Addressing imperial evasion: toward an anti-imperialist pedagogy in teacher education

ABSTRACT

Despite the pervasive impact of US imperialism, it is often ignored in US schools and teacher preparation programs. This paper introduces the concept of imperial evasion, which refers to the process of ignoring and denying imperialism and its effects. The authors argue that it is imperative that educators work to interrogate imperialist ideologies through curricula, and prepare future educators to disrupt such ideologies, policies, and practices in schools. Using a collaborative scholarly personal narrative approach, the authors discuss their experiences and approach to designing and teaching a course on migration and education at a US university. Ultimately, this paper responds to calls to disrupt imperial ideologies in education by (1) providing a framework for identifying and naming imperial evasion and how it operates through schooling; and (2) describing and reflecting on curricular and pedagogical approaches to disrupting such evasions in a teacher education course.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher education
• anti-imperialism
• coloniality
• immigrant students
• curriculum

Introduction

Higher education institutions are popularly perceived as sites for addressing and confronting issues of social justice, especially within the educational system (Patton, Shahjahan, and Osei-Kofi 2010). Yet, in the context of the United States, even when commitments to addressing social injustices are commonplace, they often do not extend to challenging and transforming the very foundations and ongoing processes of imperialism and settler colonialism writ large (Allweiss 2021; Patton, Shahjahan, and Osei-Kofi 2010; Stein 2018). Anticolonial and decolonial stances and pedagogies require a commitment to disrupting, dismantling, and reimagining unjust structures that moves beyond reform and superficial solutions (Andreotti 2016). As such, adopting these stances challenge liberal framings of and approaches to teaching and engaging in social justice (Stein 2018). Pertinent examples of this are the absence of critical discourses about Palestinian and Indigenous liberation – both of which relate to imperialism and colonialism – in mainstream and even progressive environments (Hill and Plitnick 2021; Palestine Legal 2015; Tuck and Yang 2012). Thus, even as Land Acknowledgements are becoming increasingly common in North American higher education discourses, they are often contained within a liberal institutional politic of recognition (Coulthard 2014) and do not translate into reparations and/or material decolonization (Tuck and Yang 2012).

As we prepared to teach a class on migration and education in our roles as new assistant professors of teacher education, we reflected on these institutional discourses and the local and national context in which we were teaching. We were also grappling with the ways dominant discourses about migration often obscure the ways US imperialism and military interventions have repeatedly created conditions and bear responsibility for forced migrations and displacement (Gonzalez 2022). Activists and scholars have raised concerns about the ways imperialist ideologies and practices have shaped US schools and teacher preparation programs as well as the ways they are most often ignored and/or denied through curricula, pedagogies, and dominant narratives (Chávez-Moreno 2021; Shirazi 2022). Working within this background and given our personal commitments to decolonial and anti-imperial work and advocacy, we aimed to disrupt these complicities within our curriculum and pedagogies in order to challenge deficit discourses and approaches to education for im/migrant¹ students and communities. We saw this disruption as particularly important and urgent given the increasing number of students from im/migrant backgrounds in US schools and our task of preparing teachers to work in such contexts.

This paper introduces the concept of imperial evasion, which we describe as the practice of ignoring and/or denying pervasive imperialist structures and policies and their impacts on schooling around the world and in the US, in particular. We then outline our disruption of imperial evasion through guiding principles that we applied in our shared curricular and pedagogical approaches to and experiences with a teacher education course on migration and education. Informed by anti-imperialist and decolonial frameworks, this paper is guided by the following research questions:

1. How did anti-imperialist, anticolonial, and decolonial frameworks inform and guide our development and implementation of a course on the intersection of migration and education?

2. What takeaways do we have from our experiences as university (teacher) educators and scholars about the possibilities and challenges of addressing imperial evasion in schools, universities, and teacher education programs?

We argue that it is imperative that educators challenge and disrupt the entrenched hold colonial and imperialist systems of power, oppression, and violence have in schools and universities.

Conceptual grounding: imperial evasions in (teacher) education

This paper draws on and contributes to anti-imperialist, anticolonial, and decolonial scholarship and introduces our analytic concept of imperial evasion.

Anti-Imperial, anticolonial, and decolonial theories

In our work with pre-service teachers, we critically engage with the ways Western/colonial domination takes shape within, at the edges of, and outside of nation-state borders (particularly, US national borders) in order to uphold and reify power, difference, and the geopolitical boundaries of the nation-state (DiPietro, McWeeney, and Roshanravan 2019). To do so, we engage with anti-imperial, anticolonial, and decolonial theories as interconnected theoretical traditions, or what Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2015) describes as ‘constitutive of the expansive decolonial archive and decolonial thought’ (47). These frameworks work to expose and disrupt various ways Western nation-states have engaged in processes of domination within and beyond their modern/colonial borders through military, sociopolitical, and economic interventions (e.g. Escobar 2004; Lugones 2007; Quijano 2000).

While the definitions of and distinctions between colonialism and imperialism have been highly contested (Arneil 2023; Kumar 2021; Pitts 2010), in this paper, we approach them as overlapping, but distinct projects (Coloma 2013; Maldonado-Torres 2007). Imperialism can be understood as a broad ideology that seeks to dominate and exploit through cultural, linguistic, militaristic, economic, and other hegemonic impositions (Kumar 2021). Colonialism, on the other hand, is one of the consequences of imperialism, and manifests as physical dominance and exploitation of resources through invasion and settlement. In particular, we draw on Said’s (1993) framing that ‘“colonialism” … is almost always a consequence of imperialism’ (9). For Said, both imperialism and colonialism are based on material processes of domination and the idea that ‘certain territories and people require and beseech domination’ (9). These frameworks persist and are maintained through coloniality, or the ‘long-standing [global] patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism’ (Maldonado-Torres 2007, 243) and which persist after formal colonial rule through material and epistemic frameworks and practices that pervade curricula and pedagogies (e.g. Calderón 2014; Domínguez 2021; Grande 2015). We work to engage with various histories and geographies of domination that constitute part of a larger colonial and imperialist project.

The current geopolitical context of US imperial hegemony makes the sustained attention to imperial processes particularly urgent and necessary from our (the authors’) geopolitical locations in the United States. In our teaching, we consider these processes within the context of migration in order to support students in interrogating dominant discourses about US, im/migration, and the histories, policies, and processes that drive migration and displacement (Chávez-Moreno 2021). Chávez-Moreno notes, ‘one piece that has been largely missing from critical teacher education’s conceptualization of immigrants/immigration is attention to contemporary American imperialism,’ which has limited efforts to disrupt dominant narratives and fully divest from interlocking systems of harm and oppression (Chávez-Moreno 2021, 210). At the same time, the framing of the US as ‘a nation of immigrants’ is persistently mobilized in US media and popular discourses in ways that belie settler colonialism and the violence of occupation and participate in Indigenous erasures (Grande 2015). As Mahmood Mamdani (1998) describes, ‘Settlers are made by conquest, not just by immigration.’ Centering conquest as an ongoing violent project disrupts claims of innocence and demands a framework of critical accountability and divestment.

Through dominant discourses, pedagogies, curricula, and modes of being and learning, imperial and colonial structures, policies, and logics are sustained by and worked out materially and epistemically through schools and education systems (Willinsky 1998). Schools are primary sites and institutions where colonial and imperialist logics are circulated and made palatable and ordinary through mythmaking and processes of Indigenous erasures (Patel 2021). This impact is pervasive and multifaceted, ‘construct[ing] ways of seeing and not seeing’ sociopolitical relationships and processes as well as oneself and others within them (Grande and McCarty 2018). In this context, we argue that ongoing avoidance of addressing imperial histories and complicities make space for frameworks of compliance, ethnocentrism, white supremacy, and militarism to continue to pervade our programs unchecked and leave deficit and dehumanizing frameworks of im/migrant students and communities uninterrupted (e.g. Chávez-Moreno 2021; Shirazi 2022).

Imperial evasion

To make visible and confront the ways colonial and imperialist ideologies and processes are simultaneously pervasive and obscured, we put forth the notion of imperial evasion as an analytic concept. Imperial evasions name the silences around and denials of imperialism that are complicit in hiding its pervasive and harmful impacts and in turn sustaining an avoidance of accountability and systemic transformation. Our use of the term ‘evasion’ echoes the ways Annamma, Jackson, and Morrison (2017) describe the need to use the term ‘color-evasiveness’ instead of ‘colorblindness,’ because the verb evasiveness ‘make[s] the goal of erasure more fully discernible. In other words, to use the term “evade” highlights an attempt to obliterate … or escape’ (156). They show how ‘evasiveness’ best reflects the work of avoiding talking about race and how that upholds systems of white supremacy and racism (Annamma, Jackson, and Morrison 2017). Similarly, teacher education and K-12 curricula have upheld imperial logics, frameworks, policies, and modes of being by actively avoiding talking about the United States (as) empire, which in turn facilitates teachers’ and schools’ ongoing complicity in the imperial project.

Shirazi (2022) outlines how, despite such long-standing and contemporary critiques of US imperialism, ‘terms like “imperialism” and “empire” are neither common in the lexicon of US K-12 teacher education, nor have they appeared as central themes of US historiography’ (3). Spivak posits that ‘sanctioned ignorances’ have sustained Euro – and US-centrism and what she refers to as the ‘worlding of the West as world’ (Spivak 1990) that belies its complicity in imperial harms and upholds racialized othering. Such frameworks of structured epistemologies of ignorance (Mills 1997, 2007) must be confronted.

Discourses and dispositions of imperial evasion allow for the appearance of plausible deniability about historic and current wrongs, and thereby serve as a tool for evading and actively denying one’s responsibilities toward addressing such harms. Such frameworks of evasion uphold global power dynamics and material and epistemic violence even within narratives of transformation and justice. Given the ways schools and universities have been used to uphold and sustain imperial and colonial power relations and privilege white Eurocentric modes of being and knowing (Fúnez-Flores and JoAnn Phillion 2019; Simpson 2014; Willinsky 1998), it is imperative for teacher educators and those working in K-12 schools and universities to engage in work that interrogates and refuses to be complicit in or absolve colonial and imperial violence.

We assert that an explicit commitment to directly addressing and disrupting this evasion and the ways educators, schools, and higher education programs are implicated within imperialist and modern/colonial systems are necessary for building justice-oriented programs and commitments. In what follows, we put into motion the imperative to combat imperial evasions through on our own teaching praxis with students and future educators in our course on migration and education. Reflecting on our joint conceptualization, framing, and practices we share our own experiences and pedagogical framing of addressing imperial evasions. Through our own experiences and research questions, we respond to Chávez-Moreno’s (2021) questions about how to approach teachers with discussions of empire and an understanding of teaching and schools as sites of empire-building.

Methodology

In this paper, we use a collaborative scholarly personal narrative (SPN) approach (Nash 2019; Nash and Viray 2013) to bring together our experiences designing, teaching, and reflecting on the course. Ng and Carney (2017) outline the value of SPN in providing insights into teaching practices in higher education. They state, ‘SPN challenges researchers to apply theoretical concepts to personal and professional experiences’ such as teaching and learning (Ng and Carney 2017, 11). We focus on our curricular and pedagogical reflections, which offer insight into anti-imperial and anticolonial pedagogical practices. To do so, we draw on our memories, notes, and syllabi.

Positionality and collaboration

Andreotti (2011) asserts that when writing from an anti-imperial and decolonial perspective, ‘the location of the speaker, [their] experience of colonial or imperial difference needs to be revealed and become the starting point for thinking’ (65). Our different positionalities, situatedness, and experiences with imperialism informed how we each approached our pedagogy and came together in this work.

Alex is a white Jewish US American settler woman, whose family histories, narratives, experiences, and entanglements with various imperialist, migration, settler colonial, and oppressive logics, histories, and practices deeply shaped her understandings of the world and the ways in which she is positioned and implicated within them (Lugones 2007). While her K-12 US public school experience in a Midwest suburb with a relatively large Jewish population illuminated shared histories and contemporary realities of antisemitism and violence, it obscured and upheld other violent relationships, particularly those of US and Israeli imperialism and settler colonialism in Palestine. She first learned about US imperialism and military interventionism from Nicaraguan Sandinista community organizers, who she met and lived with during a high school summer exchange program. Their stories disrupted what she had learned through her schooling about US history and its global positioning. Her experience as an undergraduate exchange student at the University of Dar es Salaam further exposed how Western-centrism shaped her understandings of global power relations and policies. And her relationships, teaching, and research experiences with youth, educators, and organizers in the Chuj Nation in Iximulew (Guatemala) further ground her commitment to exposing and disrupting coloniality and imperial violence in its many ongoing and overlapping iterations (Allweiss 2021, 2023; Peña-Pincheira and Allweiss 2022). These multiple positions and relationships are what she brings to thinking about co-formations (Bacchetta 2009) of (forced) migration, imperialism, and settler colonialism and what it means to disrupt hers’ and others’ investments and complicity in such systems of harm.

Shireen was born in Aden, Yemen, which was once colonized and ruled by the British Empire for over a century. She comes from a multi-ethnic, multilingual background and has experienced multiple migrations: as a child to India, as an adolescent to Canada, and as an adult to the United States. Through these experiences, she navigated cultural, political, socioeconomic, and linguistic shifts, all of which inform her approach to teaching this course. In her scholarly work, she explores how K-12 students develop literacy skills by engaging in whole-classroom critical dialogic discourse, and how teachers facilitate and navigate students through discussions about controversial topics (e.g. Al-Adeimi and O'Connor 2021; Al-Adeimi and Baumann 2023). In her public scholarship, she also engages in critical discourse about the US’ military interventions globally, and specifically in Yemen, which is currently undergoing the world's worst humanitarian crisis after years of US-backed and supported Saudi and UAE blockade, bombardment, and occupation (e.g. Al-Adeimi 2019, 2021, 2022). These personal backgrounds and experiences as well as her scholarly and advocacy commitments to critical dialogic discourse shape her pedagogy for pre-service teachers (PSTs) and graduate students, with whom she works to cultivate both justice-oriented and dialogic stances.

Collaboration and pedagogy

Our collaboration and dialogic engagements were grounded in a decolonial feminist praxis. Lugones (2003) writes about how shared understandings and coalitions against colonial injustices are created through a sustained deep dialogic and reflexive processes grounded in accountability. Throughout our years working together, we (the authors) have fostered a shared relationship of care and trust and a commitment to listening and learning from one another – our different perspectives, experiences, and ideas. Thus, our authorial ‘we’ in this paper represents this coalition and dialogic space and praxis built through years of collaboration; rather than a site of erasure or absorption, this ‘we’ represents a coming together of our shared commitments as well as our different positions within the modern/colonial gender system (DiPietro, McWeeney, and Roshanravan 2019).

Throughout our teaching, these commitments manifested in a collaborative approach to redesigning the existing course, working closely, and drawing on each of our commitments and areas of expertise. While we engaged in co-teaching at times (Wenzlaff et al. 2002), our approach most reflected a collaborative relationship, which Murawski (2010) describes as ‘a style of interaction in which two or more professionals work together toward a common goal’ (11). By working together, we developed a course that highlights our combined experiences and commitments to anti-imperialism, decoloniality, language, and dialogic pedagogical approaches. We also drew on our own expertise as former K-12 teachers working in diverse settings and current teacher educators focused on cultivating critical stances among PSTs. While we taught separate sections, we brought our classes together for collaborative experiences such as attending and debriefing guest speaker talks, visiting the museum and other exhibits, and presenting film/book posters. Each week, we jointly reflected on and discussed our class experiences and modified the course as needed. This collaborative model allowed us to bridge our unique experiences and expertise while building on each other’s strengths to develop a course for PSTs and other students interested in education. In the context of teacher education, our collaborative approach to teaching may also serve as a model for future educators (Darling-Hammond 1996, 2005).

Another component of our collaboration was our shared investment in dialogic pedagogy (Al-Adeimi and O'Connor 2021; Alexander 2020; Reznitskaya 2012). Freire notes, ‘Only dialogue, which requires critical thinking, is also capable of generating critical thinking’ (1970, 92). As such, our pedagogical approach centered on dialogic discourse, where students and teachers co-create meaning and unpack complex ideas in discussions that position teachers and students as equals (O’Connor and Michaels 2007). Such classroom talk is ‘orchestrated by the teacher’ and is characterized by students who ‘make public their half-formed ideas, questions, and nascent explanations’ while others ‘take up their classmates’ statements: challenging or clarifying a claim, adding their own questions, reasoning about a proposed solution, or offering a counter claim or an alternate explanation’ (Resnick, Asterhan, and Clarke 2015, 3–4). Thus, we aimed to cultivate a discursive environment that reflected equal power dynamics and critical engagement with topics that were challenging yet often evaded or dismissed by educators.

Course development

We are both teacher educators and junior scholars at a public university where two thirds of the undergraduate population is white.² In our first year at our current institution, we were invited to teach a course on migration and education. The course is required for education students in a cohort program in the teacher preparation program at our institution but is also open to all undergraduate students at the university and fulfills various minor options. As such, several students from colleges and programs outside our department enroll in the course each time it is offered. Building upon our colleagues’ previous course syllabus, we have taught four (Alex) and three (Shireen) iterations of this course respectively since 2019; it is offered once a year during the Fall semester. While we taught separate sections of the course, we built upon the existing course and co-planned each lesson, while intentionally planning joint class sessions that brought together students from all sections of the course for collective experiences at the beginning, middle, and end of the semester. Below, we present our anti-imperialist-focused design of this course using our guiding principles for cultivating an anti-imperialist stance, reflect on insights from teaching, and discuss implications for other educators.

An anti-imperialist pedagogical stance in practice

Laying out the concept of imperial evasion through an anti-imperial and decolonial lens, allowed us to think through the curricular and pedagogical moves and approaches needed to disrupt it. To define how we conceptualize an anti-imperialist pedagogical stance in teacher education that confronts and refuses imperial evasiveness, we delineate our guiding principles below:

1. Principle 1: Challenging and resisting dominant ideologies about US history and society that are rooted in the interconnected structures and ideologies, such as imperialism, white supremacy, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, anti-Blackness, and linguistic hegemony (e.g. Coloma 2013; Flores 2013, 2018; Lugones 2007; Maldonado-Torres 2007).

2. Principle 2: Critically interrogating histories and contemporary schooling practices and policies (e.g. boarding and residential schools and curricular materials that perpetuate settler colonial myths, narratives, and pedagogies), and understanding of schooling as a process of empire building (e.g. Chávez-Moreno 2021; Grande 2015; Patel 2021; Simpson 2014).

3. Principle 3: Centering and affirming the knowledges and experiences of those most impacted by modern/colonial and imperial violence and multiple marginalizations to refuse US exceptionalism and white supremacy (e.g. Chávez-Moreno 2021; Mignolo 2012; Shirazi 2022; Spivak 1990).

These principles represent the characteristics that drive our pedagogical praxis, which we engaged in on our curricular design and teaching of a migration and education course. Informed by anti-imperial and anticolonial frameworks and scholarship, these principles describe the contours of our praxis and way of navigating and working within our institution and teacher education spaces. These principles were implicitly developed through our different experiences and shared commitments as we approached the class, refined through our pedagogical experiences, and then articulated in conversation with the existing literature (e.g. Chávez-Moreno 2021; Coloma 2013; Grande 2015; Shirazi 2022). In what follows we provide examples of how each of these principles manifested in our (re)design and teaching of the course on migration and education.

Principle 1: challenging dominant ideologies

Since we aimed to support students in challenging dominant narratives and ideologies that facilitate and uphold imperial evasions, we knew we needed to ground our course in a different way. We based this course in an understanding of the violence of the settler colonial project of the US, through which US universities operate (Grande 2015), that is predicated on the dispossession of Indigenous lands; the elimination of Indigenous peoples, knowledges, and cultures; and the ongoing occupation and invasion of ‘conquistador-settlers’ (King 2019). We began our classes with a discussion of the provisional institutional land acknowledgement for the university that we included in the course syllabus. After reading the text, we collectively reflected on text as well as the ways land acknowledgements can be used as performance to absolve white settler guilt (Tuck and Yang 2012). We also encouraged students throughout the semester to reflect on our location at a university which positions itself as a leading ‘land grant institution’ – that is, one that benefited from federally-expropriated land following the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890 – and the discourses and silences used to support that narrative (Ahtone and Lee 2021). Grounding our course in this way helped establish a shared understanding that while this course is about im/migrants and migration, we must acknowledge and actively wrestle with the contradictions of living and teaching in settler-colonial states.

We layered this with discussions that explicitly centered the histories and practices of US imperialism and introduced students to this topic through readings about the United States’ imperialist agendas – – as manifested through regime changes, military interventions, and/or outright annexations in Iran (Vossoughi, Shirazi, and Vakil 2020), Yemen (Al-Adeimi 2019), Hawai’i (AJ+ 2017), and in the broader global context (Immerwahr 2019). In doing so, we worked with students to expose the ‘convenient myths’ (Dunbar and Ortiz 2006, May 29) that serve to mask the founding of the United States as a new wing of the British empire while mislabeling Indigenous people, enslaved Africans, migrant workers, people fleeing the effects of US interventionism in the Global South, and early European settlers as immigrants. This approach emphasized the importance of grounding students’ and pre-service teachers’ understanding of im/migration and the experiences of im/migrants within a broader framework of viewing the US as an empire with goals of expansionism through less obvious (or hidden) goals (Immerwahr 2019) that then lend themselves to imperial evasiveness in educational and other contexts.

While most class readings and materials encouraged students to reevaluate or expand their knowledge and stances on this topic, perhaps the most impactful material (per students’ reactions and ongoing references) was a viewing entitled, The Dark History of ‘Gasoline Baths’ at the Border (Vox 2019). We chose to watch this 15-minute video during class so we could collectively reflect on its content. This short piece discusses the use of toxic chemicals to ‘cleanse’ migrant workers at the US/Mexico border in El Paso, Texas. The video begins with the story of Carmelita Torres, a 17-year-old who rebelled against this practice in 1917, and ends with harrowing footage of asylum seekers at the same border crossing in El Paso, more than 100 years later, who are again subjected to dehumanization disguised as ‘security’ and ‘border control.’ Students often reflect how the video encouraged them to more deeply confront the historic and contemporary violence that marks the US nation state project and its pervasive reverberations (such as through inspiring Nazi’s use of gas chambers for the Holocaust) that illustrates the fallacy of US exceptionalism discourses and claims to a moral authority.

Additionally, throughout the course, we provided students with chances to engage with current events and media to support their critical understandings of the world around them. For example, when we taught the course virtually in Fall 2020 during the global COVID-19 pandemic, we discussed the scapegoating of im/migrants during the pandemic (Escobar 2020) and immigration policies that imposed even further restrictions under the guise of controlling the virus (PBS NewsHour 2020). This allowed students to reflect on the ways imperialist and colonial logics persist and their ongoing impacts globally through policies, discourse, and epistemic dominance in ways that are sometimes overt and other times more subtle.

Principle 2: schools as sites of empire

Throughout the course, we engaged with the ways education has been used as a tool of (settler) colonialism and imperialism as well as an area of critical resistance to encourage students to reflect critically on their own experiences and socialization and their future role and position in schools. We have done this by connecting imperial processes to schooling. Using various readings (e.g. Gonzalez 2022; Tseng-Putterman 2012; Vossoughi, Shirazi, and Vakil 2020), we introduced students to the concept of the United States as an empire, and in particular the idea that it continues to operate as one using schools and depending on evasion. We interrogated the ways empire is simultaneously upheld and obscured in the context of US education and schooling policies and practices (e.g. histories of Native boarding schools, English-only curricula and policies, educational and linguistic resistances in Hawai’i, schooling imagery and discourses in US-occupied Philippines, and John Gast’s painting of American Progress).

We coupled these readings with connections to other experiences. For example, one year we coupled it with a trip to the contemporary art museum where students viewed and interacted with an exhibition entitled, The Edge of Things: Dissident Art Under Repressive Regimes. This experience helped shape students’ understanding of the experiences of Latin Americans in countries such as Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, and the rippling effects of US imperialism on these countries. That same week, students read a piece by Giroux (2010) that challenged them to rethink educational practices through a Freirean lens of critical pedagogy. By integrating these readings and experiences, we aimed to disrupt students’ normative understandings of im/migration and placing them within a broader context that centers the role of US imperialism. In other iterations of the course, we also began to explicitly discuss colonial pedagogies (Lyiscott 2017), families’ demands for linguistic justice (Baker-Bell et al. 2020) and engaged (virtually) with Maya activists and educators to learn about the histories and current realities of their struggles for linguistic and educational sovereignty.

As we introduced students to these histories and experiences, students, particularly white settler students, often expressed surprise or frustrations at having not heard this before. To encourage them to consider why they had not learned these histories and contemporary realities sooner, we intentionally used the first month to give students the space to reflect on their experiences and interrogate who was ignorant of these realities, who was not, and why. We did so through a reflective course assignment that invited students to incorporate class readings and materials from the first few weeks of class to engage in a reflection about their personal histories, assumptions, and beliefs about im/migrants, migration policies, and language. We designed this critical reflection to serve as a way for students to express their knowledge (or lack thereof) but also discuss why they were under – or mis-informed about im/migration and im/migrants, and what their responsibilities are as future educators.

Principle 3: centering marginalized knowledges

As the course proceeded, we introduced students to discussions about young im/migrant students’ experiences within the context of gendered im/migration (Gallo 2014), immigrant parental and community involvement in schools (López 2003), and civic engagement among African immigrant youth and young adults (Knight and Watson 2014). Students also read about racialization and schooling experiences of Asian Americans (Lee, Park, and Wong 2017), the intersection of race and language in Arizona schools (Cammarota and Aguilera 2012), and the experiences of Arab American students post 9/11 (Abu El-Haj 2010). These readings, coupled with discussions with guest authors and film discussions (e.g. Donnellon and Kleyn 2016) provided opportunities to discuss im/migrant students as members of broader communities and families as well as interrogate notions of citizenship and belonging and how they affect different groups of im/migrant students. In one of our discussions, we invited an author whose work focused on father–child separations as a result of immigration policies, and the resulting burdens on children and families living on either side of the US/Mexico border. Later, we also invited a mother based in Guatemala who shared her personal experiences with family separation and having children in US schools while living away from them. Having both guest speakers allowed students to understand the complexities and lived realities of immigration policies and their negative impact on families first-hand. Students regularly shared how hearing someone’s personal experiences helped them understand their responsibility in working with and advocating for children, families, and communities as future educators.

Following these conversations, students had opportunities to explore im/migrant youth-led organizations and engage with their demands for schools. We also invited community members and leaders to engage with our students and talk about their experiences and visions for education in order to disrupt the positioning of (white Eurocentric) academic knowledge as holding the sole expertise. By intentionally centering the everyday experiences and scholarly works of those most impacted by imperialism, we aimed to actively work against normalized discourses and frameworks that uphold white supremacy and US exceptionalism. This was particularly important given the context and demographic makeup of our institution (predominantly white), as it disrupted the notion that these were fringe or ‘unknown’ ideas, and instead highlighted the ways imperialism is experienced, understood, and actively resisted by marginalized groups in schools and beyond.

Reflections and learning

Through this course, we aimed to foster classroom environments in which students were challenged to examine imperialist ideologies that shape migration and schooling experiences in the United States, while also working toward disrupting imperial evasion through pedagogical stances and approaches. Below, we outline our reflections from the course, including challenges we encountered that necessitated pedagogical shifts, and implications for other educators.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2014) reminds us that education systems ‘are primarily designed to produce communities of individuals willing to uphold settler colonialism’ (1) and, thus, we needed to think about how to interrupt the holds of colonial discourses and educational projects within which our students were immersed. Across our years teaching the course, we confronted various pedagogical and curricular challenges. One consistent challenge we encountered every semester when teaching about histories and contemporary iterations of US imperialism (such as the histories of gasoline baths on the US-Mexico border and US occupations and military involvements around the world and resistances to them), were students’ proclamations of shock and surprise. We heard students asking, ‘why haven’t I learned this before?’ after each reading, across discussions, and following the videos we shared in class. At first we were frustrated at the ways some students would seem to use those statements to evade deeper analysis. This prompted us to use that question as an opening to encourage students to reflect on the silences and gaps they were observing from their educational experiences and how that was reflective of a larger social and political project. This pedagogical move helped us not only encourage students to reflect on their own reactions and experiences, but also to begin to notice the ways schools have been complicit in evading and upholding imperialism and its ongoing effects. We encouraged students to reflect on the ways ignorance is not just a passive not knowing, but something that is actively cultivated (Mills 2007).

Additionally, Tiffany Lethabo King (2019) describes the need to develop language and frameworks that disrupt the static nature of terms like ‘settler’ and ‘settlement.’ Whiteness and anti-Blackness are wrapped up in these projects that ‘require the death of others’ (King 2019, xii). King (2019) explains that the ‘discourse of settler and settlement disavows the violent ways that settler human self-actualization depends on the most violent forms of Black and Indigenous death’ (19). As we developed this course, we reflected on the ways schools have been actively complicit in these projects and what accountability to these ongoing harms might look like for teacher candidates, whose socialization and notions of self have been built in and through these projects of dispossession, violence, and death. We regularly reflected on the question, ‘What does it mean to ask our teacher candidates to see their own investments in dispossession and violence and to take a stance that commits to recognizing and disrupting those collusions even as they prepare to enter institutions built and predicated on such violence?’ We view this as an ongoing tension with which we, and other educators committed to this work, continue to wrestle and which does not have an easy resolution. We approached this tension by addressing it directly; we provided students with space to wrestle with it through both the scaffolding, our engagement with the histories of imperial violence in and out of schools, and the dialogic pedagogies we used for this course.

We centered dialogic pedagogies to provide students with the space to interrogate their own and learn from others. This provided us with a vehicle through which students unpacked complex and controversial topics and we were able to cultivate a learning environment where students’ – rather than only our own – knowledge and experiences were centered. Additionally, dialogic teaching enabled our students to develop critical engagement with texts and materials. Cultivating such a dialogic discursive environment required abstract processes such as trust – and relationship-building and mutual responsibility to engage critically and thoughtfully with class materials and readings. Additionally, it required the use of pedagogical practices such as using open-ended, authentic questions, prompting students to engage with each other’s ideas, utilizing follow-up prompts and questions, actively listening to students, and other dialogic teaching moves that invite students to participate as equal partners in the discussion (Al-Adeimi and O'Connor 2021; O’Connor and Michaels 2007). These pedagogies facilitated our ability to support students in moving past the shock into critical interrogation and application.

Another ongoing challenge has been interrupting students’ investments in white saviorism and deficit notions of im/migrant students and communities. This was particularly apparent during our first experience teaching this course, which was organized thematically and had anti-imperialist readings embedded across the curriculum. Throughout that semester, we were confronted with the ways some students remained committed to deficit and distancing discourses and notions of im/migration and im/migrants. This seemed to reflect an unwillingness or lack of preparation to grapple more deeply with their positionalities in relation to the realities of settler colonialism, empire building, and past and present US-led military and political interventions globally. By dispersing anti-imperialist readings and historical engagements throughout the class, we realized that they did not function as the core principle of the course, thereby allowing some students to continue evading or minimizing imperialism and its effects. This allowed them to continue viewing im/migrant students as lacking preparation and knowledge that teachers and schools could provide (i.e. individualized problems with individual solutions), rather than understanding the structures and institutional complicities that uphold oppression and privilege white Eurocentric ways of knowing and being.

To address this challenge, in later iterations of the course, we foregrounded building an anti-imperialist lens through which students could engage with readings and materials. We moved to dedicate the first month of class to building an understanding of imperialism, settler colonialism, the US’s role and position globally, and the historical and contemporary immigration and international policy landscape. We also worked to disrupt students’ understanding of policies through US binary partisan political lenses; rather, we emphasized the continuity of US foreign policies that perpetuate empire building and immigration policies that span both dominant US political parties and are underpinned by shared commitments and goals. This helped move students away from binary narratives of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ individual leaders or political parties to noticing larger patterns and structures.

To frame the class, we also explicitly explained to the students that the class was designed to support students in cultivating an informed stance that reflected their understanding of policies and histories that shape im/migrant students’ realities in schools. And we included course materials that directly addressed saviorism tropes in an effort to move students away from benevolent stances and push them toward an understanding of both complexity and their own complicity. Without a pedagogical stance rooted in deep understandings of the historic and ongoing policies that shape who was and is allowed to seek asylum or work in the United States; how im/migrants’ experiences are shaped by class, race, and gender; as well as institutions’ commitment to upholding white supremacy locally and globally, students will not be able to apply a just and principled pedagogical stance in their everyday teaching and work. As such, we aimed to cultivate an anti-imperialist stance that would later guide students’ actions in their future classrooms and communities, an aim that we intentionally used as a guiding principle in the second course-redesign of the course.

Furthermore, throughout the course, pre-service teachers were especially eager to learn about practical pedagogical ‘solutions.’ While we found this to be a valid and understandable concern, we also observed how some students would use the focus on practical and pedagogical application to evade deeper reflection. Thus, we encouraged students to first take the time to equip themselves with the knowledge necessary to shift (or create) their own pedagogical stance, mobilizing on reflections of the way imperialism is rooted in and perpetuated through schools and schooling. We saw this as an opportunity to move students away from a more episodic and surface-level view of im/migrant students to a more structural understanding that could inform their pedagogical decisions in dynamic classroom environments and shifting sociopolitical contexts. In the last part of the course, we explicitly oriented students toward culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies (Bajaj, Argenal, and Canlas 2017; Souto-Manning et al. 2018) that help address students’ pedagogical concerns, while emphasizing a stance-oriented rather than a toolkit focused pedagogy.

This is not to say that all resistances and challenges with this approach have been mitigated. We have continued to witness individual and collective evasions, which surfaced most prominently during discussions of the ongoing colonial occupation of and assault on Palestine. Yet, having a shared stance with shared principles helped guide us to address some of the overarching challenges that have arisen, and allowed us to confront and interrupt students’ evasions and deficit orientations. Additionally, our collaboration and reflections – which occurred after each class and at the end of each semester – were pivotal in helping us recognize our individual and shared curricular, pedagogical, and knowledge gaps. Our ongoing dialogue helped us address challenges, articulate our goals of building students’ stances, and ultimately identify and operationalize our guiding principles. Through dialogue and collaboration, we were able to draw on our different knowledge backgrounds, experiences, and strengths to develop a more expansive and responsive course.

Implications and conclusion

In this paper, we reflected on how we developed and implemented a course on migration and education drawing on anti-imperialist, anticolonial, and decolonial frameworks and considered what we learned from these experiences about the possibilities and challenges of addressing imperial evasion in education. While our specific histories and positionalities informed our practice, we argue that this work can and should be taken up by university and K-12 educators across disciplines and subject areas. We caution, however, that naming imperial evasion without coupling it with actionable pedagogy to disrupt it is akin to the performative nature of acknowledging stolen land without active commitments to addressing the root causes and resulting injustices. To fully disrupt imperial evasion and prepare students to engage in a world where im/migrant students are supported and valued (rather than problems to be addressed), we urge teacher preparation programs and educators to engage students in discussions that broaden their lens about im/migration and im/migrant students and communities. To do this, we recommend educators ground their work in anti-imperialist pedagogical principles and through: (a) a purposeful, ongoing critical engagement in historical and current socio-political events; (b) an intentional selection and integration of curricular materials that address US imperialism and challenge dominant ideologies; and (c) dialogically engaging students and colleagues to understand and grapple with historical and current events and power relations. Critical engagement in current and historical narratives requires a commitment to dismantling harmful structures and narratives that normalize imperialism and its consequences. Without such preparation, we risk further perpetuating harmful stereotypes and practices and upholding imperialist logics and systems of violence and dispossession.

Given their role in shaping modern discourses and events, we encourage educators to actively engage in cultivating their own knowledge, which can in turn inform the curricular materials they select and the ways in which they engage their students pedagogically and dialogically to critique, challenge, and build collective knowledge. For us, our collaboration was pivotal for recognizing and addressing our individual gaps and leveraging our different strengths. We see such collaboration as an ongoing commitment. And we hope that other (teacher) educators will join us and take up our call to equip them/ourselves with the knowledge, relationships, and collaborations necessary to facilitate students’ growth toward cultivating a stance that is grounded in historical and contemporary knowledge about coloniality, imperialist logics and practices, and (forced) im/migration and disrupt the allure of imperial evasion in our everyday practices. When educators form a stance grounded in the principle of anti-imperialism, they can then confront episodes of injustice inflicted against im/migrant students and communities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We use the term im/migrant to reflect both immigrant and migrant identities as well as the movement between these designations.

2 We use ‘white' in line with US racial discourses as well as the ways critical whiteness and decolonial scholars show how whiteness is a global ideology and social construction that operates within a global system of white supremacy and is connected to individual identities that privilege white people (e.g., Allen 2001; Matias and Mackey 2016).