This special issue of the International Journal of Critical Diversity Studies grapples with the contentious issues of decolonisation and social justice in Academic Literacies (AL 1 )/English for Academic Purposes (EAP) curricula and pedagogy in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) globally. The teaching and learning of AL/EAP, which Slevin (2007) calls the most crucial work globally, has gained traction in the past four decades; change in the political and economic landscape during these decades has resulted in an evident increase in student support and access at most universities. This widening participation has seen more students from lower socio-economic and poorer educational backgrounds accessing universities, leading to a much more diverse student population.
Universities have introduced AL courses as support initiatives to aid student success. However, due to its misperceived neutrality (Boughey & McKenna, 2016), AL has not been made sufficiently accessible and open to critique in HE, especially in light of global calls for curriculum transformation. It has largely escaped decolonial scrutiny and has mainly remained outside the decolonising commitment of institutions of learning, as the focus in these institutions has mainly been on decolonising the so-called mainstream content. Such a visually impaired approach to decolonising AL has mainly left the decolonial vocation tasks to individual or a small group of practitioners.
Besides this perceived veiled neutrality, AL has remained a marginalised pedagogical service enterprise, outside the mainstream curriculum and outside the students’ zone of proximal development (Joubert & Sibanda, 2022). This is despite being taken by many first-year university students (Seligmann & Gravett, 2010), which thus furthers the continued lack of concerted decolonial scrutiny and commitment. This phenomenon is also observed by Angu, Boakye and Eybers (2019), who acknowledge that there is a disconcerting silence on decolonisation in the field of AL as the AL curriculum has largely remained Eurocentric, alienating and exclusive to students seeking epistemic access and success in HE. In this regard, Taylor (1995, p. 18) argued that it is important to frame understandings of what academic literacy can mean and the power that academic literacy can have in ways that do not seek out any “unifying logic” nor attempt to silence the voices of Indigenous people whose conceptions can fit outside those of the “legitimate” dominant culture and its traditions. Furthermore, Nakata (2001) argued that educators need to give Indigenous people “the codes to break into the bank”. MacGregor (1996) also maintains that academic literacy work needs to be framed in terms of culture and power. In an endeavour to improve student agency, access to the multiple AL practices needs to be understood in terms of the factors that restrict and maintain access differentials, and this remains a complex problem in the field of AL.
AL work has been critiqued for not being culturally responsive in terms of content and assessments since students, in completing tasks or learning certain AL practices, are often not encouraged/allowed to draw on their myriad learning experiences and Indigenous knowledge systems (Angu, Boakye & Eybers, 2019; Montenegro & Jankowski, 2017; Brock-Utne, 2016). Instead, Eurocentric and colonial epistemic practices are still mostly preferred, despite being in line with the recognition
that literacy has been often regarded as a White trait, something that Whites possess naturally, rather than as a White privilege … more accurately reveals why many Whites—including those who are contesting affirmative action in educational settings—have acted as if something has been taken away from them when the goods of literacy are redistributed. (Prendergast, 2003, p. 8)
A failure to meaningfully accommodate the identities, bodies, knowledges, histories and ways of the other has remained a thorny issue. As stated earlier, the dominant perceived understanding of academic literacy practices as neutral, which has led to the construction of students as decontextualised, lacks the complexity needed to serve students’ diversity and positionalities (Boughey & McKenna, 2016). To this end, this themed issue calls for the reimagining of AL pedagogies to focus not only on multiple ways of designing and teaching AL but also on the issue of knowledge relevance.
In this issue, the article by Angu titled “What, Why, How and By Whom? Reflections on the Hashtag Movements, the Politics of Knowledge Production and academic Literacy Pedagogies in South African Higher Education” re-introduces this complexity by examining the impact of the Rhodes and Fees Must Fall movements on South African higher education, particularly focusing on the need for curriculum decolonisation in academic literacy pedagogies. It argues that despite the symbolic fall of the Rhodes statue, the entrenched racial and epistemic hierarchies persist in university curricula, influencing AL teaching and assessment. Angu advocates for AL pedagogies that develop critical cognitive competencies in students, enabling them to challenge Western epistemic dominance. This is an approach that requires the inclusion of Indigenous and culturally inclusive practices, moving beyond merely technical language skills to foster transformative education that prepares students to critically engage with and reshape their societal contexts.
The debate around lingua academia has consistently troubled the field of AL as there is a general misperception that AL is about language teaching and learning. Far from it. Some AL practitioners, in search of weapons of defence against the misperception, tend to bring Bourdieu and Passeron’s (1994) famous statement that “Academic language is … no one’s mother tongue”. However, Ding (2019) makes it clear that this statement has been misused and misappropriated by AL practitioners to mean that AL has nothing to do with linguistic issues. While linguistic challenges should not be misconstrued as an inability to think, it is the misappropriation that hides the linguistic challenges inherent in the field of AL that Ding is concerned about. The article by Sibanda and Joubert titled “The Language Contestations and Complexities in Higher Education: Students’ Perspectives” adds to the complexities in AL work by creating a student’s mini-Makerere moment through the centring of student views on the discourse on multilingualism in higher education. It explores the dynamics between English and Indigenous languages that underline the persistent challenges in the debate of language and decolonisation. In elevating the experiences and viewpoints of students, the ambivalent nature of English as both an enabler and disabler of learning is brought to the fore.
While there is consensus that students’ Indigenous languages are an enabler of being, teaching and learning, the “Development of Indigenous Language Orthographies: Setting Up English as the Torch Bearer” by Matavire posits the need for the revitalisation of Indigenous African languages. The author brings to attention the urgent need for affirmative action to redress the imbalances that exist in how languages are chosen, treated, and used as lingua academia across the pedagogic spaces. This is an acknowledgement that with development, every language is fit for teaching, learning, and life.
In “Epistemologies of the South”, de Sousa Santos (2014) asks what our weapons against coloniality are. He further asks how effective these weapons in our possession are as decolonial thinkers. He concludes that our own weapons and those that we have appropriated from others, when combined, are lethal weapons. This is what the article “Don’t Throw the Colonial Text Out with its Ideology!: Recruiting a Colonial Text to do Decolonial Work on a University Academic Literacy Course” by Hunma, Aditi, Torquato, Cloris, Arend and Moeain does by harnessing colonial texts to do decolonial work. It is a useful case of using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. The article looks at the repurposing of texts for decolonial purposes, thus offering pedagogical decolonial possibilities.
One of the weapons at the disposal of AL practitioners in pursuit of social justice consciousness among privileged identities in academic spaces is the Critical Diversity Literacy (CDL) pedagogical lens. The article by Vanyoro and Steyn titled “Using Critical Diversity Literacy (CDL) To Cultivate Social Justice through Reflexivity in Research in Higher Education Spaces” makes the normative strange by unnaturalising traditional models of researching and understanding differences. Such an approach allows for genuine research spaces where black and white bodies, males and females, non-gender conforming individuals, foreigners and citizens, with abilities and inabilities of body and mind, find a home. This article provides a lens to critique and interrogate positionality. Steyn’s 10 CDL criteria to acknowledge differences in research in higher education is one of the effective weapons available for AL practitioners in their decolonial commitments.
Student voice as part of decolonising expertise is critical in AL work. The article titled “Unsilencing the Student Voice: Detecting and Addressing ChatGPT-Generated Texts Presented as Student-Authored Texts at a University Writing Centre’ by Coetzer and Van Aardt explores students’ overreliance on AI-generated texts as a potential contributor to the loss of a critical student voice, which is essential for transformative social change, more so in AL. The article, while suggesting strategies to identify AI-generated content, interrogates practices that unsilence student voices by fostering practices that bring out original student work and develop authentic student voices as a crucial aspect of academic decolonisation.
This special issue recognises that AL/EAP courses are too important to be overlooked in universities’ commitment to decolonisation and that current decolonial efforts must be identified, visibilised, expanded and prioritised. It also presents potential alternatives in the efforts and commitment to imagine socially and epistemologically just universities, globally. While making a point about coloniality and the blind acceptance of “neutral” Eurocentric and English language conventions in AL/EAP, this issue provides alternative thinking, unthinking and rethinking of AL/EAP from a decolonial and epistemic justice lens at institutional and individual levels.