Decolonising the Language Learning Experience: Equal Language in an Open Space

in: Transnationalising the Word: A Decolonising Approach to the Teaching and Learning of Modern Languages
July 2nd, 2021

My name is Marta Milani, I am an Italian native speaker, i teach Italian as a foreign language.

langue-culture (R.Galisson, 1991)

CLINAMEN-scuola di italiano: custom-made Italian courses in Montevideo (Uruguay) since 2014
→ ClinamenOnLine: without confinement Italian
In Clinamen we teach Italian langue-culture mainly to senior and Spanish speakers (Rioplatense variety), studying Italian because it is "a beautiful and musical language". → the pleasure of learning and motivation.

Is Italian a language that needs to be decolonized, to be observed through a transnational lens?

First answer: no. Italian is spoken in one country with a single language standard, shared by almost all speakers and easily accessible. I will teach that standard.
Despite my cult of the linguistic standard I dare to a cross-eyed look (hacker pedagogy).

How can I make Clinamen learners live an intercultural discovery experience and a language learning experience free from the burden of the right-formed and nationally established standard, online too?
How can I live this experience with them, as a facilitator of their learning path, sharing the experience of co-construction and conviviality (Ivan Illich, Tools for conviviality, 1973)?

The language I teach is “narrowed to the standard, already built and defined by the respected and immutable norm” → impossible to be perfectly adapted to our personal experience.

Four practices, four exercises to free our language and our learning experience:

exercise n.1: PATIENCE AND LISTENING:

• listen to the learners – the real protagonists of the game, the core of the learning experience.
• value their goals and expectations (why and how do you want to learn Italian? What do you want to do with your new linguistic competence? Which Italian do you want to learn?), their anxieties (especially in this moment of general and collective disorientation) and what they like or not (S. Krashen: easy, captivating, and repeated inputs)

  → UNHINGE ROLES also in online activities.

exercise n.2: CONTINUOUS DISCUSSION:

• life-long and life-wide teacher update -to share positive experiences and critical issues with colleagues, reflect together and make constructive self-criticism, put yourself in the shoes of others;
• in the classroom, repeated and constant checks on individual well-being within the group
• take nothing for granted.

  → NEW INSPIRATIONS AND NEW MOTIVATION for teacher and learners, despite the catastrophe

  καταστρέφω: I overturn, I reverse
  one of our last adventures is a podcast

exercise n.3: THE HYBRID, SELECTED AND SITUATED WORD:

to use, even in class, a language "aware of the standards but not blindly subjugated to the norm" means:

• always and every time check the adequacy of texts, schemes, exercises, topics;
• measure the terms;
• lead by example.

  → SHOW A WIDE PANORAMA OF DIFFERENT AND VARIOUS LANGUAGE MANIFESTATIONS + SUPPORT IN THE OBSERVATION OF THE IMPLIED DYNAMICS, THEN SUPPORT LEARNER IN THE CHOICE OF WHICH LANGUAGE TO PRODUCE.

Enseñar: to teach and to show, to make visible, to display
It is easier to present the standard language to learners. This is true.
Observing the whole panorama might represent a distraction from the goal. Which goal?

exercise n.4: SELECTION, CHOICE AND CONSTRUCTION OF THE LANGUAGE LEARNING EXPERIENCE:

choosing for and with learners a decolonized, equitable, polyphonic language:

• in heterogeneous textual inputs (i.e. always check the adequacy of the texts and themes and topics);
• with modalities of constructive proposal in progress -always make everything as explicit as possible; remember that everything is always a proposal, not an imposition; the path is in the making, we build it at every step;
• in an open learning space: it is not mandatory to use the digital tools that everyone uses, the first tools recommended -in the emergency of the pandemic- are not necessarily the most appropriate for our group or the most comfortable. I have to question myself and understand what I need, review the strengths and skills available and find my tool.

  → REASONING ON AND NEGOTIATE with learners EVERY ASPECTS OF OUR LANGUAGE LEARNING EXPERIENCE, can offer us A LEARNING EXPERIENCE AIMED AT ACQUIRING AN AUTONOMOUS AND CONSCIOUS LINGUISTIC COMPETENCE and feed the PLEASURE OF LEARNING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE.

  → WE CANNOT TAKE ANYTHING FOR GRANTED, FOR OBVIOUS, FOR ESTABLISHED AND IMMUTABLE.

  → IT IS NECESSARY TO UNHINGE THE STANDARD NORM = There is no right or wrong, beautiful or ugly, allowed or forbidden in a linguistic environment composed of people with various sensitivities, hybrid skills, different and multiform lives.

  Clinamen (Epicurus): "deviating from the rules increases the potential of a work" - J.Perec; P. Klee
  the space of learning experience is content (Circe, R.Lorenzo)
  the space of learning experience shapes acquisition style (P.Balboni, M.Mezzadri)

From: CLINAMEN- custom-made Italian To: ClinamenOnLine: without confinement Italian

Our experience

Didactic tools, physical space and interaction’s style chosen with care.
The pandemic: pouring our learning experiences into online meetings or renegotiate everything from the beginning and invent a new conviviality.

Clinamen chose to use Free and open-source software tools:

FOSS (or F/LOSS) is software that can be classified as both free software and open-source software. That is, anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source code is openly shared so that people are encouraged to voluntarily improve the design of the software. This is in contrast to proprietary software, where the software is under restrictive copyright licensing and the source code is usually hidden from the users.

my article Clinamen a distanza: italiano senza confino
in Formare... a distanza?, a Circe book
the intervention: https://clinamen.xyz/it/blog/clinamen-a-distance-litalien-sans-confinement
in the event: http://www.inalco.fr/evenement/distances-apprivoisees-enseignement-confine-langues-etrangeres

1. Our classroom (shared space + interaction + collaborative learning) is now a Jitsi room.

   Jitsi is an open source platform that offers us a video chat space.

2. Our tools to support learning and linguistic systematization (personal book, table and blackboard) have been translated into the Jitsi Chat and into tools such as Pads (we often use Etherpad or Framapad services) or, lately, in shared and editable .odt.
   In this way we have even managed to “invent” an additional teaching tool, which is both self-teaching and co-teaching at the same time: our collective notebook on Etherpad

   Etherpad is an open-source, web-based collaborative real-time editor, allowing authors to simultaneously edit a text document, and see all of the participants' edits in real-time, with the ability to display each author's text in their own color. Link spec.

3. All these materials are available to all of us who live Clinamen in our cloud, hosted on Nextcloud in our server Lola and easily accessible following shared links.

   Nextcloud is a suite of client-server software for creating and using file hosting services. It is enterprise-ready with comprehensive support options. Being free and open-source software, anyone is allowed to install and operate it on their own private server devices.
   URL shortening is a technique on the World Wide Web in which a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) may be made substantially shorter and still direct to the required page.

Why did we choose Nexcloud, Jitsi, Etherpad?

• they are Open tools.
• not having passwords, codes, users lowers the stress given by an unknown environment.
• they are tools within our reach, with a very low access threshold

• they are handcrafted and appropriate tools.

  • we need to speak, teach and learn an equal language freed from the narrowed Eurocentric perspectives of grammatical, correct, adequate, fair, dignified, traditional, etc.
  • we deserve to experience this language in free, current, heterogeneous, but situated textual inputs that offer an honest panorama of linguistic reality and give us the tools to observe and understand the multiplicity of linguistic and cultural reality;
  • we choose to learn and teach in ways of freedom even if sometimes we have to go find them and build them to measure, custom-made and it is a lot of work.
  • we want to do everything possible to inhabit an open learning space.