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Short abstract:

This paper explores the mutual (trans)formation of pluriliterate English-mediated instruction (EMI) and uncertain critical STS pedagogies through insights from applied linguistics, educational theory, and a participatory action research project with the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL).

Long abstract:

This paper explores the mutual (trans)formation of English-mediated instruction (EMI) and critical STS pedagogies. While offering valuable tools for critiquing linguistic imperialism, critical pedagogy risks positioning experts/teachers as uniquely qualified to unveil inequality, tools of oppression, and means of students’ liberation. Drawing on recent theoretical insights involving language, education, and STS, as well as from situated engagement with EMI science and technology education at a university in Japan, this paper suggests a reconsideration of orientations toward control versus range in these interrelated realms. Rather than necessarily entailing the policing of the boundaries of English as a named language and the accurate reproduction of its conventions, EMI can enable a focus on expanding repertoires and poetic capacities for (re)translation with and beyond language in STS pedagogies. Illustrating this possibility, participatory action research with colleagues and students in hybrid and shifting roles between “student” and “teacher” has prompted stumbling, improvised performance, and adventures with the mediation of texts, communication, and concepts along uncertain paths. Indeed, this transdisciplinary scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) project has led to a curious distraction from explanatory narratives that have assigned positions and possibilities in entangled hierarchies of sensible speech, affect, knowledge, and agency. The accompanying reconfiguration of the sensible has not only surfaced deficit models, therapeutic language, and assumptions of inequality in folk pedagogies, but also potentially decolonizing solidarity/agonism. This paper demonstrates how critical STS pedagogy can emerge with EMI from different attention to pluriliteracies with transforming language, disciplinarity, and sensibility.