Reconceptualizing Teaching Practice: Lessons on Conceptual, Curricular, and Pedagogical Change Toward Decolonization

• In Event: Diversity, Equity, and Social Justice in Teacher Education

Abstract

Enlightened by a student teaching presentation in a foundational educational studies course, this paper documents a narrative-based self-study of oppression in the researcher’s classrooms and teaching. The resulting commitment was simultaneously situated among and between arenas: conceptual, curricular, pedagogical, leading to course revision. This paper explores the possibilities and complexities of how these dimensions are linked in intricate ways and how they coexist to inform a journey to reconceptualize practice. The findings suggest the ways that decolonizing practices can be relevantly enacted is by acknowledging the dispossession of power from marginalized groups, addressing those racial and power dynamics, and dismantling the white supremacy that will continue to be perpetuated in educational structures without explicit resistance.

Author

• Chanelle Wilson, Bryn Mawr College