How to Decolonize Your Classroom by Ariana Gonzalez-Bonillas
Gonzanillas Home Publishing May 10, 2017 EDUC 215 Prof. Rubin Wellesley College
These steps do not have to be in order; many of them work together. This is only the beginning. Books can and have been written about decolonizing, and this is just the start of my personal research in Decolonization Theory-&-Practice in education.
Table of Contents All steps are named after protest signs featured on Instagram @xicanisma_
Poem: Love Kids of Color 1. White Guilt Won't Dismantle White Supremacy 2. Respect Existence or Expect Resistance 3. A Woman Armed With Ancestral Knowledge is an Unstoppable Force 4. Fly as High as You Can Without Forgetting Where You Come From 5. Educate, Agitate, Organize 6. They Tried To Bury Us, They Didn't Know That We Were Seeds
Love Kids of Color Writing essays in middle and high school And even into college I was told I wrote too passively And today I realize Of course I wrote too passively I was taught to question everything that came out of mine Or any other woman-of-color’s Mouth I was taught that white men were the be all end all I was taught that their opinions were fact I was told that white men telling me “well, actually” was not an act of violence What a fucking lie “Well, actually” cuts into my skin and makes it question its own validity it brings up the goosebumps as I remember what it feels like to not be someone that is believed in this society My opinions are never regarded as fact My peoples’ version of history is not factual when you look at it through Anglo eyes But thank goodness I don't have those I am not asking for my opinions to be regarded as fact In fact I am asking for white men’s opinions to be regard as what they are Opinions Pieces of sound that do not have to be taken so seriously As soon as anyone’s opinions are regarded as fact Then the rest of us are left to believe that we too can be regarded as fact When in fact we should pull white men off their pedestal Not want to get up there ourselves
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The same thing goes for capitalism For the white women CEOs who want to reach white man’s power and lose their feminism
If your feminism isn’t intersectional, then it’s not feminism So white women, remind me how 53% of you voted for not-mypresident Don't even get me started on white men’s voting It’s not fun being grouped and generalized huh? It’s not fun being told that Mexicans (by which I am sure he meant all dark brown Latinx people) are rapists, and some of us are probably nice people It’s not fun remembering the Mexican Repatriation movement in the 1930s When all Mexicans, Mexico-born and US-born Were coerced into returning to Mexico By the US government It’s not fun to think that the not-my-president has promised that 80 years later So I want to see your pussy hats at immigration reform rallies But not at the front of the line You’re there to support, not speak for us I want to see them at Blacks Lives Matter rallies I want them supporting No Dakota Access Pipeline It’s not fun to have to protest for my life and not just my vagina Besides, some of us women don't have vaginas Or papeles
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But after all of these protests I would love to teach kids of color To teach them that a world without them Is lost That their brown eyes should not be shut To the atrocities that are happening But I want to live in a world where Black and brown children Can keep their eyes open Because they want to learn their history Our history Of how they were trafficked Of how the border jumped them Of how their land was stolen Of how they were excluded in an act of 1882
Of how they were moved to concentration camps “Internment camps” Of how they were shot with firefighter hoses of how the bus was burned But we know this We know our histories So then why are we STILL HERE Hearing about a new ban on Muslim siblings Hearing about deportations everyday Hearing about hate crimes rising Hearing about how bathrooms are up for assault Hearing about the rise of the Nazis again Hearing about racism as a point of pride I have never lived in a post-racial society I have yet to live in a society where our bodies are not stereotyped to the death Where children are still fighting for water Flint, Michigan Dakota Access Pipeline Why Are we STILL HERE Why am I still hearing the lie of “equal rights for all” on “our” Declaration of Independence Ironically enough Our electoral college elected someone with enough racism, sexism, and nativism To match the white man’s Founding Fathers Maybe that's why we’re still here
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My non-white siblings This country was not made for us My non-cismale siblings This country was not made for you either My Native American Indian siblings This land was yours to respect and care for And the lands were stolen out from under you
to be disrespected Is that why we’re still here? Maybe we’re still here Because our education still prioritizes White men and boys Because we are taught that slavery was not “that bad” Because Andrew Jackson was just “doing his job as president” when he ordered for The Trail of Tears Because in the Japanese-American concentration camps “People still lived their lives” They had to! To survive We have to! To survive We have still thrived under oppression But did we have to live under it? Should we have to carry it on our backs while we dance the night away? I’m going to celebrate my siblings of color My gender-queer siblings My LGBTQ siblings My differently-abled siblings Our intersectionality Our identity as politics As I fight for it As I survive As I want my children to thrive My siblings’ children An education that loves them That validates their ancestors’ struggles And accomplishments
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Listen to Kids of Color Listen to their realities and dreams Listen to their discoveries Listen to their self-love Eradicate their self-hate
Listen to them like we were never listened to So that we can get out of here And walk into equity To thrive
When will the required reading reflect us So that we no longer have to defend our humanity?
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1. White Guilt Won't Dismantle White Supremacy
You are not there to save the child, you are there to empower them The stereotype of a teacher is a middle-class white woman who wants to save her low-income urban students. She is colorblind to the ethnicity of her students, she is encouraging, but also gets burned out because students do not want to listen to her, and she sees her students filling the stereotypes she originally wanted them to defy. She wants to see her students turn their lives around in the 180 days that she has them in her classroom, but to little avail. This stereotypically teacher, yet truly all of us who would like to be successful teachers, forget that “the struggle is long and social in nature, one cannot egocentrically base one’s commitment on seeing instantaneous change: One must have the faith” (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2002, p. 84).
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The majority of teachers are middle-class white women, and as of 2011-2012, over 80% of all teachers in elementary and secondary schools were white (U.S. Department of Education, 2016, p. 6). Christopher Emdin (2012) highlights that recruitment programs for public education teachers “sell this image of this is what you can do to help […] [to] stir up a white guilt,” and the teachers carry their white guilt to the inner-city schools, and then “you drop [the white guilt] right on the students that you want to save and you crush them.” White guilt, or guilt in general for those of us that are not white, does not work to dismantle white supremacy. Guilt does not fuel a healthy passion for your students. Alongside guilt, assuming that you know where the kids are coming from, especially if you are an outsider to the community, can be detrimental.
All teachers who come in as outsider to the community they are teaching in, “even if they are of color and/or share their students’ ethnicity, may also bring experiences, privileges, and prejudices that, if left unexplored, hinder the teacher’s ability to relate to students and the community” (TintiangcoCubales, Kohli, Sacramento, Henning, Agarwal-Rangnath, Sleeter, 2014, p. 118). Teachers cannot come into the classroom as culturally relevant if “I’m teaching you based on my perception of your culture. I can’t be student centered if I say this what I think the student wants and needs so let me give them that. Our guilt and our experience and our words make us think that we know what they need” (Emdin, 2012). For any of us, we cannot let our guilt get in the way of our actually teaching. We have to set ourselves up to take into account the feelings, experiences, and thought processes of the students themselves, not just what we think their experiences are. We have to give them a chance to speak for themselves, and not prioritize our guilt over the students’ experience. Not letting our guilt get in the way is a way of decolonizing because we are not coming into the classroom trying to impose our guilt and ways onto the students, we are letting them speak for themselves in a way that their ancestors and themselves had not been allowed to in being colonized.
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2. Respect Existence or Expect Resistance Active Not-learning To start putting away our guilt, we need to listen to the kids’ existence, respect their experiences, opinions, and personal knowledge. Emdin (2012) advocates for Reality Pedagogy, teaching and learning based on the reality of the students’ experience.” For him, teaching is not about equality, it is about equity, “hearing somebody’s voice about what they need, and providing them with that” (2012). If we do not listen, students resist our teaching and thus learning. As Dr. Jeff Duncan-Andrade says, “I’ve never met a kid with a dysfunctional relationship to learning. I’ve met a lot of kids with a dysfunctional relationship to school” (Precious Knowledge, 2011). Students naturally want to learn about the world around them, but they do not want to learn from people who will not respect them.
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Herbert Kohl (1995) observes that students who are not respected, either by their teachers, schools, society, or all, will actively not-learn. Unfortunately, not-learning is “often and disastrously mistaken for a failure to learn or the inability to learn” (p. 2) and is not acknowledged as an appropriate response to oppressive education (p. 28-29). Not-learning is active as a conscious refusal of being schooled for political cultural reasons; this massive rejection of schooling by students from poor and oppressed communities reveals a truth about the major problems of education (Kohl, 1995, 32). To avoid the truth about the major problems of education, “experts are consulted, complex personal or family causes are fabricated, special programs are invented, all to protect the system from changing itself and accommodating difference” (Kohl, 1995, p. 11). Not-learning is a coping mechanism against
the oppressive system, it is the students’ “sense of resiliency and agency [that] operates […] to achieve despite inequitable contexts” (Farmer-Hinton, Patton, Rivers, 2013, p. 5). However, as teachers, our responsibility is to empower our students more than their active not-learning does. Their resistance to learning is a product of being disrespected, a feeling of being unwanted by society, so why should they want to learn to be a part of that society? They resist as a refusal to abandon self-respect – to resist self-hatred. We must acknowledge and directly confront all oppressions in our classrooms, schools, society, and ourselves. We must privilege students’ cultural knowledge and experiences, their community cultural capital, thus decolonizing which cultural knowledge and experiences are important.
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3. A Woman Armed with Ancestral Wisdom is an Unstoppable Force
A focus on decolonizing child treatment and rearing
As teachers, we can also decolonize how we treat our students. Having a colonized method of treating children means we follow society’s hegemonic method of treating children. When the colonists met Native American peoples, they were “offended by the power of women in the clan structure” (Spring, 2016, p. 14). Feeling threatened, EuropeanAmericans started schooling Native Americans to assimilate them to European-American culture, forcing ideas of the nuclear family and authoritarian child-rearing practices onto them, replacing “a peaceful, non-punitive, nonauthoritarian social system wherein women wield power by making social life easy and gentle with one based on child terrorization, male dominance, and submission of women to male authority” (Spring, 2016, p. 14). Child-rearing was colonized since “many Europeans and white Americans equated permissiveness in child rearing with different levels of civilization. Indulgence of children indicated to whites a primitive or uncivilized state while strict discipline indicated a high level of civilization” (Spring, 2016, p. 12). Child-rearing practices translated into strictness in the classroom, but teachers of color are moving to change this model. A child that deals with restriction and strictness fights back with resistance and not-learning.
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To combat colonized ideas of child rearing, Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant (2002) explains Womanist methods of teaching and caring for children in the classroom, and teachers who exemplify such caring demonstrate “an embrace of the maternal, political clarity, and an ethic of risk” (p. 71).
Womanist is interchangeable with black feminist; they understand that “oppression is an interlocking system, providing all people with varying degrees of penalty and privilege […] they believe that individual empowerment combined with collective action is key to lasting social transformation. Last, they […] [seek] the liberation of all, not simply themselves” (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2002, p. 72). Womanist teachers engage in a tradition of othermothering, where the larger community is responsible for the children of the community. By giving othermothers and other nonparents rights in child-rearing all of the children of the community, “African-Americans challenge prevailing property relations. It is in this sense that traditional bloodmother/othermother relationships in women-centered networks are “revolutionary”” (Collins, 1991, p. 123). They resist the colonizers’ thoughts on child-rearing, caring for all students, but especially those that are marginalized in U.S. society precisely because they are marginalized while society only embraces some children (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2002, p. 80). They also do not want to belittle children: they do not withhold information of oppression from them, because to withhold is to disempower (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2002, p. 79).
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Child treatment requires love, not complete strictness and perfect discipline. In Precious Knowledge (2011), the Chicano/a studies program advocates for “the idea of love. Its not simply love for myself, [but] the love of those around me.” Decolonizing means love of ancestral knowledge, love of self and less love of colonizers. Unfortunately, love of the colonizers’ hegemony tends to go hand-in-hand with selfhatred. In reference to the same Chicano/a studies program, they practice a humanizing pedagogy, emphasizing respect, mutual trust, verbal teachings, exemplary models, thus
practicing “authentic caring, a type of care that emphasizes reciprocal relationships, unconditional love, and connection, where both students and teachers realize their humanity” (Tintiangco-Cubales et al., 2014, p. 114). Teacher who do not prioritize kids who benefit from the hegemony – from colonization – and instead prioritize kids of color, practice a love that society does not give to kids of color.
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4. Fly as High as You Can Without Forgetting Where You Come From Community Cultural Capital: Foster their self-love, love and importance of community, and encourage their participation in defending their own education and selves
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When the New Rich started to rise in wealth and compete with the Old Rich in economic capital, the Old Rich developed a system of cultural capital that was objectified, embodied, and institutionalized. Cultural capital prioritized the mannerisms and knowledge of the Old Rich, and has since evolved to prioritize Anglo-Americans. Consequently, the cultural capital that we recognize in society today is the prioritized cultural capital. Even people who do not have the prioritized cultural capital have some type of cultural capital. When Mr. Kozol went to East St Louis and described the destitution of the students he talked to, Farmer-Hinton and her peers (2013) argued that he frames East St. Louis as a place to be saved, but “did not privilege [the] residents’ cultural knowledge and experiences” (p. 5). Community cultural capital is important, and focuses on different traits than the prioritized cultural capital does. The traits that community cultural capital focuses on are possessed by socially marginalized groups and also ignored in the dominant schooling and understanding of privilege. Farmer-Hinton highlights the work of Tara Yosso, who developed the Community Cultural Wealth Model (CCWM) (Farmer-Hinton et al., 2013, p. 8). The six traits that the CCWM measures are aspirational, linguistic, familial, social, navigational, and resistant capital.
Aspirational capital is one’s ability to maintain hopes and dreams for the future even in the face of real and perceived barriers. Linguistic capital is the intellectual and social skills attained through communication experiences in more than one language and/or style. Familial capital is the knowledge that is produced and nurtured through kinship that extends beyond the traditional idea of a nuclear family, thus accounting for historical and communal bonds with others; extended families are central to this type of capital. Social capital is the networks of people and community resources that exist to help communities of color navigate social systems. Navigational capital represents the skills and knowledge one has to develop to strategically move through systems and structures that were not intended for the participation of people of color. Lastly, resistant capital is the skills that are enacted through persistent stances against the systemic inequality that people of color experience (Yosso, 2005).
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This cultural capital that is ignored by hegemonic society is how communities of color resist assimilating into self-hatred, and thus teaching their kids ways of resisting. The kids and communities do not need to be saved; they need to be recognized for the work they are already doing. Communities are important to kids; the community raises them, not just the nuclear family. Therefore, the community should be important to the schools and in our classrooms also. In the Tucson schools with the Chicano/a studies, schools are not just a part of the community; the community is a part of the school (Precious Knowledge, 2011). Decolonizing how we look at cultural capital lets us prioritize the kids’ communities, how important communities are to raising them, and leads us away from the idea that the communities and kids need savingÂ
within the colonization and hegemonic ideas that put them there in the first place.
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5. Educate, Agitate, Organize Reality Pedagogy and Culturally Responsive and Relevant Teachers Kids are usually part of the community in the area where they go to school. Most schools want to be sterile places where “bad neighborhoods” cannot come into the schools, but classrooms should embrace where the kids are coming from. Tintiangco-Cubales and co-writers (2014) try to enact this through Ethnic Studies, since Ethnic Studies should be culturally responsive and the teachers should invest in their students’ academic success “by creating caring environments where student knowledge and skills serve as the primary point of departure” (p. 114), and by “situating student culture and funds of knowledge at the center of the curriculum” (p. 113). Similarly, Emdin (2012) seeks to build a culturally responsive and relevant pedagogy, calling it Reality Pedagogy. He outlines five steps to Reality Pedagogy: co-generative dialogues, co-teaching, cosmopolitism, context, and content. He wants to center students’ experiences without imposing his own views on their lives, cultures, or communities.
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He starts with co-generative dialogues, where the teacher picks out a handful of students that represent varying demographics in the classroom to critique the teacher’s instruction, asking the students what would improve the class, and empowering the students by asking for their critique. Next, co-teaching, where youth have voice to get to teach the class themselves and get to use their own examples in their lives as experts on their surroundings. Then, cosmopolitanism, where the teacher prioritizes how the students communicate with each other outside of the classroom and brings it into the classroom, so that the “forms
of expression and celebration welcome the ways that youth engage and communicate outside the classroom” (Emdin, 2012). Cosmopolitanism also calls for the students to “have responsibility for each other outside the classroom [and] should be the same inside”(Emdin, 2012). In addition to having responsibility for each other, the Ethnic Studies’ community responsive pedagogy prioritizes the students’ home and community life, thus helping students analyze and act on community needs. One method of doing so is through Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), “where youth become critical action researchers.” (Tintiangco-Cubales et al., 2014, p. 115). Students are empowered by learning about subjects that are relevant to their lives and communities.
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Next in Emdin’s (2012) Reality Pedagogy, the context of the students and community is required. Context compels teachers to “be hyperfocused on the immediate communities that the students are from” (2012). Methods of enacting context could be naming areas of the classroom after popular streets in the community, or bringing in icons from the community to talk to the class or to use in the lesson. Acting within the students’ context allows them to see that you are placing value on where they come from instead of imposing your own ideas about them on them. Context also places value on the students’ “agency as producers of culture, and […] on de-essentializing ethnic identities and subjectivities by acknowledging the heterogeneity and multiplicity in people of color’s epistemologies” (Tintiangco-Cubales et al., 2014, p. 113). Once the context is established, content comes last, because the environment of the classroom can set up students for success or failure. When the students feel heard in the classroom, they do no want to not-learn; they are engaged in the classroom, and then content knowledge can develop.
If co-generative dialogues, co-teaching, cosmopolitism, context are not set up, there will still be students that succeed, but they will be succeeding “in spite of, not because of, our practices” (Emdin, 2012). After decolonzing how we treat our students, we are able to center them in the classroom, so that the colonizers’ ideas are not prioritized over the students’ experiences.
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6. They Tried to Bury Us, They Didn't Know That We Were Seeds Recognize that the violence happened, then de-centralize European history and Anglo-Americans Decolonization is partially about de-centralizing European people and the direct descendants of that history, but it is more so about the centrality of people of color who have been ignored in Euro-centric curriculum, whose ancestors and own bodies have been marginalized, beaten, deculturalized, enslaved, interned, trafficked, (illegally) deported, and shot. For kids of color, their ancestors and their own stories have been ignored. We can no longer ignore the violence on kids of color in our educational system. Decolonizing is a way of prioritizing them, liberating them and all kids with education.
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Kids of color are not taught the violence of the history of their ancestors in this country, and to care for them, we cannot ignore the violence. From the nineteenth century, public schools were “primarily designed to protect the ideology of an Anglo-American Protestant culture. Most of the commonschool reformers […] were native-born Anglo-American Protestants,” who called for schools that would be more common, equal, dedicated to public policy, and thus more effective in creating cultural and political values that centered on Protestantism, republicanism, and capitalism (Spring, 2016, p. 5). Yet, since colonial times to today, “educators have preached equality of opportunity and good citizenship, while engaging in acts of religious intolerance, racial segregation, cultural genocide, and discrimination against immigrants and nonwhites” (Spring, 2016, p. 2). Students should be allowed to
learn about and understand “how republicanism, democracy, and equality are compatible with racism and religious intolerance in some people’s minds is key to understanding American violence and the often tragic history of education” (Spring, 2016, p. 10). In telling the truth there is love, like the Womanist teachers are trying to show love to their students. Public schools were not made for kids of color, or if they were it was to assimilate them into self-hatred. Decolonizing schools and classrooms works to change this, make schools that are made for kids of color. Decolonization is a liberatory process since it centers on “a systematic critique of the traumatic history of colonialism on native and Third World peoples and, subsequently, healing from colonial trauma, including the trauma of having learned to see oneself as academically incapable” (Tintiangco-Cubales et al., 2014, p. 111). A decolonizing pedagogy has to include “a critique of capitalism and a transnational perspective for the purpose of transforming institutions, local communities, and individuals as a form of resistance against psychological and social structures of domination” (Tintiangco-Cubales et al., 2014, p. 112).
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Ultimately, decolonizing our classrooms should be out of love for our kids who are not embraced by the society we live in. Decolonizing lets Kids of Color succeed because of, not in spite of, our practices. It lets them have a voice and have input on our teaching. Decolonization – within and through Reality Pedagogy, and Culturally Relevant and Responsive Pedagogy – all prioritize and show love for our kids. Decolonization is about respect, recognition, education, liberation, and above all, love.
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Works Cited Beauboeuf-Lafontant, T. (2002). A Womanist Experience of Caring: Understanding the Pedagogy of Exemplary Black Women Teachers. The Urban Review,34(1), 71-86. Collins, P. (1991). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. Emdin, C. (2012, August 23). Reality Pedagogy: Christopher Emdin at TEDxTeachersCollege (T., Ed.). Retrieved May 10, 2017, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y9tVf_8fqo Farmer-Hinton, R., Patton, L. D., & Rivers, I. D. (2013). Dear Mr. Kozol. . . . Four African American Women Scholars and the Re-Authoring of Savage Inequalities. Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education,115, 5th ser. Kohl, H. R. (1995). "I won't learn from you": and other thoughts on creative maladjustment. New York: New Press. May, S., & Sleeter, C. E. (n.d.). Critical Multiculturalism: Theory and Praxis. 1-16. Precious Knowledge [Motion picture on TV Documentary]. (2011). United States of America: Arizona Public Media. Spring, J. H. (2016). Deculturalization and the struggle for equality: a brief history of the education of dominated cultures in the united states. New York: Routledge. Tintiangco-Cubales, A., Kohli, R., Sacramento, J., Henning, N., Agarwal-Rangnath, R., & Sleeter, C. (2014). Toward an Ethnic Studies Pedagogy: Implications for K-12 Schools from the Research. The Urban Review,47(1), 104-125. doi:10.1007/s11256-014-0280-y U.S. Department of Education, Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development, Policy and Program Studies Service, The State of Racial Diversity in the Educator Workforce, Washington, D.C. 2016. @xicanisma_ • Instagram photos and videos. (n.d.). Retrieved May 09, 2017, from https://www.instagram.com/xicanisma_/ Yosso, T. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69-91.