TRANSLANGUAGING AS A DECOLONIAL TOOL IN BI/MULTILINGUAL EDUCATION: A SOCIAL JUSTICE-ORIENTED APPROACH

Aware of Brazil's stark inequities and the neoliberal framing of schooling, this article advances a critical, justice-oriented view of bi/multilingual intercultural education. Drawing on interculturality, a heteroglossic view of language, and decolonial pedagogies—including translanguaging—we analyze thematic activities from a learning resource designed for under-resourced contexts. Organized around culturally relevant stories (Indigenous lives, racism, gender inequality), the material adopts a translanguaging/decolonial stance to reject colonial boundaries of named languages while valuing students' linguistic-semiotic, cultural, and historical repertoires often erased by abyssal thinking. We situate bi/multilingual education in Brazil amid hegemonic ideologies, then contextualize the Bilingual Kids portfolio and examine how early-childhood activities foster translanguaging (García & Wei, 2014), intercultural practices, and multidiscursivity (Busch, 2014) to unsettle colonial norms. We argue that intentionally selected children's stories counter school color-blindness and expand access to plural narratives, enabling more agentive, responsive, and solidaristic subjects (Sousa Santos, 2002). We conclude by reflecting on how the portfolio challenges coloniality and Eurocentric universalism, and on our loci of enunciation as researchers and teacher educators.

Keywords
bi/multilingual education; multilingualism; decolonial perspective; translanguaging; social justice