Anti-Colonialism Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

This entry explores coloniality, colonialism, and colonization in order to construct the case for building a pedagogy of and towards decoloniality with teachers, teacher educators, and instructional leaders in mind. As the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2007) is fundamentally capitalist and racist, decoloniality is anti-capitalist and anti-racist. A pedagogy of and towards decoloniality interrogates the question, where and how is racism and capitalism systematically structured within educational institutions in naturalized, normalized, and rationalized ways? This line of inquiry is central in a pedagogy of and for decoloniality, which rejects the ways that the colonial project led by Europe and the United States has destructively impacted Indigenous peoples as well as constructed institutions, policies, and practices to perpetuate its aims. As a praxis-centered pedagogy (Grande, 2004; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018), it simultaneously works as process, practice, and condition to examine, disrupt, and transform how the colonial project has normalized and naturalized western-centered ways of thinking, knowing, valuing, feeling, doing, being, and becoming. In this regard, a pedagogy of and for decoloniality works to recenter indigeneity, while also calling for the abolition of white supremacy and world capitalism. While a decolonial pedagogy is not and cannot be formulaic and prescriptive, it can be guided by a values-centered, socio-historically grounded, higher purpose-driven set of principles. This approach invokes the creative, transformative potential of teachers to act as agents of change rather than passive consumers of cultures of oppression. As such, four interrelated, praxis-centered maxims will also be offered within this entry to guide the concrete practices that can employ a pedagogy of and towards decoloniality.