Decolonizing Educational Mind-Sets

• In Event: Critical Leadership Praxis Is Not a Luxury

Abstract

Objectives

We ask, how do we identify coloniality throughout our educational systems? How do we begin to dismantle them through our work as CLP leaders? We argue for the importance of recognizing the inherent coloniality of education systems and argue for decolonizing lenses and interventions to transform our systems.

Overview of Framework

While schools promote their role in preparing young people to participate as democratic citizens, in practice, these efforts have been limited to supporting the settler-colonial national project of the United States (Tuck & Yang, 2012). Education has been a space of explicit colonial violence, playing an active role in the “dispossession and attempted destruction of tribal communities” (Lee & Attone, 2020). Colonial violence permeates throughout the “hidden curriculum” of schools as well, which is the unwritten everyday practices of teaching and leading that message values to students, including colonizing efforts and attitudes (Regalsky & Laurie, 2007).

Decolonizing pedagogies recognize the existence and consequences of colonialism and create openings for imagining and working towards a less violent future which importantly requires a remediation of the violence in our curriculum and schooling structures. Decolonization is a disruptive pedagogy that requires critically examining and challenging what we know, how we value and devalue forms of that have governed the perpetuation of White, male, Western dominance (Mignolo & Escobar, 2010).

In our presentation, we will describe the decolonial imaginarium as a critical inquiry process in which leaders work together within a framework of challenge and care to bridge the significant ontological distances between oppressed groups and contemporary Western norms and values (Patel, 2016). The imaginarium framework allows educational leaders of all races (since coloniality is internalized by all of us as the status quo) to take in and engage with people of color in intentional and critical ways that allow for them to question colonial moments, practices, policies, procedures and educational spaces.

Significance

Decoloniality is a way for us to understand the systemic marginalization of our students and communities through the cumulative effects of post-colonial intergenerational poverty, epistemic violence, and trauma (Tuck & Yang, 2012), and a way to re-learn the knowledge that has been pushed aside, forgotten, silenced or discredited by the forces of modernity. Recognizing that the process for decolonization is not a straightforward, even particularly clear one, we (three transnational women of color) bring our “outside eyes of criticality” to lift up how the principles of decoloniality can reshape the US educational system (Tuck & Yang, 2012

References

Lee, R., & Attone, T. (2020, March 30). Land-grab universities [Magazine]. High Country News. https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.4/indigenous-affairs-education-land-grab- universities
Mignolo, W. D., & Escobar, A. (Eds.). (2013). Globalization and the decolonial option. Routledge.
Patel, L. (2016). Decolonizing educational research: From ownership to answerability. Routledge.
Regalsky, P. & Laurie, N. (2007). ‘The school, whose place is this’? The deep structures of the hidden curriculum in indigenous education in Bolivia. Comparative Education, (43)2, 231-251.
Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1-40.

Authors

• Reima Shakeir, New York University

• Rehana Odendaal, University of Pennsylvania

• Atenea Rosado-Viurques