A Casebook of Decolonizing Pedagogical Practices for Second Language Teacher Education Amy B. Gooden

The ‘decolonial turn’ of the late twentieth to early twenty-first century has afforded greater agency for postcolonial nation-states to begin to interrogate, if not attempt to dismantle, the structures of coloniality that continue to haunt them. The interrogation of colonial legacies in postcolonial nation-states impacts several sectors, including law and governance, data and technology, academic research, and education. A crucial foundation for the propagation of the movement is a straightforward methodological approach at all levels of education that can guide practitioners and stakeholders—learners, teachers, academic leaders, and even non-academic staff and the greater public, that part and partially comprise the clientele of basic and higher-education institutions—in promoting and developing a decolonized perspective and approach in teaching and learning languages. This is what Amy Gooden’s A Casebook of Decolonizing Pedagogical Practices for Second Language Teacher Education aims to achieve. True to its name, the casebook presents cases from K-12 to higher-education classrooms that aim to spark meaningful conversations and social participation between teachers and students, leading to the ‘co-construction of knowledge and understanding’ (p. 14) of decolonizing the language classroom. The cases have authentic roots based on the experiences of the author as a language teacher, but they are stylized to simulate the complexity of what transpires in a language classroom through ‘problem-based narrative’ (p. 5).