Teachers as Public Intellectuals: An Analysis of Teacher Inquiry Groups and Decolonizing Pedagogy

• In Event: Reclaiming Social Justice Teaching, Curriculum, and Teacher Education: The Centrality of Grassroots Community Organizing

Abstract

Schooling in the U.S. has historically served as a project of colonization, designed to rob People of Color from their true identities and thus, ensure their continued oppression and subservience (Spring, 2010). Teachers within these colonial complexes called schools, therefore, become the agents responsible for carrying out this project on a day-to-day basis. From this anti-colonial lens, teacher preparation programs, in turn, socialize teachers to become neo-colonial agents. Recognizing the direct contradiction between the educational needs and aspirations of Communities of Color and institutionalized teacher education programs, members of the A.R.E. Los Angeles Chapter have created Teacher Inquiry Groups (TIGs), a form of grassroots professional development.

In this presentation, I will unpack the curricular, pedagogical, and ideological mediations in the construction of a particular curricular unit, as they take form within an A.R.E. TIG. The impetus for documenting how teachers move pedagogically within planning and teaching spaces is towards a broader conceptual discussion on the meaning and praxis of a Decolonizing Pedagogy.

This project draws connections between the fields of Critical Pedagogy, Postcolonial Theory, and Critical Race Theory. All of these traditions frame how teachers conceptualize pedagogy. In an era where “outcomes” and “accountability” dominate educational policy and public discourse, while at the same time opportunity gaps are widening between People of Color and White people as well as between low-income communities and rich communities, it is vital to document, analyze, and reinvent decolonizing pedagogical processes. Through this conceptual framework, we are calling for a paradigm shift in how we view “learning” and interrogate the outcome based, standardized view of public education and learning, embedded within a positivist Western tradition: What do learning and development look like from Indigenous and Afro-centered epistemologies?

This project is both conceptual and empirical, building from a qualitative approach to understand what and how a teacher, working within a decolonizing framework, teaches as she guides her students on the path towards humanization (Freire, 1970). I provide a curricular analysis of a unit that was developed in the A.R.E. Teacher Inquiry Group. In the study of this unit, based on the Zoot Suit "Riots" of the 1942, I highlight how one teacher develops meaningful curriculum within the TIG and how she moves pedagogically in reinventing the designed curriculum within classroom spaces. I draw from video data, fieldnotes, and informal interviews with teachers and students.

By coming together to develop curriculum and pedagogical practices that provide a counter-narrative to dominant society, ARE teacher inquiry groups have generated a wealth of pedagogical, social, and knowledge resources amongst ARE teachers, thus reclaiming professional development and their identities as organic intellectuals.

The empirical investigation has lead to a theoretical re-definition of a Decolonizing Pedagogy, where I lay out a working set of principles that distinguish decolonizing pedagogies from more general critical pedagogies, and principles for teaching, learning, and development that define a Decolonizing Pedagogy framework.

Author

• Antonio Nieves Martinez, University of California - Los Angeles