WP328. Decolonizing academic literacies through cariňo pedagogies: A narrative inquiry from a Master’s program in multilingual education

The internationalization of postgraduate education at home through the use of English as a Medium of Instruction and the hiring of foreign faculty is seen by institutions in non-English dominant countries as an opportunity for local multilingual students to expand and share knowledge with international academic communities. On the other hand, such environments can foment racial and linguistic hierarchies of knowledge production that lead to anxiety and marginalization of local students. In this paper, I describe efforts to navigate myself and my students towards both academic achievement and self-esteem through the use of cariño [caring] as a pedagogical stance. I aim to show why I believe my positioning of cariño as “academic mama” and “mama bear”, and recall of students’ responses to this stance, are aligned with the possibilities of cariño as a decolonizing pedagogy in a multilingual English-medium context.