Teaching Toward a Decolonizing Pedagogy

Critical Reflections Inside and Outside the Classroom

Victoria F. Trinder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367376437
• eBook ISBN: 9781000038149
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Honorable Mention-2021 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award

Teaching Toward a Decolonizing Pedagogy outlines educational practitioner development toward decolonizing practices and pedagogies for anti-racist, justice-based urban classrooms. Through rich personal narratives of one teacher's critical reflections on her teaching, urban education scholarship and critical praxis are merged to provide an example of anti-racist urban schooling.

Steeped in theoretical practice, this book offers a narrative of one teacher's efforts to decolonize her urban classroom, and to position it as a vehicle for racial and economic justice for marginalized and minoritized students. At once a model for deconstructing the white institutional space of US schooling and a personal account of obstacles to these efforts, Teaching Toward a Decolonizing Pedagogy presents a research-based 'pueblo pedagogy' that reconsiders teacher identity and teachers' capacities for resilience, resistance, and community-based instruction. From this personal exploration, emergent and practicing teachers can extract curricula, practices, and dispositions toward advocacy for students most underserved and marginalized by public education. As an exemplar of decolonizing work both in classroom practices and in methodologies for educational research, this book presents tensions and complexities in school-based theorizing and praxis, and in teacher implementations of anti-racist pedagogies in and against the current US model of colonial schooling.

1

July

Hiding Idols

There were many reasons not to go.

Two weeks into an immersion tour in the worlds of education, arts, culture, and history in Mexico had left me overwhelmed, drained, sick, and on unstable footing. Whether it was the infamous altitude of Mexico City or a sudden bout of homesickness, I was feeling shaky and a bit daunted by the realization that the day’s activities involved a 90-minute bus ride over mountain roads.

I could have chosen not to go. I could have spent the day in quiet isolation, sparing my nomadic collective any physical contagion, resting from the hyper-sociality of our research and study fellowship. I could have tended to the relentless nausea that made sustaining any kind of nutrients nearly impossible, as well as the emotionally intellectual crises I’d felt over the course of the two-week immersion in the center of an intense and complicated city, itself at the center of an intense and complicated national history.

I could have decided not to go. I could have spent the day in quiet contemplation of the transformative things I’d already learned—at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, where historic artifacts from Mexico’s different heritages were located and memorialized as much as the student martyrs of the 1960s. I could have written down the details of our tour underneath the Catedral on the main zócalo—the central plaza of Mexico the city and country—where the ruins of the indigenous temples lay sequestered from public consumption meters under the marble floor over which parishioners made their pilgrimages to the massive crucifixes. It might have been wise to sleep, dreaming of our recent coasting through the canals of Xochimilco past the seeds of indigenous harvest, in homage to the early commerce of the original inhabitants of the city. I could have painted my mind with the walking tour of Coyoacán and its cobalt blue that spoke not just to Frida’s aesthetic but more profoundly her take on the world. If my condition improved, I could have repeated our studying of the timeline of Mexico’s early pillar civilizations and the different archaeological treasures of each at the Museo Nacional de Antropología. I could have sat in the hotel café watching the patrons, and internalizing the lessons learned of the purposes of cold leadership on show at the castle at Chapultepec.

There were still three weeks ahead of us, so I could also have been proactive and protective of the diverse experiences yet to come. In a mere week I would be on a gallery crawl through Oaxacan streets in the strange light of dusk, watching colors in the sky reflected in the Rodolfo Morales painting that sang to my heart. Somewhere in between, beyond the recollection of nearly all of us, I would be sampling the benign and vindictive tequilas of the Puebloan deserts. After a sing-along bus ride across the waist of the country, I would spend hours taking notes on the language-acquisition policies of Xalapan schools, seated at wooden first-grade desks. On a Sunday near the end of the trip, we would be carted to a retreat from the teeming streets, and wander freely across the coffee trade history lived through an epic family drama of one hacienda in the Veracruz hills. We would leave soon after observing world heritage artisans dye their own spun wool in the purees of local plants of Michoacán, thinking of the chocolate-sipping at dawn with sweet bread in the footsteps of rural Mixtec radicals. We would take maps locating the radio tower of a Lake Pátzcuaro Purépecha-language station and break pace from the group, walking the back stalls of Morelia’s largest outdoor mercado in search of a hand-made guitar.

I was possibly forsaking all that. I was potentially ruining future years of good health. I was sacrificing it all because this was the chance of a lifetime and I had much to learn.

Something whispered this to me, and so I went.

The bus pulled onto the dirt road outside the cathedral and abbey. We disembarked and allowed ourselves to be herded in the manner we’d grown accustomed to through the wrought iron gate and the heavy oak door. Despite the heat of a mid-July much nearer the equator than any place I’d ever been, the hacienda-style cloister was cool. The building stretched both to our left and right and was lain out as a square perimeter around a central garden, replete with a humble fountain and brick seating area beside the far wall.

There were murals in random locations around the small garden, and the faded colors gave them an eerie but historic air. They conveyed different moments of spiritual doubt from ancient texts, and visually communicated the messages of the different parables connected to each. At one point in time, I might have been able to call up the stories connected to the images, but at this moment the murals were simply an allusion to events yet to unfold.

The large cathedral was to our left upon entering the hacienda, attached at the back of the northern wall by a covered walkway. We’d seen this layout at several different churches around the capital city, but the architecture hadn’t really yet struck me until I saw personally its height and mass here, without any people, and up past the distant mountain ranges into the clear blue sky that felt closer than the steeple.

I was familiar with the architecture, personally and intellectually, from my travels in Europe. The church where my ancestors were buried, as I eventually will be alongside them, looked strangely similar to this one, especially in the simplicity of its faded pale ecru exterior color. The earth tones made me think of the different geologies that must have perplexed the original colonists, expecting to replicate their beliefs, and themselves, here in the new world.

The guide was talking to us about the different uses for the cloister but I was focused on what looked like mountainous desert surrounding this oversized monument to Christianity. The terrain we’d passed through had been daunting even by vehicle, and I couldn’t imagine a hubris large enough to attempt it. I felt certain they did not have the materials necessary to re-create a world left behind for the disappointments of a slow and unfulfilling conquest.

Monuments to one’s own people across England were at least generational gifts that could be eventually appreciated. What arrogance had made them think after the decades to build this, there would be anyone to remember why it was built?

I couldn’t place the hue of the soil and wondered if my eyes were finally caving in to the illness that had wrought havoc on all my systems. The mountains seemed orange—imbued with a light whose source I couldn’t place. As I looked down at the slate under my feet I noted the same color, and its marbling in the brick walls painted over with several different coats.

I had nothing to help me believe I was there.

It was as I had perhaps always imagined Mexico to be—from my own tinted lens of heritage and experience.

I’d been alive twenty-odd years before I realized the brutal sense of loss my mother had felt at her isolation from the geology of her youth. Though I’d been back with her to England on previous trips, I’d yet been too young myself to see it as anything but different than the world I’d grown up in. Then in my early twenties, it somehow felt deeply familiar—as though I’d affected the connections to the world I’d adopted through my parents’ migration and was now dropping the façade—as though geology had reached out and grabbed me from beyond the constructions of culture I thought I’d made.

On my first return with her as adults, I watched my mother’s shoulders drop and her neck straighten and her skin glow in the Atlantic air that had fostered her growth. In looking at the faces filing in and out of the market stalls, I’d seen them differently—their broad faces and solid gaits—and realized there is a community for everyone.

I wonder what emotions flowed in the intersections of lives here in this mountain valley. One long route of history for the people who had always lived here, were of here and for here. These were the people whose joy in their surroundings emanated from them in welcome to those who would take from it what they wanted. Those people on a long perpendicular route, tense with a deep homesickness, desperate to enforce upon others their values and punishments, so homesick for a spire to break the horizon they’d just met, and blind to the spot for all its layered meaning it had before them.

I thought suddenly of the marches we’d just participated in to speak out against anti-immigration school policies spreading across the US. We knew that facing the foreign on our own soil seemed to bring out the ugliest natures of the US. We watched how, despite the ways in which the indigenous of this special place had indulged the Spanish need for spires, their descendants humbly settled without complaint in our gritty and overcrowded section of the city where they’d come simply to save their families.

I considered these two book-ended moments in history, and the ways in which I’d been greeted and treated as royalty here in my students’ homeland while my own government failed to acknowledge its accountability in the phenomenon that forced them northward—only to then treat them as criminals.

My thoughts were hanging heavy on me and I needed to get some air, so I asked if I could head outside and over to the cathedral while the rest of our group studied the artifacts protected in the abbey. One of the guides was happy to oblige and escorted me through the garden and over to the back door.

It was stunning inside—simple in its white walls and wooden pews. I recognized again the elegance in its humble placement of ex-votos and storied mummies. I saw the peaceful blend of the peoples of those two eras only in the graves found inside the floor of the chancel.

I’d been in churches like this all my life and never would have imagined the power of this one on my life, at this moment, in this place. There was a learning here I’d been prepared for but didn’t know—the blend of what I was without knowing and what I knew without being. An aesthetic and knowledge I’d inherited enveloped me and filled me at once with peace and shame.

I wondered where my students in their mestizo lineages stood in relation to these things. We’d seen for ourselves on this trip how important and integral a part of the national pride of Mexico the colonial era was, and I’d been surprised. While the iconographies of popular murals and paintings I’d seen north of the border harkened back to the indigenous eras primarily, I was astounded to learn how reconciled people were about the conflicts in their histories. The only word I could find to describe it was “mature”—that in the developmental trajectory of a country, they’d reached an achieved identity beyond even my own individual abilities, let alone my adopted country’s.

The group was filing back in and our guide was telling me he had the best treats yet for our visit. I couldn’t quite imagine what more might be there, as the whole purpose for writing our federally-funded grant for teacher development and studying so hard through the last weeks seemed suddenly to have manifested already—and I was internally more ready to really see my students in front of me, those of the last few years and those I was going to teach for the first time, and our work together, in a new light.

We ascended the back stairs up to the choir loft. There, tucked into a corner, was a centuries-old pipe organ. It looked uniquely small in the otherwise empty loft space, its wood chipping away from being unfurnished and subjected to climates it was not intended to experience. I realized that I’d seen the pipes from the pew down below and not even registered them, but now I could see them connected to the source. I wondered when was the last time anyone had ever played it and thought briefly of my two grandfathers whom I’d never known yet who had sat at similar instruments inside similarly small and peaceful churches thousands of miles away, on the other side of this history.

There beside the crippled organ, I suddenly knew that despite all the nuances of difference, there were powerful elements of our human experience that bound me to my students and to the crazy world we all shared far away from here. In the attempts to read the world for any reflections of ourselves within it, we were also deeply tuned to the absence of such reflections —and the ways in which substantive inquiry might erase the distinctions between us.

I had images in my mind of the enormous labors of the Herzog masterpiece “Fitzcarraldo”—the teams of hundreds of South Americans who had hauled a 300-ton steamer up a muddy hillside to fulfill some random imperialist dream—and thought for a moment of the legions of people who’d also possibly labored to bring this instrument here to this place, most likely with less of a connection to it than the one I felt. The metaphor also elicited the thought of my students earnestly expending all their energies in order to master a curriculum designed to erase them and which fulfilled the dream of some neo-imperialist far removed from themselves. In the muddy climb to some elusive apex, where would I find myself in the chain of events, I often wondered, and how was this different than the story behind this pipe organ?

We had other places to travel to that day and so were being ushered back down to the chancel of the church. I could feel my color starting to return and the hint of a spring in my step. This sense had been missing since the day beneath the Catedral of the capital, where we’d descended to the ghostly Aztec ruins, overwhelmed and subsumed within their conquerors’ Christian versions. We scattered ourselves throughout the pews. Our guide stood to the north side of the chancel and drew our attention to a medium-sized cross. It stood toward the back of the open space about three-feet tall and built of what appeared to be burnt house beams. Some of the beams looked to be in poor repair and we were intrigued as to the role of something so banal and homely.

The guide held up an old journal protected by a plastic sleeve. It suddenly dawned on me that we’d seen more artifacts here than present-day inhabitants. The town appeared to be no longer much alive in its perch atop a hill surrounded by other mountains. The guide began his story—our heads turned over our left shoulders and our left arms resting on the backs of the pews.

“As we started to uncover the history of the village,” he began, “those of us interested in keeping up the convent and cathedral came across this old diary. It was written by one of the missionaries over a hundred and fifty years ago. One of many priests recounted here his stories of struggles and difficulties as they worked to bring Christianity to the people.

“For the most part it read like most documents of the era. Except for a notable detail. The priest reported here the course of different religious celebrations that had been thrown for the whole town. These fiestas included different ceremonial elements, including a procession for which they used this cross to lead themselves to the square and back.

“On a couple of different occasions, the cross was struck by lightning. Not while it was being carried but there in its station in the middle of the plaza. The first time, the priests were stunned —and took it as a sign of God’s approval of their work. They congratulated themselves and dove more deeply into their intended efforts to serve the people.

“The second time, a year or so later, when the cross was again struck in the same place, they were slightly frightened, and deliberated together to try to determine what indeed their god might be trying to communicate to them. For years they considered that there was a meaning in the two strikes but that because they were not able to read into the message, they should store it away in a secret place so that it would be protected until they could come to a consensus about what that message was. The priest who authored this journal briefly hints here that some people thought the message might be a directive from God to discontinue their work, but that was quickly dismissed and the cross lost to the inner closets of the convent. This diary, in fact, never mentions the cross again after that.

“Decades later, new missionaries came across it and brought it out for religious services. Within a couple of years, reports were made that it was again struck by lightning and then placed at the front of the church. Reports were made to the head parish in the capital, and someone ther...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• 1. July: Hiding Idols
• 2. August: Pueblo Pedagogy
• 3. September: Pretty Books
• 4. October: Huapango
• 5. November: Day of the Dead
• 6. December: Tianguis
• 7. January: J for Jeremy
• 8. February: Everyday Pororoca
• 9. March: Ides and Ideals
• 10. April: Unplanned, Imperiled
• 11. May: Structure and (In)/Verse
• 12. June: Spartans
• Epilogue
• Further Reading
• Index