Why Educatioinal Researchers Should Take Risks

• In Event: The Fire This Time: Toward Dangerous Creativity in Intellectual Leadership

Abstract

Educational research is riddled with studies that name nondominant populations as at-risk. Often, though, the causes, histories of intentional purpose of placing large groups of people at risk for the benefit of a few are occluded in educational research. Following a potentially paradigm shifting pandemic and desire to return to ‘normal,’ the timing for reading, writing, and knowing dangerously is an appropriate shift, a radical stance away from repeatedly studying educational debt. Acclaimed Haitian writer, Edwidge Danticat (2010) challenges: “​​Create dangerously for people who read dangerously.” With multiple intertwined pandemics and deep division within and across peoples, education remains political with material impacts. Educational research is answerable to the myriad school board, state, and federal initiatives banning Critical Race Theory, the repeal of civil rights, and outlawing being human and queer, human and trans. Reading dangerously provides an axiological stance to read against a state intent on destruction. Because these policies, laws, and durable cultural practices are all textual, reading them dangerously provides an opportunity to engage agentically while also creating dangerous texts that speculate and imagine worlds where imperialism and extraction are not the norm.

Objective
In this theoretical paper, I draw from theories of coloniality (Wynter, 2003) to posit that education’s imperative is to rescue itself from coloniality. For centuries, formal schooling has been a central place that prioritizes individualism, competition, and linear concepts of development and learning (Khonder, 2000). Together, these pillars of colonialism function to cyclically squelch imagination (Benjamin, 2019) and create a docile population (Bowles and Gintis, 2003). The COVID-19 pandemic raised many questions about schooling, but less so fundamental questions of learning how to collectively live.

Renewal offers a powerful window, and it requires witnessing and reckoning. Educational research is long overdue to reckon with its existence as an extension of a settler colonial state (Tallbear, 2021) that relies on socially created constructs designed to deliver harm. Reckoning requires the maintenance and creation of ways of knowing, also known as research, and repair that does not dabble with reforms (Critical Resistance, 2021) that further carcerality and enclosure. For this shift, educational research will need to rigorously study its own patterns of coloniality that cling to social categories and therefore predictably falter to radically wrest itself from colonial stratification. Educational research, ironically, holds great promise if it can study the mistakes and harms it has created as a mechanism of coloniality without the ranking and shame it has culturally practiced.

Significance
The violence of coloniality could not be more palpable. Rather than despair, this should lead to praxis for interdependent wellness. There is no doubt that mistakes will be made in decoupling coloniality from educational research. For this reckoning, educational research will have to take up Sylvia Wynter’s (2003) challenges of imagining ourselves beyond the current social order.

Author

• Leigh Patel, University of Pittsburgh