armed conflicts), the global health crisis, such as that caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the climate crisis (e.g., unprecedented forest fires in the Amazon during 2021 and the exceedingly high temperatures recorded in July 2023 worldwide). To cater for this need, PLs foster place-based and sentient practices (i.e., forest walking, plant weaving) that ensure care for the territories and the entanglements of human, non-human, and more-than-human beings that inhabit the world. PLs also foster respect for the pluriverse and call for overcoming the racist, elitist, ableist, xenophobic, homophobic ways of knowing and doing that have marginalized communities and perpetuate armed conflicts.
Considering the relationality enmeshed in PLs, this framework will contribute to foreign language literacy education opportunities to fight the coloniality of language (Veronelli, 2015), which spreads monoglossic ideologies and supports cultural hegemonies, linguistic supremacy, and standardization (Flores & Rosa, 2015; Kubota, 2016; Tochon, 2020). For example, integrating pluriversal literacies as the observation of local plants, not only for creating art, treating diseases, or designing furniture, but also for sustaining life may nurture relations between foreign and local languages and cultures, thus helping to overcome the fetishization and minimizing practices that prevail in foreign language textbooks and teaching materials (Babaii & Sheihki, 2018; Bonilla & Finardi, 2022). Paying attention to the assemblages of bodies, affects, and senses, PLs will contribute to expanding beyond structuralist models of communication and literacies; instead, attention to such assemblages will provide opportunities to integrate local literacies and bridge the often-felt separation between local communities and EFL classrooms (Correa et al., 2014; Duboc & Ferraz, 2020; Mnyanda & Mbelani, 2018).
Border-thinking
Border-thinking is a key tenet of Latin American decolonial thought and the epistemological proposal of the pluriverse. As Mignolo (2012) explains, border-thinking entails using one’s geo-political location at the borders of two ontologies/epistemologies/pluriverses. Such is the case of Chicana feminists Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherry Moraga, who embraced their Chicana identities to position Spanglish as a living language. This also helped them make sense of a lived experience that is unique to the indigenous and mestizo Mexican descendants who live at the borders of indigenous, mestizo, and white epistemologies (Anzaldúa, 1987). Drawing on Anzaldúa’s work, Mignolo (2012) posits “languaging” in two or more languages as a possibility for border-thinking that aims to decolonize knowledge production and educational projects, including literacy.
Border-thinking permits subalterns to create new ideas which transcend the shortcomings of hegemonic knowledge and laden the unbalanced power relations of imposed “global designs” like development, the nation-state, or humanism. Literacy is one of these imposed global designs: One needs to be literate to be developed, to not be primitive. Literacy has also been a tool for spreading Western civilization myths and ideologies. Literacy has been commodified by coloniality to erase and disregard non-hegemonic literacy practices such as oral storytelling and narrative traditions, keeping them out of school and labeling them as deficient (Gee, 2008; Villegas et al., 2021; Heath, 1982, Souto-Manning et al., 2021).
I argue that such disregard is visible in current EFL literacy research and practice in Colombia, which is dominated by a utilitarian view of literacy as a tool for developing the skills to compete in the market and a knowledge-based economy (i.e. the idea that knowledge production is central to economic growth) (Becker, 2007) . The over-emphasized instruction of functional literacy skills and grammatical accuracy to reach and demonstrate the language competency levels required in the Common European Reference Framework (CERF) and which are measured by standardized tests are proof of the pervading utilitarianism (Correa-Ospina, 2019; Espinosa et al., 2019). Such utilitarian purposes in EFL literacy instruction limit teachers and learners to delve into the cultural and social value of literacies.
In this context, the border-thinking nature of PLs may contribute transformative, equity-based practices in foreign language literacy education. First, it has the potential to make foreign language learning less alien to learners from non-dominant groups like rural or indigenous communities. By recognizing and valuing language hybridity and fluidity, PLs will foster the recognition of learners’ cultural and linguistic repertoires as recent critical language learning theories, especially translanguaging and plurilingualism (García & Li, 2014; Piccardo, 2019), have suggested. Both theories shift away from additive models of language learning that expect language learners to use languages separately and according to standardized norms. Indeed, they argue for an expanded understanding of linguistic repertoires, thus valuing the different semiotic and cultural assemblages that are at interplay in meaning-making and communication (García & Otheguy, 2020).
Second, PLs will contribute to an expanded notion of foreign language literacy that shifts away from literacy as a “fixing tool” towards literacy as nurturer of local knowledges. By valuing subalterns’ knowledges (i.e., the knowledges that lay within the experiences of oppressed groups like indigenous communities, peasant, informal workers, racialized subjects, women and LGBTQ+ individuals) learners’ perspectives will broaden, thus allowing to cross the distance between local and foreign languages. Furthermore, the border-thinking characteristic of a PLs framework may also provide opportunities for EFL practitioners, policy makers, and researchers to recognize the existing local varieties of English in Colombia, resulting in an increase of the value of the knowledge and linguistic repertoires of subaltern subjects in Creole communities like San Andrés Islas (Mora, 2015). Such recognition is urgently needed to overcome the assimilationist, native-speakerist ideologies that focus on “proper”, standardized languages and which permeate EFL teaching materials, policy and practice.
In recognizing the value of local knowledges and language varieties, PLs may respond to the transcultural, translanguaging, superdiverse societies that have resulted from the ongoing, either forced or voluntary, human migration. PLs transcend the idea of language as a sophisticated system; conversely, language is conceived as a living, growing, and changing being (Anzaldúa, 1987). Thus, border-thinking as one of the tenets of pluriversality provides a new tool for language and literacy education in ways that learners’ meaning-making resources and practices (e.g., dialects, vernacular literacies) are valued and used harmoniously. In this way, literacies that sustain transcultural and transdisciplinary dialogues will arise.
Design
In his book Designs for the Pluriverse, Escobar (2018) calls for new paths of innovation that move away from the idea of modern development and progress that promotes ‘competitive individualism’. Instead, Escobar proposes paths to Earth-centered and justice-oriented innovations. These paths should be built non-hierarchically and should entail participatory, collaborative, and sustainable principles. A PLs framework, like recent multiliteracies and new literacy approaches to literacy education, thus focuses on design. However, this focus reclaims transitional and transformative designs that are delinked from modernity’s idea of progress and development.
PLs transcend the emphasis of multiliteracies on preparing learners for working life and designing social futures. This emphasis is inextricably associated with fast capitalism and the drive for Western development that oppresses millions of people in the world (Leander & Boldt, 2013). I also agree with Leander and Boldt’s (2013) critique of multiliteracies, especially their view of design, which is prescribed by Western grammars and discourses, and overemphasizes texts while paying little attention to affects and bodies in meaning-making. These two latter elements have always been important elements of social and literacy practices across cultures (Bucholtz & Hall, 2016; Pennycook, 2010, 2017). As such, returning to them is necessary for more meaningful approaches to literacy education that transcend neoliberal, utilitarian models.
Furthermore, PLs which challenge business-as-usual designs (Escobar, 2018) will allow literacy education to be decentered from market-driven purposes. PLs thus propose new designs for literacy teaching that allow us to question how literacies (e.g., digital literacies) are related to sources of the oppression which is quintessential to modernity/coloniality. PLs also recognize the discourses and struggles of the marginalized and those who have been deemed as subaltern by hegemonic logic; thus, acknowledging their influence in the social practices and literacies they engage with (e.g., the use of graffiti, storytelling traditions that combine dance, oral history, and movement, as well as the use of slang or local dialects). In this way, PLs may allow for a response to the calls for critical literacies in EFL education in Colombia (Mora et al., 2020; Mora & Cañas, 2020).
For foreign language literacies, delinking from traditional, business-as-usual designs represents opportunities for moving away from dominant, prescriptivist approaches towards literacy that see languages as concrete objects and deny their fluid changing nature. Moving away from this view allows teachers to transcend the reductionist perspective of standard-based foreign language teaching and assessment that serves capitalistic, instrumental views of language (language as human capital). Thus, PLs will inform approaches to foreign language literacy as meaningful, creative, knowledge-making experiences that entail feeling-thinking and center on the learner and their meaning-making potential to unleash the creation of new worlds, the pluriverse. For instance, the inclusion of traditional weaving of Iraka in the EFL classroom may allow learners the opportunity to use their bodies, their senses, their local knowledges, and their imagination to create artifacts that tell stories, indexing identity and sense of belonging to a community.
Discussion and Conclusions
In this article, I have pointed out the colonial ideologies that pervade EFL literacy policy, research, and practice in Colombia, as well as their damaging effects on non-dominant communities who face widened inequity when attempting to learn English as a mandated foreign language. I argue for PLs, which are relational, foster border-thinking, and delink from business-as-usual designs to counter such pervasive and harmful coloniality.
One of the main contributions of PLs lies in its potential to debunk the neoliberal, colonial, transnational agendas that have coopted literacy as a tool for profit. Challenging the notion that meaning making equals money making (Mignolo, 2007) and instead embracing other forms of meaning making that allow us to see the limitations of Western epistemologies and connect with the pluriverse of knowledges that our colonial myopia have prevented us from seeing. For instance, recognizing the value of the artifactual, traditional, ritual, indigenous, peasant literacies enables the creation of new narratives that are not based on modern/colonial values. Thus, PLs may also allow us to convey a broader understanding of literacy and meaning making, considering the expansion of semiotic resources through the value of all our senses as proposed by post-humanist and new-materialist perspectives in Applied Linguistics and additional language learning (e.g., Pennycook, 2017; The Douglas Fir Group, 2016).
PLs may also sustain pedagogical and knowledge-making practices that aid us in valuing the subaltern’s knowledges and literacies. This challenge includes voicing the experiences and struggles of the subalterns in minoritized communities, the indigenous, black, peasants, women, immigrant children, who have been silenced by the classist, elitist, racist, and patriarchal modes of domination that still pervade Colombian society. When these experiences are heard, read, written, talked about, and sensed in the literacy classroom, opportunities to transform the literacy curriculum and policy will be made possible.
PLs will potentially advance critical literacies, providing spaces to question the extractive, harmful practices that have perpetuated inequity and oppression of minoritized communities in Colombia. Examples of such oppression include the forced displacement of peasants and inhabitants of rural areas in the North of Colombia by mining conglomerates; the increasing poverty and violence in the Colombian Southwest, and the continuous land hoarding that has destroyed natural ecosystems (e.g., wetlands) and endangered the life of indigenous and afro-descendant communities by the sugarcane industry (Escobar, 2018). Such practices are at odds with pluriversal designs that strive for new ways to co-exist in dignity with the Earth, humans, more-than-humans, and non-human beings.
Finally, a PLs perspective will add to the development and advancement of foreign language literacy as a field, especially by including schoolteachers and communities, the silenced subalterns, in knowledge-making endeavors. Teachers and communities will be afforded opportunities to contribute their histories and experiences in their territories to build EFL literacy pedagogies that are land-based, asset-based, and culturally sustaining.
