LANGUAGE TEACHING AS A STAGE OF LANGUAGE POLITICS: MOBILIZATION OF GENDER REPERTOIRES

ABSTRACT

In order to discuss language teaching as a stage of language politics (RAJAGOPALAN, 2011), we begin this article by pointing out that linguistic and educational policies are discourses and texts produced by multiple sources and resulting from many disputes (LOPES, 2006). We exemplify two of these disputed fields using the most recent legal text of Basic Education, a Base Nacional Comum Curricular (National Curricular Common Base). The first field refers to the establishment of the English language as a compulsory curricular component of the area of Languages in the final years of Ensino Fundamental (Elementary Education), and the second refers to the deletion of the terms gender and sexual orientation of the document. We also argue that policies influence, but do not determine what happens in school practices (LOPES, 2006) and we resort to Biesta (2015) to point out that, ultimately, it is up to teachers to make decisions about the three educational purposes - qualification, socialization and subjectification - as they constantly deal with new situations that require contextual judgment. Next, we highlight that the focus of our research group has been on subjectification and socialization and that we have drawn on theorizations of Critical Applied Linguistics, Queer Pedagogy and Decolonial Thinking. Finally, we present a brief discussion of our work, taken from a Master’s study, the context of which was an English-language classroom of a public school in Goiânia (HOELZLE, 2016). This discussion, in which gender identities are problematized, shows that, by privileging subjectification and socialization, we are not promoting English, but rather the people who use that language.

Keywords:
language teaching; language/educational politics; gender; subjectification