Reconsidering Educational Spaces: Exploring Relationality in Schools Through Indigenous and Queer Theory

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 3:05 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Interracial Solidarity, Educational Possibilities (Table 29)

Abstract

Building on critical and humanizing pedagogies, we extend notions of relationality in schools to work toward tangible and disruptive forms of relating that make participating in oppressive institutions undesirable. Reflecting on our own experiences as educators and researchers, our paper will: 1) Discuss how critical and humanizing pedagogies have sought to revolutionize schooling while upholding inequity and injustice inherent in schools; 2) Apply Indigenous and queer studies to problematize our understanding of relationality in the context of schools; and 3) Suggest that for relationality to be radical, it must be grounded in and responsive to the material realities of students and teachers, and must disrupt and dismantle ways of relating that value power and that reproduce settler colonial ideologies.

Authors

• Sara Jasmin Diaz-Montejano, University of California - Los Angeles

• JC Lugo, California State University - Northridge