What is to be done with curriculum and educational foundations' critical knowledges? Toward critical and decolonizing education sciences

ABSTRACT

As editors of the special issue in Teaching Education titled What Is To Be Done with Curriculum and Educational Foundations’ Critical Knowledges? New Qualitative Research on Conscientizing Preservice and In-Service Teachers, our purpose with this conceptual essay is twofold. First, we historicize and characterize the critical knowledges deployed in this special issue as a broad array of criticalities. Second, we provide a reading of these criticalities that together we tentatively call critical and decolonizing education sciences. In our discussion and conclusion, we focus on the dual challenges of developing work in critical and decolonizing education sciences: (a) better historicizing academic work and (b) clearly responding to demands of institutional praxis.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical pedagogy
• race-based epistemologies
• teacher education
• decolonizing curriculum
• curriculum studies
• educational foundations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. All quotes from Spanish language titles in the reference page have been translated by the first author, Jim Jupp.

2. CWS’ lack of tenets, as compared to CRT, represents a debility of CWS in education as a field that requires both an introductory volume and a comprehensive handbook for better definition in the present and for passing the legacy onto future grad students and scholars. The introductory volume and comprehensive handbook will better consolidate, define, and extend the field whose old languages require much new labor. Tim Lensmire (2013, 2017) is the perfect candidate to lead the efforts toward writing an introductory volume and organizing a comprehensive handbook. In the absence of Lensmire’s efforts, we are left with Gary Howard's book as “representative volume” or, to use one of Lensmire’s favorite words, “synecdoche” for the field.

3. Here the term Americanist located intellectuals emphasizes the centrality of historical colonialism, present-day coloniality, and related ongoing oppressive power relations as key historical conditions within which our lives are bounded and under which we provide intellectual labor.

4. It is important to note that the term decolonial is nothing new and should be considered within an arch of critical scholarship and praxis including Bartolomé de Las Casas, Bernardino de Sahagún, Chaca Zulu, Tupac Shakur, Simón Bolivar, Chinua Achebe, Amilcar Cabral, Marcus Garvey, Cesaire Aime, and many, many more.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James C. Jupp

James C. Jupp, a White, middle-class male, spent 18 years teaching and learning in de facto segregated schools in the Southwest experimenting with culturally relevant and critical pedagogies before moving on to preparing teachers in the South and in Texas. He is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Teaching and Learning at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, the largest Hispanic Serving Institution in the continental US.

Theodorea Regina Berry

Theodorea Regina Berry, a Black American middle-class woman of Caribbean and Cherokee heritage, spent nearly 20 years researching, teaching, and learning in socially, politically, and culturally diverse communities in the US and Germany. She currently serves as Professor and Chair of the Department of African American Studies at San José State University, the founding university of the California State University System.

Amanda Morales

Amanda Morales is a biracial Latina from the rural mid-West whose research and practice builds on her prior work in teacher preparation, recruitment and retention, and diversity leadership affiliated with the Center for Intercultural, Multilingual Advocacy at Kansas State University. She currently serves as Assistant Professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education at University of Nebraska.

Ann Mogush Mason

Ann Mogush Mason is a white, upper-middle class cis woman from the Midwest whose early studies in sociology and her teaching background in elementary and early childhood education contribute to her current work preparing elementary school teachers who are sociopolitically conscious and who understand teaching as a political act. She currently serves as Program Director of Elementary Education at the University of Minnesota.