Pedagogical and Leadership Practices. Pushing Against the Curriculum: Exercising Institutional Power as a Teacher of Color to Enact Decolonizing Pedagogy and Equitable Curriculum

• In Event: AERA Teachers of Color Handbook Session 2

Abstract

Education is anything but neutral. Scholars such as Applebee (2005); Au (2012) and others have determined schooling, through an official, enacted curriculum, carries the weight and responsibility for content delivery and cultural transmission. The purpose of this chapter is to present findings from a case study involving three educators, two classroom teachers and one curriculum specialist, who pushed against their official curricula to create and enact a decolonized curricula (Patel, 2016), which offered students knowledge beyond the haze of White ontological, epistemological, and intellectual ignorance (Mills, 2007) advanced in their constrained curricula. The work of these three educators offers implications for how instructional power, used by Black teachers can fashion a decolonized methodological (Patel, 2016) approach to teaching and learning.

Author

• Tanji Reed Marshall, The Education Trust