Generative AI and Recursive Colonization in Language Teachers’ Professional Imagination in the Global South

Resumen

This article examines how 20 prospective language teachers at a federal university in Brazil, enrolled in a course on digital technologies in language pedagogy, envisioned their professional futures with the widespread use of generative AI. Using visual narrative methodology, we asked participants to create images that depicted their imagined professional lives in ten years’ time. Nineteen participants responded with an image and an accompanying text, eighteen of whom used generative AI tools while one drew by hand. Analysis indicates that the images converge on Eurocentric repertoires and on well-resourced classroom settings that bear little resemblance to Brazilian public schools. Additionally, neither translanguaging nor plurilingual pedagogies appear in any image analyzed, despite all participants being prospective language teachers. Drawing on critical AI studies and decolonial theory, we discuss algorithmic bias and digital coloniality. We theorize this as recursive colonization, a process in which the generative recursion of imagining a professional future comes to operate in a medium constituted by a cybernetic loop, so that the domain of possibilities it brings forth is composed from a repertoire that is not only the imaginer’s own. Global South educators thus use tools built on Global South labor and encoding Global North values to imagine futures in which their own realities may not appear. We conclude by proposing decolonial AI literacy for language teacher education, emphasizing critical interrogation of digital coloniality, plurilingual justice, democratic alternatives and collective political action.