Learning and Unlearning at the End of the World: Toward a Black Travesti Radical Imagination Against Colonial Pedagogy (original) (raw)
Intersecting Critical Pedagogies to Counter Coloniality (by Cathryn Teasley & Alana Butler)
The SAGE Handbook of Critical Pedagogies (3 volume set), 2020
Chapter in book: Steinberg, Shirley R. & Down, Barry (Eds.) (2020). The SAGE Handbook of Critical Pedagogies (Vol. 1, pp. 186–204). London: SAGE Publications Ltd. https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/the-sage-handbook-of-critical-pedagogies/book257052#preview Critical intersectionality informs the analysis conducted in this chapter of three overlapping epistemological approaches to denouncing and fighting racist colonialities in and through education: critical anti-racist and anti-colonial pedagogies with strong links to Critical Theory; postcolonial pedagogies emerging mostly from non-Western Cultural Studies scholarship in the English language; and decolonial pedagogies influenced by alternative perspectives on Development Theory and Social Theory arising mainly from Latin America and the geopolitical South. The aim here is to identify the convergences among these various epistemologies in order to forge synergetic pedagogical practices capable of countering the neocolonial forces of racist neoliberalism and patriarchy so characteristic of the dominant world-system today. Keywords: Racism, coloniality, intersectionality, epistemology, critical pedagogy
Feminist Teacher, 2018
In March 2015, the State University of New York Press published the fourth edition of _This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color_, one of the most cited books in feminist theorizing that arguably turned the tide into what we today call intersectional feminism. Fall 2015 was the first school semester where the book was back in press again, and so it took a prominent, foundational role in my courses for both content and philosophical disposition. In those classes where I actually assigned the text, I was curious to see how students would respond to this canonical book that had never been assigned in my own college coursework, though a large part of that work centered on WGS. Here I was, at this auspicious occasion, teaching as a Black-FeministCompositionist within university knowledge systems that have denied the intellectual presence of the life-sustaining women thinkers/activists for my life as both teacher and student. From the vantage point of race-radical black feminist teaching that honors legacies like _This Bridge_, two goals for my teaching seemed obvious: 1) the need to vigilantly recognize and critique the modes of racial violence that structure learning today and 2) the need to pedagogically intervene in the neoliberalist logics that govern the way language and writing are treated as white discursive processes. As a compositionist- rhetorician, my pedagogical theories focus sharply on language and writing, the place and space where we most often impose the most violence and social control in higher education. As a black feminist, however, my politicization of language and writing under the institutional domain of white (university) supremacy takes on significant new identities and passions. Inspired by one particular student’s text, experiences, and particular reactions of college literacy/learning in my first semester using the latest edition of _This Bridge Called My Back_, I interrogate colonial and imperial ideologies (Paperson 2010) shaping schooling/literacy for racially/economically subjugated youth of color and the ways race-radical black feminist thought offers an alternative praxis for teaching and learning.
Unsettling Colonial Structures in Education through Community-Centered Praxis
Journal of Critical Scholarship on Journal of Critical Scholarship on Higher Education and Student Higher Education and Student Affairs Affairs, 2022
In the context of settler colonialism in the US, mainstream education practices function as ongoing enactors of colonial processes. Decolonizing pedagogy seeks to challenge these dominant practices by centering place, Indigenous epistemologies, and rehumanizing values. In this paper, we discuss how faculty and students used community-based experiential learning projects (CBEL) to challenge these dominant and normative educational structures. By integrating an anti-racist and anti-colonial lens, CBEL projects themselves can work to dismantle power structures, build community, and promote experiential learning in a variety of educational spaces. The student projects presented here seek to unsettle colonial educational frameworks of white supremacy and white privilege by promoting counter-hegemonic critical thinking skills and incorporating culturally sustaining work with college faculty/ students, outdoor educators, K-12 teacher preparation, and Indigenous communities.
In Dialogue: Radical Futures of Black Literacies and Black Education
Research in the Teaching of English
a conversation that named and honored our origins and looked to our futures. Joyce reminded us that the traditions of self-determination, self-awareness, and radical Black study are our inheritance to claim and cannot be contained nor exhausted by the formal structures of the academy, nor the seductive enclosures of nation-state narrative reckoning. The academy is just another place and we must constantly return to our source: The lineage, the genealogy, the heritage, the people that sacrificed for you to get here, that's what you need to be awed by. In recognizing that structures do not contain freedom, we can move toward liberation. While limited by page constraints, we are incredibly excited to be able to offer extended access to the conversation via an audio podcast that accompanies the digital publication of this In Dialogue. We conclude this introduction by again thanking our participants for their time and willingness. As editors, this opportunity remains a singular, unforgettable moment in our tenure with RTE. NAITNAPHIT LIMLAMAI: What does an insistence on the always already existing practices of Black creation mean for imagining the aims of justice-oriented pedagogies in classrooms and communities?
Decolonization Indigeneity Education Society, 2012
This paper addresses some serious questions in the discussions around Black/African diasporic education: As African scholars how do we begin to pioneer new analytical systems for understanding our local/Indigenous communities and what are the challenges we are likely to be faced with? What are the intellectual and political merits of developing and promoting our own "home grown Indigenous perspectives steeped in culture-specific paradigms" (Yankah, 2004, p. 26) in the Western academy? This is an opportunity and a challenge in the struggle to save myself/ourselves from becoming "intellectual imposter[s]", simply good at mimicking dominant theories and knowledges (Nyamnjoh, 2012) in the [Western] academy. We need to replace our 'cultural estrangement' with a 'cultural engagement' in the pursuit and promotion of African/Black education in Diasporic contexts. For African learners we need develop theoretical prisms or perspectives that are able to account for our lived experiences and our relationality with other learners, prisms rooted in our cultures, histories and heritage. I intervene in the discussion through transgressive pedagogies, by way of Indigenous epistemologies, to seek different ways for educational transformation for all learners. I borrow the ideas of pioneering Black/African scholars like W.E.B. Du Bois and Franz Fanon as I articulate an 'Indigenist anticolonial' framework for understanding issues of Black/African education for the 'global good'. I use my long standing work in the Canadian school system to ground issues in the discussion. Nyamnyoh (2012) notes, in writing about the Diasporic encounter, that as those who move and/or are forced to move, we cannot position ourselves simply in relation to those we meet on 'Heritage knowledge' for promoting Black/African education 103 the journey. We must stake out our own discursive and political positions. We must be true to our authentic selves as African subjects of knowing.
Locating Colonialism in Education
Intro: Most people are completely unaware that the form and content of contemporary education, including Aboriginal studies, is rife with a complex interplay between racism and (neo)-colonialism. While some realize that racism towards visible minorities ‘may’ play a role in student success, very few realize that racism directed towards Indigenous Peoples has a distinct form. Aboriginal societies have an integrity that is separate from any Canadian identity, linked to Indigenous societies’ distinct philosophies and historic relationship to the land. Therefore insofar as education validates state authority, it tends to undermine the vested interests of Indigenous societies. Approved educational narratives preference the evolving Canadian narrative which, through selectively choosing stories which construct a dominant euro-Canadian and ‘multicultural’ construct, legitimizes Canadian and multicultural national identities at the expense of Indigenous Nations’ grounded sovereignties. This content, along with the structure and pedagogy of education systematically place Indigenous Peoples in a marginal position in the classroom and in wider society through partial and insignificant placement of their histories, geographies, knowledges, and contemporary realities in the educational environment. While considerable research focuses on curriculum as the focal point for anti-racist and anti-colonialist reform, it is the entirety of the structural frameworks and pedagogy of education (the philosophy of education, ideas of what constitutes teaching/learning, the presumption of neutrality in education, the role of the various actors in the educational environment, and the praxis of education), and how the curriculum is situated/embodied in these structural forms, that are deeply constitutive of the racist and colonialist construct. Together, these racist and colonial structures and habits within education, serve to delegitimize Indigenous past and present geographies and to produce a marginal position for Indigenous students and their cultures within the classroom and hence the larger society in ways that cannot be addresses by the simple correction of language in curricular documents.
The continuous refusal of colonial permanence as a pedagogy
2020
When thinking about how to 'decolonize' the classroom, and more specifically how we can embrace emotions and create open, transformative spaces, our point of departure must always be the realization that we, students and lecturers, are 'in it together'. The realization that study has been made impossible under the conditions in which we are being made to operate by and within the University: the realization that lecturers and students are (being) put together in the classroom under, what Ann Laura Stoler would call, similar conditions of duress. Albeit not entirely the same, these similar conditions under which we are being made to operate make 'decolonizing education' an incredibly difficult task, especially if students and lecturers are separated. A separation that doesn't only happen along the lines of hierarchy, but very much also along the lines of the belief that students are the 'enemy', or more specifically, students 'ask too much of our time'. This 'time question' is of course interesting, especially when the students aren't the cause of our time issues, but rather these issues emerge out of administrative and financial policies. In other words, the conditions under which we are being made to operate are structured along the lines of a racial-patriarchal-capitalistic logic on which the University is build and operates. This is of course why we speak of 'decolonizing the University', because we work from the understanding that the University is very much build upon various colonial histories and in so many cases the University is a direct result of colonialism.
Decolonial approaches to school curriculum for Black, Indigenous and other students of colour
London Review of Education, 2022
This article analyses findings from a research project examining the Pear Tree Community School in Oakland, California, USA – a small, social justice-focused school primarily serving Black, Indigenous and other students of colour in grades from kindergarten to Grade 5. Through this multi-year case study, which included observations, interviews and focus groups, this article presents data from interviews with teachers and administrators who explain how they decolonise their primary school classroom curriculum, particularly amid national and global issues, such as heightened racial violence and increasingly polarised political discourse, which adversely impact the families and communities to which students belong. Teachers and administrators share concrete examples of decolonial approaches at the school level and within their classroom curricula that centre the lived experiences and histories of communities of colour. This article contributes an empirical study of one school’s decolon...
Decolonizing the Classroom: Settler Colonialism, Knowledge Production, and Antiracism
Global Perspectives on Dialogue in the Classroom, 2021
As scholars and educators, it is critical for us to explore the racialized dimensions of knowledge production and its effects in the classroom. As a Chicana of Apache descent, I feel obligated to apply decolonial approaches to pedagogy. In an academic context, decolonization has come to mean challenging the racist ideologies that produce hierarchies of knowledge systems/worldviews and peoples. While there is no single perfect approach to decolonizing your pedagogy, it could mean interrogating our assumptions around what constitutes legitimate and rational knowledge in the academy. By analyzing the ways racialization continues to stratify peoples and resources, students are enabled to listen without judgment and are motivated to explore collective solutions to material inequities.
Confronting Colonial Representations Postcolonial Directions in Education
2015
This article explores Latina representation and questions the use of research for the purpose of rendering the Latina "knowable" in the benevolent hopes that her strengths and resources will be celebrated by the dominant group. Drawing on Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed, the author argues that traditional research may unwittingly parallel the coercive function of traditional theater. The author argues instead for a revolutionary performative research "for ourselves and each other" that disrupts Latina myths, recognizes how spectacles are created to support the interests of national and transnational capital, and aims at a pedagogy of liberation that involves participants as actors in the process of inquiry and where advocacy and intervention for equity are central components of reciprocal relationships.
Culturally Relevant Education; Reclamation & Power the Route of Ma’at: A Response to Anti-Blackness
Open Access Journal of Education & Language Studies, 2024
The intersection of anthropology and African Centered Pedagogy is an opportunity to explore the connections and reflections of the field. African Centered Pedagogy is a discipline of study that aims to explore how cultural practices, beliefs, and values shape educational processes and outcomes in African communities. Anthropologists study the diverse cultural practices of African societies, including their traditional ways of transmitting knowledge and educating their youth, while African pedagogy seeks to understand the cultural and historical context of education in Africa and its relationship to experiences in African societies. Anthropology, as a discipline that studies humans and societies, provides a framework for understanding the diversity of cultural practices and how they can influence education in different contexts. African pedagogy, on the other hand, is concerned with developing a culturally relevant and responsive approach to education in Africa. This approach recognizes and incorporates African cultural knowledge, values, and practices into the educational process to enhance the relevance and effectiveness of education. George (2017) suggests that the intersection of anthropology and African pedagogy, therefore, seeks to explore how anthropological theories, methods, and concepts can be applied to understanding the cultural and social contexts of education for people of African descent. This involves examining the role of culture in shaping educational practices, the impact of colonialism and globalization on African education, and how African pedagogy can be used to promote a culturally responsive and relevant educational system. By the inclusion of these two fields of study, scholars and practitioners can develop a better understanding of the complexities and nuances of education in African societies and work towards creating educational systems that are more inclusive, culturally relevant, and empowering for African learners.
Remembering an Apocalyptic Education Revealing Life Beneath the Waves of Black Being
Root Work Journal , 2020
We write, individually and collectively, as Black educators attempting to survive the ravages of schooling. Along with a host of Black people, we too believed our schooling was a means toward liberation – a saving grace and way to honor the resilience of our people and their resistance to national investment in their undoing. We conflated our humanization with matriculation in schools. We now recognize the inextricable link between our social death and the function of schools. We have witnessed and experienced the social reproduction of Black death that schools rely upon for national order. As survivors, we lay to rest the schooling project, engaging Christina Sharpe’s (2016) mournful meditation on the Wake to exhume how even critical education work can reinforce the very projects it seeks to fight against. We hold ceremonial space for prospective and veteran educators across the K-20 continuum to re-conceptualize their curricular posture and join us in a final farewell to schools. From Shujaa (1993), we distinguish schooling from education and propose the Root Work of Apocalyptic Education, a meditation, a posture, an epistemological stance rooted in African ancestral ways of knowing (Ani, 1994; Fu- Kiau, 2014) to help us make sense of our loss and usher us into new ways of existing and being beyond the afterlife of schooling.
Pedagogies in the Flesh Building an Anti-Racist Decolonized Classroom
Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 2019
Drawing on queer and women of color theoretical frameworks including Cherrie Moraga's "theory in the flesh," M. Jacqui Alexander's "fire" metaphor, and Grace Chang's "Where's the Violence?: The Promise and Perils of Teaching Women of Color Studies," I discuss what I call "pedagogies in the flesh," which urge educators to challenge white entitlement and empower women and queer students of color, disrupting psychic racial violence in the college classroom.
Teaching Black Canada(s) Across Borders: Insights from the Caribbean and United States
2016
This article offers two unique and overlapping perspectives that explore the challenges and practices faced when teaching and researching Canada from the Caribbean and the United States. Acknowledging that curriculum, which ontologically and epistemologically influences the norms and values of the learning environment, is not a neutral document (Ross 2001, 1) the authors focus on how they enact curricula outside of Canada to discuss issues of rights and diversity as well as to challenge hegemonic narratives of white Canadian nation-building and historiography and ideas of Canada as a benevolent nation-state. Specifically, the authors examine (1) the ways in which assumptions about power and privilege play out in the classroom by either reinforcing or challenging established North/South relations; (2) how the black Canadian experience can be used to disrupt the U.S. black nationalist discourse and allow for an elaboration of the black or African Diaspora; (3) how dominant notions of ...
Disrupting Colonial Narratives in the Curriculum
Within the field of critical education studies, scholars argue that social studies curriculum should address colonialism. This article presents a single case study of an eighth grade social studies teacher, and how vestiges of colonialism were evident in his classroom. While class lessons and discussions offered opportunities to engage and challenge colonialism, the teacher opted to either normalize colonialism or erase its influence. Treating colonialism as normal or non-existent in the curriculum does not acknowledge how endemic colonialism is within society, and perpetuates an ideology that continues to marginalize the colonized and their contributions to society.
How African Nova Scotians envision culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy as civic repair
British Journal of Sociology of Education, 2021
African Nova Scotians constitute the largest multigenerational Black Canadian community, with 400 years of presence in Atlantic Canada. Despite the end of de jure school segregation in 1954, African Nova Scotians' social and cultural capital were not incorporated in curricular and pedagogical practices. Using the theoretical framework of cultural trauma, this article draws from a qualitative study conducted using semi-structured interviews and focus groups with sixty participants. A cultural trauma process takes place after a traumatic event and involves a cycle of meaning-making and interpretation that can result in demands for reparation or civic repair. This study illustrates how through the cultural trauma process grounded in their collective memory, African Nova Scotians articulate an aspiration for culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy as a form of civic repair. This transformative pedagogy would facilitate a reconnection with their heritage and a fulfilment of the democratic goals of public education.
Critical Studies in Education, 2023
In this Black feminist critical inquiry, I theorize the politics of race, gender, and geography in the context of a liberatory Black pedagogical space located in the United States. Using curated interview and observation data, I position an anti-racist pedagogue as a cartographer who employed method, content, style, and technique to map freedom routes away from schooling, a Dumasian site of suffering for Black students. I paint a narrative portrait that foregrounds sights, sounds, and felt tensions emerging from two manifestations of Black affective networks that constellated in the Black male critical pedagogue’s classroom. Ultimately, I call for attention to the construction of liberatory education spaces created to address the comfort and needs of not only racially minoritized learners but also students who embody sexes, genders, and gender performances marginalized in white-dominant culture. Such pedagogical spaces, I argue, can be a refusal to indulge the ontological, epistemological, and existential project of whiteness.