My teaching started with Early Childhood Education & Care (ECEC) and evolved into critical pedagogies in teacher education. an ethic of care is still central to my teaching praxis, as well as centering student agency and creativity.
Time to show, not tell!
Moreno (2019), in her article discussing the ways in which her approach to 'decolonial love' has emerged through her community-based research, discusses her relationship to her research as extending far beyond the colonial 'disinterested researcher' paradigm. Quoting Métis scholar Natalie Clark (2016, as cited in Moreno, 2019), she repeats the question, "who are you and why do you care?"
Given my intimate relationship with the violence of settler colonialism, I'm currently approaching my teaching with as much transparency as it represents an inherently non-innocent space (i.e. Lather, 2018).
Myself and my father were born in Fort Worth, Texas, upon the land of the Jumanos, Wichita, Nʉmʉnʉʉ Sookobitʉ (Comanche), Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo), and Tawakoni peoples. My mothers family is from Grand Island, Nebraska, upon the land of the Pâri (Pawnee) and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ peoples. As an American, White, cis/hetero-presenting, able-bodied woman raised in a mission-oriented church in the Bible Belt, far too many 'well-meaning' Christian and/or White women like me have caused harm to communities of color at home and abroad. Additionally, my current role as a teacher and researcher operating in the university means that I directly play a central sustaining and expansive role in the "colonial matrix of power" (Mignolo, 2017).
Given my intimate relationship with the violence of settler colonialism, I'm currently approaching my teaching with as much transparency as it represents an inherently non-innocent space (i.e. Lather, 2018). I'm specifically practicing transparency through showing rather than telling what my teaching is all about; in other words, I’m going to talk about my teaching through the pieces of my syllabus as evidence of praxis.
The Syllabus
In the past few years we have seen calls from international scholars and students alike to ‘decolonize the syllabus’ (e.g. Fuentes et al., 2021; Primiano et al., 2020; Zidani, 2021); many of these efforts might be critiqued as being caught in the malignant crosshairs between Cartesian logocentrism and willful ignorance toward materiality, being concerned with the nature of colonialism on a symbolic but rarely material or political dimension.
As Tuck and Yang (2012) poignantly state,”decolonization is not a metonym for social justice” (p. 21). As such, my teaching practice is not to be described as decolonizing as I do not directly work towards the redistribution of Land to Indigenous peoples. I do attempt toward anti-coloniality through forefronting the Land Acknowledgement of TCU on the first page of my syllabus and integrating art work representing images of local flowers from the Land we are on.
I also include images of Fort Worth, and have content that brings attention to protecting Indigenous sovereignty and contesting deficit narratives of Indigenous peoples. For example, in my Child and Adolescent Development class, we cover Indigenous concepts of kinship in the families unit, including the necessity of protecting the Indian Child Welfare Act and the implications of doing so for Indigenous sovereignty. A pattern of settler colonialism is separating the child from their family, culture, history, and Land, and so, in content of this, I always re-place the child back into their cultural and historic context, and challenge assumptions made about the child’s caregivers.
One particular syllabus reform effort, the Center for Urban Education (CUE) at University of Southern California published a syllabus review protocol designed to increase racial equity and equity-minded practice (CUE, 2020). While this protocol goes beyond simply diversifying the reading list and does make clear connections to the historical exclusion of racialized peoples from places of higher education, it makes minor and superficial changes to syllabi which have the potential to ignite deeper re-consideration of the syllabus, but seem to forefront quick-fixes such as ‘welcoming language’.
I’ve integrated and expanded upon welcoming language into my syllabus through showcasing multiple languages, scholars that are critical pedagogues, writing and explicit letter to the students welcoming them into class, showing my picture on the first page of the syllabus, and sharing information about myself such as questions students might ask me about my travels.
Annamma et al. (2013) construct DisCrit, Dis/ability Critical Race Studies, as a theoretical framework working at the intersections of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Disability Studies (DS). Among the seven tenets of DisCrit they identify is the assertion that “the forces of racism and ableism circulate interdependently, often in neutralized and invisible ways” as well as inherent rejection of singular notions of identity, including but not limited to race, dis/ability, class, gender, or sexuality (p. 11).
As such, I work against ableism in my teaching through an intersectional approach that forefronts resource sharing and student agency. For example, all students have access to a ‘TLDR’ or ‘too long didn’t read’ version of the syllabus which is printed in black and white and given to them on the first day of class. The inspiration for this came to me when I had a student I was working with with dyslexia request that I make a chart of due dates. However, it is not just the ability to read a syllabus but also the conciseness of the syllabus which is necessary. Many students are also parents, teachers, caregivers, workers, or have other roles which simply do not allow them the time to make an intricate bullet-journal outlining and summarizing all these rules for themselves.
As another example, I do not count tardies for lateness, but count any attendance to class as presence, so far I haven’t had any issues with students ‘abusing’ this but have had several students with back to back classes take the time to get lunch, go to the bathroom, or call their family back.