Student Empowerment through Critical Language Teacher Practice:a teaching activity

Abstract

Working from the premise that dialogue constitutes reality as a fundament of human agency, my proposed teaching activity strives to improve students’ understanding of their agency in academic power relations and provide them with safe space to reconceive and realign it with their emergent critical consciousness. In applying a critical intercultural communication focus to intercultural dialogue, the aim of the activity converges with the overarching goal of the process of designing a new critical intercultural curriculum for linguistics in English-language teacher preparation at our department. The principal approach that permeates the proposed activity and will be adopted throughout the curriculum is critical applied linguistics (Pennycook) and critical language awareness (Fairclough), particularly in its aspect of constant questioning of assumptions. I also draw on autoethnography (Ellis et all.) that challenges canonical representations of culture and systematically analyses personal experience to contribute to a more socially just and conscious education (Freire; Giroux). Moreover, the critical pedagogy concept of learning through discourse and honouring lived experience (Boronski) is employed. The proposed teaching activity practises creating specific instructions to question personal assumptions and their impact in broader educational contexts.