Teaching Indigenous Language Revitalization over Zoom

In this teaching reflection, co-authored by an instructor and a teaching assistant, we consider some of the unanticipated openings for deeper engagement that the “pivot” to online teaching provided as we planned and then delivered an introductory course on Indigenous language documentation, conservation, and revitalization from September to December 2020. We engage with the fast-growing literature on the shift to online teaching and contribute to an emerging scholarship on language revitalization mediated by digital technologies that predates the global pandemic and will endure beyond it. Our commentary covers our preparation over the summer months of 2020 and our adaptation to an entirely online learning management system, including integrating what we had learned from educational resources, academic research, and colleagues. We highlight how we cultivated a learning environment centered around flexibility, compassion, and responsiveness, while acknowledging the challenges of this new arrangement for instructors and students alike. Finally, as we reflect on some of the productive aspects of the online teaching environment—including adaptable technologies, flipped classrooms, and the balance between synchronous and asynchronous class meetings—we ask which of these may be constructively incorporated into face-to-face classrooms when in-person teaching resumes once more.

Decolonizing the digital landscape: the role of technology in Indigenous language revitalization

Due to colonization and imperialism, Indigenous languages continue to be threatened and endangered. Resources to learn Indigenous languages are often severely limited, such as a lack of trained or proficient teachers. Materials which follow external standards or Western pedagogies may not meet the needs of the local community. One common goal for Indigenous language revitalization initiatives is to promote intergenerational language transmission and use in multiple social domains, such as the home. Could the use of technology assist in Indigenous language revitalization? And what would be its role? This article, emerging from ongoing research, aims to synthesize some key takeaways on the role of digital and online technologies in Indigenous language revitalization over the past three decades since the foundation of the World Wide Web in 1989. The article highlights how Indigenous communities, content creators, scholars and visionaries have contributed to an ongoing decolonization of the digital landscape.

Innovation, reflection, and future directions: An introduction to the special issue on Indigenous language revitalization

Introduction

A A framework for designing pedagogical materials in Indigenous languages: examples from Brazil and Mexico

Many language revitalization programs in Latin America rely heavily on instructional settings that require some sort of pedagogical materials. One of the primary challenges for such programs is to produce these materials and incorporate them into consistent practices. This paper presents a framework that can be used to assess the needs and justify the design choices for books, dictionaries, grammars and multimedia products to be incorporated into indigenous language revitalization programs. The examples used to illustrate the deployment of such framework come from two projects, one in Brazil and one in Mexico, to prepare pedagogical grammars in multiple indigenous languages.

A A framework for designing pedagogical materials in Indigenous languages: examples from Brazil and Mexico

Many language revitalization programs in Latin America rely heavily on instructional settings that require some sort of pedagogical materials. One of the primary challenges for such programs is to produce these materials and incorporate them into consistent practices. This paper presents a framework that can be used to assess the needs and justify the design choices for books, dictionaries, grammars and multimedia products to be incorporated into indigenous language revitalization programs. The examples used to illustrate the deployment of such framework come from two projects, one in Brazil and one in Mexico, to prepare pedagogical grammars in multiple indigenous languages.

Stitching Language: Sounding Voice in the Art Practice of Vanessa Dion Fletcher

This paper engages with the artistic practice and work of Vanessa Dion Fletcher (Potawatomi and Lenapé) from my perspective as a non-Indigenous academic and curator. Dion Fletcher and I have worked together over the past several years through discussions about her work, studio visits, and various events. In her art practice, Dion Fletcher uses porcupine quills and menstrual blood to inquire into a range of issues and concepts including Indigenous language revitalization, feminist Indigenous corporeality, Land as pedagogy, decolonization, and neurodiversity. In particular her work confronts the ways that Indigeneity, the queer and gendered body, and disability are rendered expendable. In this paper I engage with Dylan Robinson’s “sovereign sense”: a transcorporeal mode of perception that is affective, land-based, and formed through relations between human and non-humans. Dion Fletcher’s work makes palpable this sense of sovereignty through its unruly and mutating feltness. Further, her work makes visible feminist Indigenous artistic acts of resurgence alongside the frictions at the intersections of settler colonialism and disability. Following Karyn Recollet, I contend that Dion Fletcher’s work activates an Indigenous affective experience of futurity and creative intimacy that in turn imagines disability and Indigeneity as sites through which new pedagogical relations can be formed.

A Discourse Analytic Approach to Practices of Hawaiian Language Revitalization in the Mass Media

Scholars of language policy and planning (LPP) have recently started using ethnographic and discourse-analytic methods. Examining the collaborative sense-making activity of language users can shed light on how they construct their version or versions of reality by using semiotic resources, creating intertextual links, and referring to language ideologies. This study investigates an under-researched area in LPP: spoken discourse in media talk, specifically in media involved in indigenous language revitalization in Hawaiʻi. Using audio recordings of Ka Leo Hawaiʻi (The Hawaiian Voice) broadcast from the 1970s for over 25 years, the study explores the multilingual practices of the hosts, the guests, and the call-in listeners of the translingual contact zone of this Hawaiian language radio show by analyzing these participants' metapragmatic comments on the use of English and their bivalent utterances.

(Be)Coming Together: Making Kin through Stories of Language and Literacy

Inspired by our attendance at the 16th Annual Language and Literacy Researchers of Canada (LLRC) Pre-Conference and their call to undertake ways in which race, decolonization, and unsettling research can shift the lens of traditional language and literacy approaches, we have come together to experiment with métissage (Hasebe-Ludt et. al, 2009) as a writing and research praxis. Using this “writing as inquiry” (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005) methodological and theoretical approach, we embark upon our métissage of making kin. With research interests in the fields of Indigenous Language Revitalization (Benson), Ecojustice Education (Lemon), and Decolonial/Equitable Teacher Education and Schooling (Thomas), we weave together our micro-stories, provoked by the temporal questions: Where do we come from? Where are we right now? Where do we hope things will go?