Search Results (15)

This autoethnographic study examines my transformation as an educator teaching gender and sexuality to future helping professionals in South African higher education. Through systematic analysis of personal journals, teaching reflections, and pedagogical materials collected over 180 contact hours, I explore how innovative approaches can create collaborative learning environments in traditionally sensitive subject areas. Drawing on critical pedagogy, queer theory, and decolonizing methodologies, the research reveals three interconnected pedagogical innovations: structured vulnerability protocols that transcend traditional “safe space” models, progressive exposure pedagogy that challenges heteronormative assumptions by introducing diverse content early, and indigenous knowledge integration that positions students as knowledge co-creators. The findings demonstrate how my professional evolution from knowledge authority to learning facilitator enabled authentic engagement with diverse epistemologies while maintaining academic rigor. Students consistently contributed concepts absent from academic literature—from social media discourse about sexual identity hierarchies to traditional cultural practices—enriching collective understanding. This study addresses significant gaps in South African literature on tertiary-level sexuality education pedagogy, offering concrete strategies for implementing transformative approaches. The research contributes to autoethnographic scholarship by demonstrating how systematic reflection can generate theoretical insights about collaborative knowledge construction while acknowledging the ongoing challenges of teaching sensitive subjects within complex cultural contexts. Full article

This article explores the integration of “Ayatutu”, a communal philosophy from Nigeria’s Tiv people, into mathematics education frameworks. Ayatutu—embodying collective responsibility and mutual assistance—aligns with contemporary cooperative learning approaches while offering unique cultural dimensions. Through analysis of the ethnomathematics literature, indigenous knowledge systems, and cooperative learning theories this article develops a theoretical framework for Ayatutu-based mathematics instruction built on the following five core elements: collective problem-solving, resource sharing, complementary expertise, process orientation, and intergenerational knowledge transfer. The framework demonstrates significant alignment with sociocultural learning theory, communities of practice, and critical pedagogy while also offering potential benefits including enhanced mathematical engagement, positive identity development, stronger learning communities, and cultural sustainability. Implementation challenges involving teacher preparation, structural constraints, cultural translation, and balancing individual with collective learning are examined. This research contributes to decolonizing mathematics education by positioning indigenous philosophical systems as valuable resources for creating culturally responsive and mathematically powerful learning environments that serve diverse student populations while honoring cultural wisdom. Full article

Academics often comment that their teaching affects their research, but how this manifests is often implicit. In this essay, I explicitly explore the artistic, scholarly, and curatorial research instantiated by an undergraduate class titled “Transgender Studies meets Art History,” which I taught during the fall of 2022. Alongside personal anecdotes—both personal and connected to the class—and a critical reflection on my pedagogy, I discuss the artwork and public programming connected to a curatorial project, “Forever Becoming: Decolonization, Materiality, and Trans* Subjectivity, I organized at UrbanGlass, New York City in 2023. The first part of the article I examine how “trans” can be applied to thinking about syllabus construction and re-thinking canon formation for a class focused on transgender studies’ relationship to art history. In the second half, I theorize trans joy as a felt vibration between/across multiplicity and singularity, belonging and unbelonging, and world-making and world-unmaking. Overall, I consider trans as a lived experience and its utility as a conceptual tool. As a coda, I consider the precarity of teaching this course in the current political climate of the United States. Full article

In this paper, we demonstrate the ways in which the schooling of refugee youth in the United States reflects ongoing coloniality in education. Drawing on data collected in a case study, conducted between 2013 and 2016, as part of a larger ongoing ethnography of a Southwest United States District school’s response to refugee students, we show how the enactment of policies, pedagogies, and practices within schools reinforce the government’s control over refugee students and their families. In schools, the students are kept out of certain school spaces, marginalized in remedial courses, and denied academic opportunities and integrated support services. Using empirical data, we demonstrate how the restriction of the students’ movement in and around schools is embedded within the larger limitations embedded in coloniality and assimilation. We situate our analysis within the tensions and interactions between coloniality, assimilation, and neoliberalism as articulated in studies within anthropology and sociology, migration studies, critical refugee studies, and cultural studies. We conclude with a call for the decolonization of education and offer a practical starting point in refugee education. Full article

Many scholars have portrayed technological advances as conducive to English language teaching and learning, without questioning their possible colonial assumptions about languages and literacies. Drawing on critical pedagogy and Global South epistemologies, I reconceptualize decolonization as a humanizing project in the contact zones between English and non-English languages. This poetic autoethnography, informed by my memories of my own experience as an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learner in China, alongside a wide range of artifacts from a senior seminar course in an international college in a Thai private university, illustrates how educational technologies can be decolonized by producing (and publishing) emergent translanguaging literature that repositions teachers and students from marginalized backgrounds as co-creators of new knowledge about languages and literacies in the global context. Full article

This paper enlists Paulo Freire’s work to explore the interplay between technology and pedagogy from a decolonial approach, thus stressing the importance of adopting a critical stance to the facilitation of digital education experiences. It starts by denouncing digital education as entrapped in digital capitalism, contending how curricular practices are likely to be subjugated to technological function. Through such a conceptual lens, digital curriculum design is explored from a perspective of learning solidarity, aiming to disrupt the instrumentalization of education and creating educational experiences that cater for a humanizing process of education. The paper aims to contribute with ideas towards a framework of critical digital education, deeming the interactive and creative side of technologies as well as the socio-affective dimension of education crucial to the decolonization of different ways of (curricular) knowing. Full article

De-colonizing the curriculum and active learning approaches that engage students experientially are both current themes in the teaching of International Studies and related disciplines. For the discipline of global development, both are critically needed approaches to training students who are able to work across national contexts and effectively interact with communities of different political histories and cultures. Yet neither is necessarily straightforward. This article explores two pedagogical projects that, while very different from each other, reveal commonalities through a technique of systemist notation and visualization, strengthening their contribution to cross-cultural and cross-national active learning. While online international collaborations and study abroad programs are different pedagogical contexts, they both involve significant levels of intercultural communication and knowledge exchange, neither of which is a given and requires careful course design and implementation. Full article

Since the 1970s, Yomitan Village in Okinawa has been at the forefront of community-led efforts of language preservation by documenting its folklore as a part of a larger goal to restore its language and culture. This has resulted in the documentation of over 5000 stories recounted in a local variety of Uchinaaguchi by over 700 community members from all parts of the village. The first aim of this article is to outline the vast folklore data that has been accumulated as well as the language-related materials that have been created from the data. Secondly, it explores conceptual frameworks for the teaching of endangered languages through an Indigenous critical pedagogy that incorporates three perspectives, namely, critical pedagogy hybridity and the third space, and decolonization. Furthermore, we suggest some ways to utilize these stories to teach the language and culture of the community and at the same time demonstrate how the accumulated narratives can be used to illuminate the crucial relationship among history, politics, and knowledge. Full article

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. Full article

Black somatic therapist Resmaa Menakem has persuasively argued that racism exist in our bodies more than our heads and that racial healing requires learning to become mindful of our embodied states. The reason that racism remains prevalent despite decades of anti-racist education and the work of diversity and inclusion programs, according to Menakem, is that racist reactions that shun, harm, and kill black bodies are programmed into white, black, and police bodies. The first step in racial healing, from this point of view, is to shift the focus from cognitive solutions to an embodied solution, namely, embodied composure in the face of stressful situations that enables everyone to act more skillfully. Similar to how racial healing has been hampered by a misguided overemphasis on cognitive interventions, might our teaching be analogously encumbered by lack of attention to the bodies of teacher and students? In this article, I emphasize the value of cultivating body awareness in the classroom. I introduce an embodied exercise that teaches students to recognize embodied clues of the experience of dukkha, the first āryasatya. Through such exercises, students take a step towards acting more skillfully and intentionally in stressful situations. Full article

This paper argues for the importance of design thinking as a creative, collaborative activity to equip students, instructors, and practitioners with important skills to address “wicked problems” that are transforming tourism and hospitality in a (post-)COVID-19 Anthropocene. Design Thinking (DT) and Design Thinking for Engaged Learning (DTEL) are becoming increasingly popular to incorporate in practice and in courses offered across various fields of study, including tourism and hospitality. The paper reviews some of their applications and uses, drawing on a range of cross-disciplinary literature. A small case study conducted over the Summer of 2020 in an undergraduate tourism course helps to reflect on existing weaknesses in DT and the original DTEL model, which the revisions reported here seek to address. Although the model engaged learners in developing innovative solutions to real problems, the incorporation of a critical, decolonizing pedagogy is needed to help learners break free of deeply entrenched assumptions, and intentionally develop pluralistic, relational solutions to address injustices and suffering. The previous emphasis on perspective taking through a dominantly cognitive (mind) empathy approach (in traditional DT models) is balanced with affective (heart) and conative (action) empathy, as aspects of care ethics that facilitate epistemic justice and praxis. Full article

In times of global systemic dysfunction, there is an increasing need to bridge higher education with community-based learning environments so as to generate locally relevant responses towards sustainability challenges. This can be achieved by creating and supporting so-called learning ecologies that blend informal community-based forms of learning with more formal learning found in higher education environments. The objective of this paper is to explore the levers and barriers for connecting the above forms of learning through the theory and practice of an educational approach that fully engages the heart (feelings), head (thinking), and hands (doing). First, we present the development of an educational approach called Koru, based on a methodology of transgressive action research. Second, we critically analyze how this approach was put into practice through a community-learning course on responsible tourism held in Colombia. Results show that ICT, relations to place, and intercultural communication acted as levers toward bridging forms of learning between participants, but addressing underlying power structures between participants need more attention for educational boundaries to be genuinely transgressed. Full article

During 2015 and 2016, staff and students at university campuses across South Africa embarked on two campaigns for decolonizing higher education, but the efforts were met with various forms of violent repression and rationalization of violence by state and private security services. In the face of the securatization of university campuses countrywide, ordinary mediums of teaching and learning proved inadequate for helping students reflect on their social reality, and similarly, public gatherings for socio-political deliberation and commentary became irregular because of the policing and surveillance of student protest action. By reflecting on the curation of three memorials and performances about seemingly racialized violence in this context, this article interrogates the meaning and the relation to the aesthetic, as well as the commentary on the context within which it is produced. Drawing on the work of Mbembe, Fanon, and Spivak as theoretical interlocutors with respect to how I understand violence, this article reflects on how three interdisciplinary curatorial events raise pedagogical challenges and opportunities for critical reflection in a context of repression. It was precisely through this interdisciplinary effort that the black body, violence, and context aligned to produce a public pedagogy on physical and representational violence. The three curatorial moments allowed for meaningful reflection on violence, resistance, religion, and the racialized self that not only drew attention to the artifacts and the performances but deliberately opened possibilities for a kind of public classroom where the discussion, articulation, and critique of violence is possible and productive. Full article

“What is suffering? What is hope?” These are questions I have asked for years with classes full of students training for Christian ministry. Now, I ask these questions in classes with Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and ‘spiritual but not religious’ students, all in training to be spiritual care therapists. The institution where I serve is in the process of transitioning from a mono-religious Christian theological College to a centre for multi/inter-religious education. Those of us who teach in the program are disrupted continually by pedagogical challenges that both perplex and energize us. The multi-religious classroom decolonizes spaces long dominated by Christian theological discourse. Course content yields to a fluid and open-ended, interactive process. My “mastery of the field” gives way to an ongoing practice of surrender—a kenotic self-emptying—that usually leaves me shaken in overwhelming awe or angst-ridden questioning. Through a practical theological methodology that begins with lived human experience, this paper shares an autoethnographic account of my experience as a teacher in the multi-religious classroom. It presents key dimensions of the theology of the cross as an interpretive framework and closes by examining how the theology of the cross offers a practical Christian theological reflective process to empower decolonizing pedagogy. Full article

This round-table, which featured literary critics Professor Stef Craps, Professor Bryan Cheyette and Dr. Alan Gibbs, was recorded as part of the “Decolonizing Trauma Studies” symposium organized by Dr. Sonya Andermahr and Dr. Larissa Allwork at The School of The Arts, The University of Northampton (15 May 2015). Convened a week after the University of Zaragoza’s “Memory Frictions” conference, where Cheyette, Gibbs, Andermahr and Allwork gave papers, the Northampton symposium and round-table was sponsored by The School of The Arts to coincide with Andermahr’s guest editorship of this special issue of Humanities. Craps, Cheyette and Gibbs addressed five questions during the round-table. Namely, does trauma studies suffer from a form of psychological universalism? Do you see any signs that trauma studies is becoming more decolonized? What are the challenges of a decolonized trauma studies for disciplinary thinking? How does a decolonized trauma studies relate to pedagogical ethics? Finally, where do you see the future of the field? While this edited transcript retains a certain informality of style, it offers a significant contribution to knowledge by capturing a unique exchange between three key thinkers in contemporary trauma studies, providing a timely analysis of the impact of postcolonial theory on trauma studies, the state of the field and its future possibilities. Issues addressed include the problematic scholarly tendency to universalize a western model of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); the question of the centrality of the Holocaust in trauma studies and the implications of this for the study of atrocities globally; the vexed issues posed by the representation of perpetrators; as well as how the basic tenets of western cultural trauma theory, until recently so often characterized by a Caruth-inspired focus on belatedness and afterwardness, are being rethought, both in response to developments in the US and in answer to the challenge to ‘decolonize’ trauma studies. Full article