Solidarity Not Charity: Decolonizing Teacher Education

• In Event: Preachin’ to the Unconverted: Building Community Between Critical Teacher Educators of Color and Their Predominately White Preservice Candidates

Abstract

In an attempt to transform cultural biases in pre-service teacher candidates, I used a decolonizing, critical framework to teach my credential students to utilize the assets and cultural wealth children bring into classrooms (Borrero & Yeh, in press & Yosso, 2005) and channel student personal frustration and social dissatisfaction against the very social system that undermines their existence (Yeshitela, 2005). Decolonizing frameworks recognize that oppression is implicated in the history of colonialism and “writing back” serves as “a recovery of ourselves, an analysis of colonialism, and a struggle for selfdetermination” (Smith, 1999, p. 7). Furthermore, I used a variety of pedagogical approaches to help pre-service teachers think about ways to teach their students to love themselves, love their people, and love their histories, while confronting the pain of their suffering and finding ways to help children and adolescents of color heal from the trauma caused by the colonial conditions they find themselves in (Ginwright, 2010). Even more, I taught teacher candidates to facilitate spaces that allow young people to explore the depths of their grief and foster a deeper sense of control over their individual and collective destinies (Duncan-Andrade, 2009).

With all this in mind, this study builds on existing culturally responsive teaching frameworks (Ladson-Billings, 2009; Nieto, 1999; Howard, 2001; Sleeter, 1996, 2001, & 2008) and is grounded in the tradition of teacher-action research (Kincheloe, 2011).

This study asked:
How are teaching pre-service teachers to critically understand race and class oppression and liberation from a decolonizing perspective transformative for predominantly European-American credential students at a private, Jesuit university?

Traditional data collection strategies were used in the form of analysis of field notes, student work and other artifacts, classroom video, and student interviews. I also used critical discourse analysis (CDA) (Fairclough, 1995) to generate grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). Blending a framework on decolonizing (Cesaire, 1972; Fanon, 1961; Smith 1999) and critical pedagogy (Darder, Baltadano, & Torres, 2008; Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008) provided the analytic basis to render observations into evidence of my argumentative points.

I will use autoethnographic inquiry (Alexander, 1999 & 2005) to examine the ways credential students problematized their notions of self and social change, developed a set of teacher-related skills and analytical practices to help prepare them to critically make sense of their racial and class privilege, and more effectively create academic curriculum that was connected to the needs of urban communities. My findings suggests that the early career teachers I worked with came away with a general understanding that if they did not show urban students that they cared about their suffering in a colonial context – through what they teach and how they treat their humanity – then regardless of how “socially just” the teaching framework in their classrooms would become, then the result would be widespread student disinvestment in learning (Kohl, 1994), multiple levels of resistance to their teaching (Solorzano & Delgado-Bernal, 2001), and ultimately the educational debt we owe to communities of color will never be paid (Ladson-Billings, 2006).

Author

• Patrick Camangian, University of San Francisco