Best Practices, Modernity/Coloniality, and the Pedagogies of Language

• In Event: Bad Teachers, Riotous Pedagogies: Possibilities and Consequences of Refusing the System

Abstract

In this presentation, I analyze data from a research project on professional teacher education, specifically exploring the language of best practices and how it functions within coloniality/modernity as a technique and pedagogy (Round, 2021). I do this by analyzing best practices within a broader context drawing on two unrelated examples from outside teacher education to shed light on how their use operates within the long-lasting context of colonialism.
In educational settings, best practices are considered the optimal approach, promoting efficiency and effectiveness. In Chile, they are crucial to the narrative of educational improvement advocated by the Ministry of Education. In our research on a teacher professional development program, we observed how the language of best practices limited both teacher educators' and participants' ability to question ideological alignments and fostered feelings of insecurity and a need for certainty. These limitations are reflective of modernity/coloniality's constitutive denials (de Oliveira, 2021) and obscure ideological and practical commitments, making best practices appear as the only sensible option.
To contextualize this analysis, I examine the pedagogies of language embedded in two examples of best practices and what we are taught through their deployment in higher education and in adoption policies to show the way they operate beyond schooling..
In 2022, a controversy erupted on social media surrounding two thesis in gender studies, accused of promoting pedophilia. The university responded by establishing best practices guidelines for thesis sponsors, emphasizing impartiality and balanced viewpoints. This incident both underscored the challenges faced by gender studies researchers and exemplified how best practices can be employed to advance attacks in neutral language, concealing patriarchal assumptions and modernity/coloniality's complicity (Liboiron, 2021).
In the case of the policies of adoptive parenting in Chile, I show how the language of best practices shapes family formation and reinforces the idea of closed adoption to imitate the heteronormative family ideal in modernity/coloniality. Viewing the language of adoptive parenting as a pedagogy shows how it teaches what family is and what may be sacrificed in the process.
Both examples demonstrate how best practices function in establishing normative standards and knowledge construction (Liboiron, 2021). They also highlight what we must forget in order to align with modernity/coloniality's desired beliefs (de Oliveira, 2021). This presentation seeks to provoke rebellion against the dichotomy of good and bad in best practices, encouraging alternative ways of thinking about teacher education outside of this framework. I hope that by showing how they operate outside of teacher education it can be easier to identify their commitments, origins and consequences to the broader project of colonialism in ways that are harder to see if we only examine them within the context of education. This presentation emphasizes the need for ongoing exploration and discussion, as we collectively navigate the complexities of best practices in educational contexts, understanding them as a pedagogy of coloniality in order to provoke movements of rebellion, resisting the dichotomy of good and bad, and imagining other ways to think about teacher education.

Author

• Andrea Lira, Universidad de Magallanes