Who benefits from Western forms of education? Unveiling ‘epistemological blindness’ in language teacher education

• Autor(a) principal: Moreira, Maria Alfredo
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1822/55604
• topic: Language education; Teacher education; Epistemologies; Epistemological blindness; Educação em línguas; Formação de professores; Epistemologias; Cegueira epistemológica; Ciências Sociais::Ciências da Educação

The text analyses the impact of current educational policies on schooling and teacher education practices in Portugal with a focus on bilingual/ bicultural students. Building on selected key-concepts and themes that traverse the work of critical analysts, including the concept of “epistemological blindness”, the text seeks to analyse how the techno-rational epistemologies underlie the subtractive forms of education that are imposed on bilingual/bicultural students in Portugal. The narratives of both beginning and experienced language teachers, on teacher education programs at the University of Minho, will be used to show how Western, Eurocentric epistemologies and “epistemological blindness” work in schools to undermine progressive and inclusive education for bilingual/ bicultural children. Their narratives on their experiences and on how they resonate with critical texts on schooling will be analysed, highlighting the difficulties and dilemmas these teachers experience that can be attributed to the disempowering forms of education these students are subjected to and that are seldom questioned. The education of bilingual/bicultural students in Portugal is located on the other side of the epistemic abyss that Boaventura Sousa Santos identifies in modern Western Eurocentric rationality. The naturalization of their invisibility in Portuguese schools and the absence of a critical multicultural teacher education programs are very much justified by the prevailing curriculum and teacher education policies and practices, but also by the ‘teaching to the test’ classroom practices that disempower both students and teachers.