2023

Iikkanen, Päivi; Ennser-Kananen, Johanna; Intke-Hernandez, Minna; Riuttanen, Sanna

Socially just education calls for recognizing societal power structures, working actively towards dismantling oppression and implementing more equitable educational practices. Cultural diversity has gained a foothold in Finnish education policies and core curricula, but there is a great deal of variation in how themes related to social justice are dealt with on the practical level. As an entry point to social justice-oriented education, we first discuss social identities and intersectionality in language learning. Then we discuss the decolonization of teaching and learning and introduce two approaches to more equitable education: translanguaging and raciolinguistics. Finally, we suggest some further directions towards more social justice-oriented language education. These would entail for example adopting an explicit decolonial and anti-oppressive stance and incorporating pedagogies developed and led by minoritized scholars, activists and practitioners. Raciolinguistic and intersectional approaches would lend themselves well towards this end. Teachers need training and support in implementing these pedagogies.