Decolonization of the Safety Discourse in Education: A Shift Toward Spiritual Pedagogies

• In Event: 42.064 - Race Theory and Educational Research: The Power of "Representations"

Abstract

Schools adopt a safety discourse as a means to sustain white comfort and it functions as a form of symbolic violence for students of color (Leonardo & Porter, 2010). Likewise, many after-school programs serve as ‘safe’ spaces to counter mainstream education. Thus, the goal of this ethnographic pilot study is to understand how after-school programs – that serve as ‘alternative’ educational spaces – follow a safety discourse that originates from a legacy of colonialism in U.S. society. Adopting a decolonial lens, I analyze interviews of after-school program instructors, who serve a predominantly girls of color and gender non-conforming population. I provide a discussion in three central areas, as it pertains to the safety discourse: a) how the intersection of race and gender construct ‘educational space’ to not only function for the comfort of whites, but simultaneously to protect white femininity values and norms; b) the risk when educators imagine healing interchangeably with ideals of safety; and c) related to pedagogy, how the existence of a tension between the safety discourse and critical pedagogy plays a role in the social reproduction of settler colonial ideals. Preliminary findings confirm the notion that after-school program’s safety discourse is a subtle form of colonial violence. Analysis of interview excerpts demonstrate how framing violence solely as a ‘cleansing force’ (Fanon, 1963) falls short in understanding how the current discourse of safety in schools, like in other alternative educational spaces, is not producing the type of spiritual pedagogies (Fernandes, 2003; Figueroa, 2014; Elenes, 2014) that aim to decolonize the classroom and other educational spaces.

Author

• Gema Cardona, Berkeley University of California