Decolonizing the National Theater Standards: Utilizing the Radical Imagination in Antiracist and Abolitionist Teaching

• In Event: Decolonizing Standards, Shadow Education, and Abolitionist Teaching

Abstract

We are in a societal moment where critical reflections upon race, racism, diversity, and equity are essential. This moment demands that educators work together to “resist, agitate, and tear down the educational survival complex” (Love, 2019, p. 89). The US public education complex has sought to control, indoctrinate, and maintain unequal systems of power that intentionally favor White students and position BIPOC and immigrant students to fail. We reflect back ten years upon our work with the National Coalition for Core Arts Standards (NCCAS) to take responsibility for the impact our actions had upon the national theatre standards. With a decolonial, anti-racist, and abolitionist position to examine the standards, we acknowledge, name, and make apparent the document’s white supremacist ideology.

Authors

• Joshua Rashon Streeter, James Madison University

• Gustave John Weltsek, Indiana University - Bloomington