Decolonizing higher education pedagogy: Insights from critical, collaborative professionalism in practice

Abstract

Building on the long-standing tradition of challenging oppression and questioning whose interests are being served in the field of language education, we report on a study that involved a group of U.S.-based graduate students who collaborated with a ninth-grade English teacher in Nepal. The study comes out of a larger project that sought to internationalize the curriculum of a graduate educational linguistics course at a U.S. university. At the heart of this internationalizing curriculum endeavour was a commitment to expose graduate students in the U.S. to the issues of language teaching outside of the U.S. This was done through co-designing of a unit of lessons, with six graduate students meeting virtually with their teacher partner, Ditya, in Nepal over the course of a semester. The graduate students and Ditya constitute our research participants. The graduate student participants learned about the need to develop pedagogical materials that were relevant to the local context in Nepali classroom, and not attempt to transplant a Western-centric curriculum onto the Nepali classroom. In keeping with recent calls to decolonize higher education, we illustrate how critical theory in general and decolonizing pedagogy in particular can be infused into a U.S. graduate curriculum by drawing on the rich, indigenous knowledge and resources of a teacher collaborator from the Global South. We do this by reporting how this critical, decolonizing goal was realized through collaborative professionalism, which is characterized by the sharing of knowledge, skills, and experience to improve student achievement, reflection, dialogue and collective responsibility.

Keywords:

• Decolonization
• decolonizing pedagogy
• critical collaborative professionalism
• Global South

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by funds from the Global Curriculum Fellowship award conferred by the College of Education at Michigan State University.

Notes on contributors

Peter I. De Costa

Peter I. De Costa is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics, Languages & Cultures and the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. He studies emotions, identity, ideology and ethics in educational linguistics. Peter is the co-editor of TESOL Quarterly and the President Elect of the American Association for Applied Linguistics.

Laxmi Prasad Ojha

Laxmi Prasad Ojha is a doctoral student in the Curriculum, Instruction and Teacher Education program at Michigan State University. His current research interests include transnationalism, language and literacy practices of immigrant-origin children and youth, language ideologies, and teacher education.

Vashti Wai Yu Lee

Vashti Lee is a doctoral candidate in the Second Language Studies program at Michigan State University. Her research interests include the intersections between identity, emotions, and ideology, particularly as these relate to multilingual or transnational language learners and teachers.

D. Philip Montgomery

D. Philip Montgomery is a doctoral candidate in the Second Language Studies program at Michigan State University. His research interests include internationalization of education policy, English as a medium of instruction in international universities, adaptive linguistic transfer, and student-centred writing instruction.