Translinguajamento: pensando entre línguas a partir de práticas e metadiscursos de docentes indígenas em formação superior

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to establish the epistemological genealogy of the concept of translanguaging from theoretical assumptions in the field of decolonial studies and to understand it based on communicative practices and metadiscourses of indigenous teachers in higher education at Federal University of Goiás (UFG). Translanguaging is presented as an alternative to problematize the essentialisms arising from the invention of languages (MAKONI; PENNYCOOK, 2007) – and consequently from “nation” and other constructs – and to understand contemporary communicative practices. We intend to mobilize reflections related to hybrid language practices that break with the ideology of colonial and national monolingualism and consider the possibility of thinking between languages, of a border thinking, as Mignolo (2003) suggests, considering the process of globalization and local contexts and thinking about interculturality in a critical way, marked by processes of interaction widely diversified and profoundly affected by the colonial difference. In addition, we seek to evidence and understand how practices and metadiscourses related to this idea of translanguaging are manifested in a context of higher education of indigenous teachers in the undergraduate course of Intercultural Education at Federal University of Goiás, based on oral and written data generated in the classroom, in an analysis with qualitative and ethnographic methodological orientation. Translanguaging is considered as an alternative to disinvent and reconstitute languages, questioning fixed and totalizing conceptions about language, especially in situations in which social complexity reconfigures linguistic maps and demands new perspectives, as is the case of indigenous peoples in Brazil. Therefore, we start from the idea that translanguaging can even be used as a negotiation strategy in intercultural relations, intrinsically constituted in fluidity and hybridity, based on the mobilization of resources belonging to diverse, mobile and heterogeneous linguistic repertoires.