Translingual crossings: an enactive-performative Afrodiasporic experience in a pedagogical guide to the teaching of Portuguese as a Host Language for children

Abstract

This article aims at revisiting an activity with jongo Pisei na Pedra (2014), which integrates the Nossa Casinha guide (in press), a didactic resource material intended for educators to mediate didactic sequences (DS) produced to teach Portuguese to migrant children. We consider such jongo activity as an Afro-Brazilian form of expression, characterized by the integration of chants, drum sounds, collective dance and elements of spirituality (Rufino, 2014). The connection between this assemblage (Pennycook, 2017) and an enactive-performative pedagogy, which unites the biological  and the aesthetic roots of poetic languages (Maturana & Varela, 1987; Lecoq, 1997 apud Aden & Eschenauer, 2020), allowed the emergence of a translingual theoretical-analytical framework through which jongo can be understood and experienced as an Afro-diasporic manifestation in anti-racist educational practices, which also empowers its aesthetic, emergent, experiential, embodied and transformative composition. In addition, by challenging the conservative approach supported by the language activities present in the guide, which favors compartmentalization, assimilationism and scriptural monolingualism, the translingual framework adopted in this work helps expanding transformative educational practices in the field of Portuguese as an additional language, by providing a view that accepts complexity, relationality and affectivity as constitutive elements of our experiences in transformative linguistic education.