Abstract:

Anglophone settler societies shared a mix of juridical, social and cultural traditions. Regardless of when rupture occurred between Great Britain and each land of occupation, the reverberations of colonisation continue in the twenty-first century. Nonetheless, neo-colonists (cite) are quick to assert the ostensive benefits of occupation—i. e., what have the Romans ever done for us (Monty Python, 1979)—with the imposition of English as a lingua franca cited as perhaps the most positive legacy of empire.

This ignores, however, the deleterious and degrading impacts on indigenous communities, in particular with respect to their indigenous languages. Aotearoa—New Zealand in English—was one of the last occupied lands by the British; Éire—Ireland in English—was one of the first. In both New Zealand and Ireland, English has achieved dominance at the expensive of an Indigenous language: Irish (Gaelige) and Māori (te reo). However, neither language has been extinguished; in fact, both languages are ascendant, in terms of the numbers of fluent speakers, through a complex, post-colonial (Said, 1979) process.

In this new millennium, technology mediates all aspects of life, including language revitalisation. Across the lifespan, teaching and learning occurs increasingly in blended and online contexts (Anderson, 2008). In language learning, a hierarchy of global languages is reflected in this space: English, Spanish, French, Russian, Portuguese and Chinese—each a language associated with empire—offer perhaps the most depth and breadth, in terms of online learning opportunities. However, language learning platforms that arguably reify this linguistic hegemony also have the potential to disrupt said hegemony.

In this paper I report findings from an action research (McNiff, Lomax and Whitehead, 1996; Greenwood and Levin, 2000) project of my own self-directed learning of two Indigenous language—Irish and Māori—using a range of technology mediated learning modes. Data includes the learning materials themselves and a reflective journal to capture aspects of my learning journey. My analysis is framed around the notion of decolonization (Smith, 1999) in this emergent, post-colonial epoque of humanity. In particular, I delineate how learning Irish via commercialised cloud-based software (Duolingo, 2019) is differentiated in comparison with crowd-based cloud-based software (MemRise, 2019) to learn Māori. Further, I contrast these experiences with those from Papa Reo, a paper-based distance learning introductory Māori course delivered by Te Wananga ō Aotearoa, our national Māori tertiary education provider. With foci on student-tutor and student-content interactivity (via email and face-to-face tutorials), the self-directed nature of the Wānanga course offers few opportunities for meaningful student-student interactions (Anderson, 2008).

The act of learning is a process of rewriting—re-inscribing—our sense of our world. In learning Indigenous languages—where I live and where I am from—I endeavour to read the world by reading the word (Freire, 1985). Freire’s initial work was focused on literacy education rather than language learning through popular—literally, the people’s—education. I am trying to acquire enough language competency in Irish and Māori to re-read my world through the mediums of Gaelige and te reo. There are further developments afoot. Māori is one of two languages added to Duolingo’s Incubator, where new courses are developed.

Keywords:

e-learning, language learning, decolonisation, indigenous.