“Glocalization”: Going Beyond the Dichotomy of Global Versus Local Through Additive Multilingualism

This article interrogates the notion of “glocalization” (Moja, 2004 Moja, T. 2004. “Glocalization: A challenge for curriculum responsiveness”. In Curriculum responsiveness: Case studies in higher education, Edited by: Griesel, H. 21–38. Pretoria, , South Africa: South African University Vice Chancellors’ Association. Google Scholar, based on Castells, 2001 Castells, M. 2001. “The new global economy”. In Challenges of globalization: South African debates with Manuel Castells, Edited by: Muller, J., Cloete, N. and Badat, S. 2–21. Cape Town, , South Africa: Maskew Miller Longman. Google Scholar) as a concept that seeks to integrate the local and the global to address both the need for social justice and the need to participate in a global market economy. The article argues that the relation between the global and the local cannot be explored without acknowledging the inequality inherent in this relation. The concept of glocalization is examined in the arena of language and education by theorizing a dual-medium undergraduate degree offered in English and an Indigenous African language (Sesotho sa Leboa) at the University of Limpopo. This degree curricularizes the principle of additive bilingualism, which both challenges the domination of English (as an expression of cultural imperialism), yet makes it available as a right to students from hugely impoverished schooling backgrounds. The degree simultaneously promotes Sesotho sa Leboa as a language of high-level cognition, knowledge construction, and dissemination; and, therefore, places it on par with English. In addition, the article briefly focuses on the concept of “translanguaging” as one of the resources used by our students to access scientific knowledge.