What's Decolonizing Got to Do With Urban Education?

• In Event: Messiness of Doing Decolonial Work in Educational Research, Practice, and Policy

Abstract

Objective

This paper examines urban education from a decolonizing lens to illustrate the ways postcolonial theorizing can address inequities and chart possibilities for urban school policies, curriculum, teaching and learning. It builds upon my previous work on the use of empire as an analytical category for educational research (Coloma, 2013), and extends its key concepts to examining urban educational contexts and practices. In particular, it foregrounds three central themes: (1) absence of indigenous students, teachers, and communities in analysis of urban schools and communities; (2) imposition and normalization of whiteness in urban school personnel, curriculum, and teacher preparation; and (c) governmental neglect and then control of urban public school systems.

Perspectives
Decolonizing is an important and necessary intervention in urban education research and practice. This paper draws from key writings in postcolonial studies that address indigeneity, whiteness, and governmentality (Byrd & Rothberg, 2011; Lopez, 2005; Scott, 1995).

Methods and Data Sources
Methodologically, the paper pursues a Foucaultian genealogical analysis that traces urban education’s “history of the present” using multidisciplinary secondary sources (Garland, 2014). As a conceptual paper, it draws from three dyads of published academic books and articles – from history of education: David Tyack’s The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (1974) and Stephen Amerman’s Urban Indians in Phoenix Schools, 1940–2000 (2010); from curriculum studies and teacher education: Marie Battiste’s Decolonizing Education (2016) and Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales’ Pin@y Educational Partnerships (2010); and from sociology of education: Pauline Lipman’s The New Political Economy of Urban Education (2011) and William Pink and George Noblit’s International Handbook of Urban Education (2017). These dyads are not meant to be read as mere binaries; rather, they will be analyzed for three purposes – for interruption, comparison, and expansion.

Significance
The paper contributes to the scholarly discourse of urban education by employing decolonizing to intervene in the general absence of indigeneity, the imposition of whiteness, and the governmental neglect of urban schools, students, and educators. Such intervention includes interrupting indigenous absence by foregrounding indigenous advocacy and contributions in urban schools. It also compares the various ways indigenous and decolonizing curriculum is integrated in urban schools and teacher preparation. Lastly, it expands the political economy analysis of urban education from local to national/global scales to magnify how certain dynamics and concerns have similarities or differences in various geopolitical and national contexts.

Author

• Roland Sintos Coloma, Wayne State University