Tupas, Ruanni; Paz, Rafael Michael O; (2025) Co-constructing multilingualism: decolonising knowledge in the production of a countertext. Language Awareness 10.1080/09658416.2025.2556935. (In press).

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Abstract

Much research has been done on decolonising education. However, we know little about what students do with decolonising knowledge if they are no longer within formal surveillance of teachers. This is one of a few studies that investigate students’ co-construction strategies in independent group work. Tasked to create a poster that aims to promote multilingualism, a group of undergraduate students from a Philippine university created a countertext through collaborative knowledge-making. This paper draws on mobilising a retrospection approach, framed as a way to privilege practice in theory-building. Materials produced for teaching and administrative purposes were re-examined as data through our research question: How do the students co-construct decolonising knowledge about multilingualism? Such knowledge in this context is best described as ‘decolonising’, meaning it is ever-transforming. We found that students co-constructed multilingualism as deeply linked to identity, as beneficial or disadvantageous to different groups of people, and as something that can mean the presence of local languages only. They did so through critical reflection, collaborative elaboration, and peer epistemic negotiation. Findings tell us that decolonising work in schools is an achievable goal, but the success depends on how much we have prepared students to critically engage with decolonisation and multilingualism.

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