Local Knowledge on Language and Education: A Special Issue of the Journal of Language, Identity, and EducationSuresh Canagarajah This special issue demonstrates how local knowledge can productively complicate a few representative fields in the discipline--literacy practices, sociolinguistics and language death studies, English-language teaching, and bilingual education. The studies display that locality is indeed relational, as each author adopts a stance relevant to his or her own context. If the studies represented in this issue succeed in showing the critical and transformative power of local knowledge, this should convince scholars of the value of providing space for other localities in academic knowledge construction. The editors hope this issue serves to prove the importance of maintaining an ongoing conversation with forms of local knowledge--if not to respect the aspirations and independence of marginalized communities, then at least for the common academic pursuit of developing valid knowledge constructs. |
