*Article* **Unsettling the Hegemony of 'Western' Thinking: Critical Reflection on My Journey to Understanding Campesino-a-Campesino Pedagogy**

**Roseann Kerr**

Health Sciences, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, ON P7B 5E1, Canada; rkerr@lakeheadu.ca

**Abstract:** In the field of education for sustainability, there is a call to consider diverse livelihoods and world views beyond dominant anthropocentric, scientific, and 'Western' ways of understanding and living. For scholars and educators trained in 'Western' culture, this is complicated by how this dominant culture is infused in all our ways of thinking and being. This paper explores the authors' journey to unsettle their 'Western' thinking through analysis of reflexive field notes taken during field research. Data is shared from the author's doctoral study of Campesino-a-Campesino (CaC) as an anti-racist pedagogy. The paper tells a story of the unsettling of the author's assumptions about research, race, development, and education prompted by field experiences and guided by critical educational ethnography. An interdisciplinary approach to analysis is used including scholars in critical race theory, TribalCrit, Indigenous education, decolonization theory, and post-development theory. Conclusions illuminate researcher reflexivity, understanding critical context, learning the history of research, and shifting which scholars are considered in the analysis as crucial in the process of decolonizing the study of anti-racist pedagogies for sustainability.

**Keywords:** decolonizing research; pedagogy; sustainability; anti-racist; critical ethnography; reflexivity; development

**Citation:** Kerr, R. Unsettling the Hegemony of 'Western' Thinking: Critical Reflection on My Journey to Understanding Campesino-a-Campesino Pedagogy. *Societies* **2022**, *12*, 76. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc12030076

Academic Editor: Ranjan Datta

Received: 27 February 2022 Accepted: 28 April 2022 Published: 4 May 2022

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**Copyright:** © 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

#### **1. An Invitation to Unsettle and Expand**

Sustainabilities (emphasizing the plural) recognize that there are multiple ways sustainable livelihoods can and should manifest in diverse geographic, social, cultural, and political contexts. This plurality invites readers to consider sustainable livelihoods that do not originate in Western/Euro-American world views but originate in Indigenous communities and other racialized communities, and emerge from multiple ways of knowing and being. Scholars of education for sustainability call attention to the need to consider a diversity of values and livelihoods that go "beyond the dominant anthropocentric, scientific and 'Western' materialist ways of viewing the world to include local and Indigenous perspectives" [1] (p. 407). Unfortunately, historically, through the projects of colonization, development, and modernization, these local and Indigenous perspectives have been discounted as primitive, backward, sometimes ignored, and often systematically and forcibly erased [2–6]. The subjugation of knowledge and people has been justified through colonial logics of white supremacy that encode white culture and knowledge as superior [7]. Kahnawake Mohawk scholar Taiaiake Alfred explains that the "basic substance of the problem of colonialism is the belief in the superiority and universality of Euro-American culture" [8] (p. 109). The dominance of Western/Euro-American ways of knowing in global society continues to reinforce the illusion that 'Western' knowledge and white culture are 'normal' and universal [6,9]. As Walsh explains, "the problem is not with European thought in and of itself but with the intimate entanglement of such thought to the processes and projects of modernity and, following Quijano, the coloniality of power" [6] (p. 12) The hegemony of Western/Euro-American thought continues to reinforce power relations that favor knowledge (and people) that are already privileged and marginalize knowledges (and peoples) other than Western/Euro-American [4,10,11].

The idea of an anti-racist approach to sustainability invites researchers, educators, and practitioners to unsettle the hegemony of Western/Euro-American thought and expand our thinking about sustainability to recognize that there are many ways of knowing and being that are legitimate and should be equally respected. Anti-racist approaches act in ways that reduce racial inequalities and hold that "racial groups are equals and none needs developing" [12], (p. 24). Among the many aspects of anti-racist approaches, this paper focuses on ways researchers, educators, and practitioners of sustainability can promote equity by challenging the privileging of Western/Euro-American ways of knowing over other knowledge and revaluing marginalized ways of knowing and being and the people who hold them.

As George Dei explains, anti-racism necessarily involves "the privileged acknowledging their relative power and a preparedness to interrogate and rupture systems of power and privilege in order to effect global social transformation" [10] (p. 15). For many scholars, including myself, who were trained in Western/Euro-American thinking, this is easier said than done. We are all embedded and entangled in colonial relations of power and privilege that reinforce Western/white culture as the norm [7,9]. This paper is a critical examination of my Ph.D. research journey. The purpose of sharing my experiences of unsettling during my research journey is to explore how reflexivity can move researchers, educators, and practitioners toward decolonizing research and valuing anti-racist approaches to education for sustainability. By unsettling, I mean to uncover and critically examine assumptions that may have been unconsciously entrenched. I reflect on how my experiences in the field and encounters with theory forced me to unsettle my own unexamined assumptions about, research, race, development, and education.

My Ph.D. dissertation focused on Campesino-a-Campesino pedagogy (peasant-topeasant) as a way to empower peasants and spread agroecology practices. Campesino-a-Campesino (CaC) is a constructivist pedagogy that is characterized as horizontal because it involves knowledge exchange between peers. It is a process of collective reflection and action through which peasants share agroecological practices and innovative solutions to problems [13–15]. Agroecology is a way of farming that promotes food production in relation to nature, aligned with ecological principles, with an emphasis on farmers' knowledge of their context [16]. Although an in-depth examination of CaC is beyond the scope of this paper, I explore its character and ways of arranging learning to illustrate how my own thinking changed through its study. This paper will focus on moments of unsettling in my journey to understanding CaC as an anti-racist approach to education for sustainability. Thus, various aspects of CaC are woven throughout this paper as they apply to moments in my journey. I will first briefly explain the form of the paper and the framing of my analysis. I will then share my story in five parts: (a) How I came to this research, (b) Navigating research and privilege, (c) Understanding how racism operates in Mexico (d) Narratives of 'development' as sites of struggle, (e) Uncovering latent assumptions about education

#### **2. An Academic 'Story'**

The form of this paper is an academic 'story' where, in line with Indigenous education, the story is a vehicle for learning (for the writer and the reader) and a way to explain a perspective as it unfolds [17]. As such, it is written as a narrative in the first person. This story is not chronological but visits various points in the timeline of my journey to convey the changes in my understanding. To develop this paper, I read through my reflexive field notes taken during my research (2018–2020). These were taken alongside my descriptive case notes each day during my three visits to Mexico. In these reflexive notes, I reflected on my role as a researcher and/or how my experiences changed my understanding. Several scholars in contemporary ethnography emphasize the need for researchers to reflect on "their own positioning and biases in relation to the people and the landscapes of activity they are engaging" [18] (p. 409). For the purpose of this paper, I chose reflexive notes that represented a change in my perspective or evidence of an

acknowledgment and unsettling of my biases. In so doing, I answer Fortier's call for "non-Indigenous academics to make transparent even the most vulnerable and shameful inadequacies of our research" [19] (p. 33). I then explain my engagement with literature that helped push my thinking. I also include, where applicable, actions that I took as a result of this unsettling. This is, of course, only part of the story and more can be found in my Ph.D. dissertation [20]. I also consider my dissertation the first step in my decolonizing journey as my experiences since have further pushed my thinking and changed my approach.

My doctoral research was done by combining critical educational ethnography [21] and case study methodology [22]. This design was used to explore a case of CaC pedagogy in practice in the municipality of Calakmul, Campeche, México, focusing on five communities as sites within the broader case of 15 practicing communities. The facilitating organization was *Fondo Para La Paz* (FPP) or Fund for Peace, a small Mexican NGO in operation for 40 years. At the time of writing, FPP was working with communities in three regions of Southern México. Their mission was to, "promote the development of Indigenous communities living in extreme poverty, increasing people's capacities to generate their own living conditions" [23]. Their small field teams in each region worked with communities to support self-sufficiency through sustainable community development programs that were developed through reflexive and participatory processes in each local context [20].

The focus of critical educational ethnography (CEE) is "radical moves toward justice within the context of education (be it in or out of schools) for communities with whom research is being conducted" [21] (p. 147). A blended methodology, CEE, brings important elements of critical ethnography into educational ethnography. It takes up critical ethnographers' insistence on "viewing power, practice, and meaning as essentially indivisible contours of history and society" [18] (p. 407). CEE is characterized by essential elements including (a) articulation of critical context, (b) understanding and defining culture, (c) negotiating relationships and embeddedness, and (d) inclusion of multiple ways of knowing [21]. These elements together guided me to, among other things, negotiate a reciprocal research agreement with FPP, keep reflexive research notes, and engage participants in reflections on my analysis through member reflections [24]. For a more detailed description of these methods see [20]. Part of my story is how I came to choose CEE as a framing device and how I chose to enact this framing in context. This will be explored in the section on navigating research and privilege.

#### **3. Interdisciplinary Framing**

In this paper, I use an interdisciplinary approach [25] drawing on various scholars in decolonization theory, critical race theory, tribal critical race theory (TribalCrit), anti-racism, critical ethnography, Indigenous education, and post-development. I choose those whose writing was critical in helping me to understand moments of unsettling and change my approach to research.

I draw on concepts of race to highlight how racialization, a social process of assigning race and its associated meanings, continues to justify the inequality and oppression of Indigenous peoples [26]. As Walsh points out, the social constructions of race have their roots in historical processes of colonization [6] and thus are intertwined and endemic in settler-colonial societies [11]. Both antiracism and critical race scholarship point to the part that white privilege plays in reinforcing inequalities through a "system of opportunities and benefits conferred upon people simply because they are White" [27] (p. 27). As Bonnett further explains, "non-white identities, by contrast, have been denied the privilege of normativity, and are marked within the West as marginal and inferior" [28] (p. 188).

As Ghanaian-born anti-racism scholar Die explains, " ... social formation[s] provide the structures within which values, ideas and norms of dominant groups are hegemonized in society" [10] (p. 11). These social formations are imbued with power relations that dictate who has the right to decide what a sustainable livelihood should look like; who is considered to have expertise; who is the teacher, and who is the learner. These power

relations have led to imperialism where "White Euro-American culture(s) as the norm from which to evaluate other cultures" [10] (p. 12). As Lumbee scholar Brayboy explains, "theory and practice are connected in deep and explicit ways such that scholars must work towards social change" [11] (p. 403). As white researchers, educators, and practitioners, when we, perhaps unconsciously, act on the assumption that Western/Euro-American knowledge is universal, we neglect to consider ways of knowing and being as they are understood in other cultures. Through this neglect, we not only ignore important considerations for sustainability, but we also continue to perpetuate the imperialism of 'Western' ways of knowing, effectively erasing and replacing these other forms of knowledge.

As Barker claims, "there remains in Western culture a choice between imperialism and emancipation, and that means that imperialism and colonialism are social states, not cultural tenants or imperatives" [29] (p. 341). This leaves room for scholars trained in Western/Euro-American traditions to unsettle and open our ways of thinking and choose to be anti-colonial and anti-racist in our approaches. For white scholars, these approaches involve critical reflection, recognition of white privilege, and taking responsibility for addressing racism. Critical reflection can lead to uncomfortable moments of epistemic friction [30], wherein "our taken-for-granted assumptions about the world begin to crack" [7], (p. 558). According to Seawright, these moments can be transformative and lead to critical consciousness needed to, first, recognize how taken-for-granted assumptions may be rooted in racism, sexism, classism, and second, to imagine and enact alternatives [7].
