# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
All papers in Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike License. For details please go to: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/ .

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Teaching For Climate Justice Booklet

This free booklet is an invitation to educators everywhere to join the national conversation about how we help our students understand what is happening to our climate, why it is happening, who it is affecting, and what we can do about it. This work belongs to all of us.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Teaching For Climate Justice Booklet - Are.na

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This free booklet is an invitation to educators everywhere to join the national conversation about how we help our students understand what is happening to our climate, why it is happening, who it is affecting, and what we can do about it. This work belongs to all of us.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Green New Deal for Public Schools

The Green New Deal for Public Schools will invest $1.4 trillion over ten years in America's public schools, K-12, to retrofit school buildings and ensure a healthy environment today, and build the carbon-free, climate resilient schools of tomorrow.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Green New Deal for Public Schools - Are.na

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Green New Deal for Public Schools will invest $1.4 trillion over ten years in America's public schools, K-12, to retrofit school buildings and ensure a healthy environment today, and build the carbon-free, climate resilient schools of tomorrow.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth - The Red Nation — Are.na

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth The Red Nation invites allied movements, comrades, and relatives to implement the Red Deal, a movement-oriented document for climate justice and … Continue reading The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Migrant Justice and Climate Justice Are Inextricably Tied - Are.na

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Four activists at the frontlines explain.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I am a teacher, a Somatics practitioner, a movement facilitator, and a coach who holds the importance of intimate, body centered transformation as key to healing and key to justice.

Prentis Hemphill is movement facilitator, Somatics teacher and practitioner, and writer living and working at the convergence of healing, individual and collective transformation, and political organizing. Prentis spent many years working with powerful movements and organizations, most recently as the Healing Justice Director at Black Lives Matter Global Network. In 2016, Prentis was awarded the Buddhist Peace Fellowship Soma Award for community work inspired by Buddhist thought. Currently, Prentis is a teacher of Somatics with Generative Somatics, which is focused on bringing a politicized Somatics practice to movement building organizations, and with Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity, a training program for Black organizers throughout the US, and works as a facilitator and consultant for organizations and groups looking to center healing justice and transformative justice into the very core of their work to build more well and self-determined communities.

Prentis has served as a board member for National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network (NQTTCN), a network for connecting communities with representative mental health practitioners and an effort at bringing frameworks of healing justice more soundly into current mental health provision models; and on Black Emotional and Mental Health (BEAM), an organization committed to removing the barriers for Black people to receive mental and emotional care.

Prentis is also a deeply committed practitioner and healer who utilizes Somatics methodology, intuitive and ancestral practice into their work to heal trauma, and unlock the unique brilliance and contribution of each person, body and being they work with.

"The kind of change we are after is cellular as well as institutional, is personal and intimate, is collective as well as cultural. We are making love synonymous with justice."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Prentis Hemphill is movement facilitator, Somatics teacher and practitioner, and writer living and working at the convergence of healing, individual and collective transformation, and political organizing. Prentis spent many years working with powerful movements and organizations, most recently as the Healing Justice Director at Black Lives Matter Global Network.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I write this from Aotearoa New Zealand, an immigrant in this country as I was in the United States for the 15 years prior. The way I see it, I am an immigrant from post-colonial India to two settler colonial states. In addition to my identity as an immigrant cis-South-Asian woman, I also identify as an academic. I often think of myself as an accidental academic. Academia was a space that offered me refuge as an immigrant, but it also allowed me to do the thinking, critical, questioning work I needed to do - but in a safe space. I started graduate studies in the post-9/11 world. As you can imagine, academia served as a particular refuge in that particular historic moment.

I have been in academia, either in training or teaching since...well, since I was seventeen. I have learned, trained, researched, and taught in four continents - my post-doc was in Geneva (even though most of that post-doc time was spend doing research in India). There are a lot of things I do not know, but there are some things I do know - one of them happens to be the intricate workings of academia - its peoples, its egos, its structures, the spaces of suppression, subversion, and subtle resistance. Within this space I see the hard work of resistance from individuals and groups, but also the dogged structural underpinnings of academia. Between the individual struggles and systematic dogma, is the troubling paradigm where academic structures and powers co-opt the struggles as their own - but contribute little to the cause. Over the years, I have seen academia do this co-optation and rebrand itself but not genuinely willing to do the hard work required to imagine a better academia. I have learned to navigate academia, but continually remembering to view this space critically.

This blog post, written as I transition into a tenured position at the interdisciplinary Centre for Science in Society at Victoria University of Wellington, is my attempt to remember to keep thinking and engaging critically. I have been precariously employed and over the past few years, I have seen what precarity does to one's sense of self and relationship to others. I hope I never forget that feeling as it has been one of the most intellectually exhausting, but also critically generative space. It was in this space of academic precarity as an immigrant living and working on indigenous land, that I have seen the interesting mobilizing of the word 'decolonizing.' I have started to see the complexity inherent in how decolonizing has been co-opted from a vibrant and critical engagement to an academic buzzword. This was recently bought home to me when I saw a student wearing a rather colourful t-shirt with a 'Decolonize the ..." typed in boldface in the front.

While it was unclear to me what they wanted to decolonize, I was troubled by the text on the shirt, not because of my dislike of buzzwords (I've used them before) or because of the student wearing it, but rather it was just at the end of a long line of hollow 'decolonizing' moves I had witnessed - online and offline. Within the academy, I have seen the sloppy attempts to 'decolonize' a syllabus or a programme without any real structural changes - in the programme, the class, the faculty, or the university. This is NOT decolonizing the syllabus, or the programme, or the university. To take on decolonizing work without having ever engaged with the long tradition of scholars who have written on decolonizing - is sloppy and opportunistic. Especially sloppy if you have not read the seminal Tuck and Yang article which asks you to not use decolonizing as a metaphor.

In my avowed attempt to stay critically focused, I thus hold my fellow academics to account and ask for some refrain when using the word 'Decolonizing.' It does a disservice to the amazing indigenous scholarship and activist work that is targeting power structures to shake and reshape them to accommodate indigeneity. So, my humble suggestion, till you are actually willing and able to do the work of decolonizing the structures you (and even me) benefit from currently, let us think of better words to do what we are actually doing.

This does not give us/you a pass to not attempt to decolonize academia, but rather start planning the ways in which to do it and putting into place plans (hiring indigenous faculty on permanent positions, provide scholarships to indigenous students, accommodate teaching/learning structures to different knowledge production sites and ways, etc.) starting now. But at this exact moment, when enjoying the privileges afforded by academia on indigenous land, and when we actively working or are unable to work towards decolonizing work, we need to acknowledge that reality.
LANGUAGE FOR A PROGRESSIVE ACADEMIA - WORDS BEYOND 'DECOLONIZING'
To that end, here are some alternative suggestions to talk about the work we are doing now, while thinking of a decolonized sovereign nation future. To really keep it simple, I even suggest words start with the letter D [1].

Diversify your syllabus and curriculum

Digress from the cannon

Decentre knowledge and knowledge production

Disinvest from citational power structures

Diminish some voices and opinions in meetings, while magnifying others

All of this allows for anti-colonial, post-colonial, and de-colonial work in the academy; but not make claims to a 'decolonized programme,' 'decolonized syllabus,' or a 'decolonized university.' It allows you to be honest - about who you/we are and how you/we are situated within certain privileges.

This means starting the work that actual decolonizing requires - but those are long term goals and require YOU/ME to do a LOT of work. They also require becoming accomplices (not an ally or spectator) in local indigenous communities and politics as the fight for land and resources continues. There are concrete plans that can be put in place and how to get there (i.e. genuinely support decolonization) in a five-to ten-year period. Do not give up on the vision...just remember, academia is not there yet.
PROPOSED WAYS TO DECOLONIZED ACADEMIA - START PLANNING NOW
Just in case you were wondering, what will the decolonizing future facing project look like and what you can actually do enable it? This requires work and planning (starting now), rather than taking that energy and excitement (around decolonization) to just rebrand yourself and your site of knowledge production and praxis.

There are amazing scholars who can teach us all about the ways we can do this planning work. I share their wisdom humbly and with the hope that it allows the start of a conversation about the future of the academic space you/we inhabit.

Hire faculty from indigenous and marginalized communities so they can magnify the voices and concerns of their communities. Change your hiring criteria (and your hiring committees), if needed, to meet this goal.

Hire said faculty on permanent positions - not on precariously created contracts. To bring on a junior faculty for a year or two position (while dangling the possibility of a permanent position someday) means they are on the longest interview ever!

Hire faculty that actually challenge you - and listen to them (they are more than your token hire).

Be willing to be inter/multi/anti disciplinary - look beyond your cannon.

Design classes that have a '?' at the end of the title. Example: Decolonizing Geography?: How, When, and by Whom? Or Decolonizing Knowledge?: (re)Imagining the Future in Sociology.

Do not expect your precariously hired POC/BAME/Indigenous/queer/junior faculty to do the diversity work (or, ahem, as you call it 'decolonizing' work for you to take credit on - we do it in our scholarship, research, teaching, thinking, talking, listening, and being in the university and we need to be rewarded for it directly).

Create syllabus and curriculums that are innovative - there are more ways to assess work than the research essay, but do not use this as a short cut to not help marginalized students with academic work.

Make space for indigenous and marginalized students - both physical and intellectual.

Then there is the slightly more complex thing to do simultaneously, as a way to create space for indigenous and marginalized students:

Take the extra time with these students to help them/us [2] learn to read and write like 'power.' Teach us ways to operate in this oppressive world. Do not assume we cannot write as well as you, thus you should not put in the time or effort.

Also take the extra time to learn how we think, read, and write. Learn from us the ways we see and seek to change this oppressive world. Respect our refusal to write like you, even after you train us well to write like you.

These are not really radical suggestions. If you are one of these lovely people trying to decolonize your space, you already know this. But this is just a good reminder to myself as I move out of my precarious space and into a tenured position that decolonizing is not a metaphor!

While there are many examples of amazing scholarship that challenges colonial structures underpinning academia, I offer one example of a dear colleague doing this work every day. She offers a wonderful course that does this heavy, preliminary work of encouraging students to think of a better academia (better anthropology in particular). Lorena Gibson's paper titled, Anthropology for Liberation is an honest and humble attempt to think about a future of a discipline without making grand claims to have decolonized the discipline or academia. Like she says, this is the first step in a long journey that she has to walk alongside other scholars, students, and communities.

Through her work (amongst others) it is clear to see that decolonizing is real work which needs to have real world structural consequences - not hypotheticals. It should not be a buzzword to increase your 'woke' student enrollments. Do not deploy it in service of the structures it was created to destroy.

It is my obligation as an immigrant living, working, researching, and teaching on indigenous land to respect and remember the history - and act as an accomplice to the local communities, particularity when it means unsettling my own academic privilege and identity. Together, it is our obligation as academics to make plans for a decolonized academia, to take care our students, and hold people to account who use this amazingly powerful word recklessly for their own self-interest. This is important to recognize and curtail, so we can start the very hard work of imagining and planning a decolonised academia - rather than just rebranding the current space and carrying on business as usual.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Do Not 'Decolonize' . . . If You Are Not Decolonizing: Progressive Language and Planning Beyond a Hollow Academic Rebranding - Critical Ethnic Studies

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I write this from Aotearoa New Zealand, an immigrant in this country as I was in the United States for the 15 years prior. The way I see it, I am an immigrant from post-colonial India to two settler colonial states.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Asking questions can create new ways of teaching and learning. StepanPopov/Shutterstock

The curriculum is not just the "stuff" that students must learn to be knowledgeable and skilled in a particular discipline. It's about more than just content.

Sociologists of education argue that "curriculum" is a highly ideological hybrid discourse. This means that it includes implicit ways of knowing, ways of doing and ways of being - as well as content.

In South African universities, curriculum issues came to the fore during a series of nationwide student protests between 2015 and 2017. Students have argued that what's being taught in university courses is imported from the global North and doesn't draw enough on African-based research and the work of academics from the global South. Students have also argued that course materials don't take the backgrounds of most South African learners into account in terms of culture, language or method.

Research conducted among academics and students at a historically white South African university suggests that many are thinking about "decolonising the curriculum" from only one angle: changing the content of what they teach.

So, for example, they might add Africa-based authors to a reading list. But they don't shift the tasks required to engage with that literature, which still leaves many students feeling alienated and marginalised.

Our own work with academics in the humanities and social sciences in South Africa shows there's not much engagement around how different ways of teaching might bring decolonial practices into the classroom. Universities in other parts of Africa are far ahead when it comes to decolonisation. Both Makerere University in Uganda, and the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, for example, have oriented their curricula towards inclusion and social justice since the 1960s.

It's vital for academics in South Africa to start asking deep questions that examine what decolonisation might look like in their teaching, and how this can be achieved. We were part of a working group at the University of Cape Town (UCT) that generated a number of questions which could serve as points of departure for beginning to think about decolonising ways of teaching.

Bridging gaps

In our work from UCT's Humanities Education Development Unit, we work mostly on tutor training and on first year courses, in partnership with departments. Our research and development work suggests that there is uncertainty among many academics about how exactly to take up the decolonial challenge in their own classroom practices.

To help bridge this gap, we've come up with a series of questions to encourage academics across faculties to unearth some of the norms, assumptions and everyday practices that are taken for granted and which may be entangled in the "hidden curriculum". This might help us to think through the "how" as well as the "what", as a first practical step towards "decolonising" our teaching.

These questions are based on discussions held during 2017 in a working group called "Decolonising Pedagogy in the Humanities". The group was made up of course conveners, teaching assistants, tutors and student representatives.

The questions were split into two themes: curriculum and pedagogy (or ways of teaching). Many questions emerged. We've distilled them into just 10 sets, with some supplementary thoughts, that lecturers could start asking as they work towards decolonising pedagogy.

Crucial questions

1. What principles, norms, values and worldviews inform your selection of knowledge for your curriculum? (think about absences as well as presences, centres as well as margins)

2. Do you articulate your own social and intellectual position, from which you speak when lecturing?

3. For whom do you design your curriculum? Who is your ideal, imagined student and what assumptions do you make about their backgrounds, culture, languages and schooling?

4. Does your curriculum reflect its location in Africa and the global South? To what extent does it draw on subjugated histories, voices, cultures and languages?

5. How does your teaching recognise and affirm the agency of black and first-generation students? How does your teaching legitimate and respect their experiences and cultures?

6. Can you speak indigenous or regional languages and relate to the cultures and lived experiences of all students? Do you draw on these valuable resources in your teaching?

7. How does your curriculum level the playing fields by requiring traditional/ white students to acquire the intellectual and cultural resources to function effectively in a plural society?

8. How do you build a learning community in your classroom where students learn actively from each other and draw on their own knowledge sources?

9. How do your assumptions about curriculum knowledge play out in the criteria that you use to assess students? What can you do to make your assessment practices more fair and valid for all students, without inducing high levels of anxiety? What assessment methods could show what all students are capable of, drawing on their strengths and promoting their agency and creativity?

10. How far do your teaching and assessment methods allow students to feel included without assuming assimilation?

What to do with the answers

When we ask questions such as these, we can begin to unearth some of our hidden practices. These practices can make students feel distanced or excluded from our disciplines and classroom interaction. Asking these questions also allows academics to become active learners within their own classroom, while creating more hospitable environments for learning.

Crucially, this allows students and staff to engage better with course content and with one another.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Questions academics can ask to decolonise their classrooms

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The curriculum is not just the "stuff" that students must learn to be knowledgeable and skilled in a particular discipline. It's about more than just content. Sociologists of education argue that "curriculum" is a highly ideological hybrid discourse. This means that it includes implicit ways of knowing, ways of doing and ways of being - as well as content.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Embodying diversity problems and paradoxes for Black feminists (1)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A ghetto land pedagogy an antidote for settler environmentalism

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Time- Enfleshing temporal insurgencies and decolonial times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why Decoloniality in the 21st Century By Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The way of the s word storytelling as emerging liminal

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Multiliteracies Learning Environment as Decolonial Nexus Designing for Decolonial Teaching in a Literacies Course at a South African University

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Eve Tuck- Settler Colonialism and Curriculum Studies

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Education and violation conceptualizing power domination and agency in the hidden curriculum

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Delinking global issues in northern Europe classrooms

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Asking questions can create new ways of teaching and learning. StepanPopov/Shutterstock

The curriculum is not just the "stuff" that students must learn to be knowledgeable and skilled in a particular discipline. It's about more than just content.

Sociologists of education argue that "curriculum" is a highly ideological hybrid discourse. This means that it includes implicit ways of knowing, ways of doing and ways of being - as well as content.

In South African universities, curriculum issues came to the fore during a series of nationwide student protests between 2015 and 2017. Students have argued that what's being taught in university courses is imported from the global North and doesn't draw enough on African-based research and the work of academics from the global South. Students have also argued that course materials don't take the backgrounds of most South African learners into account in terms of culture, language or method.

Research conducted among academics and students at a historically white South African university suggests that many are thinking about "decolonising the curriculum" from only one angle: changing the content of what they teach.

So, for example, they might add Africa-based authors to a reading list. But they don't shift the tasks required to engage with that literature, which still leaves many students feeling alienated and marginalised.

Our own work with academics in the humanities and social sciences in South Africa shows there's not much engagement around how different ways of teaching might bring decolonial practices into the classroom. Universities in other parts of Africa are far ahead when it comes to decolonisation. Both Makerere University in Uganda, and the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, for example, have oriented their curricula towards inclusion and social justice since the 1960s.

It's vital for academics in South Africa to start asking deep questions that examine what decolonisation might look like in their teaching, and how this can be achieved. We were part of a working group at the University of Cape Town (UCT) that generated a number of questions which could serve as points of departure for beginning to think about decolonising ways of teaching.

Bridging gaps

In our work from UCT's Humanities Education Development Unit, we work mostly on tutor training and on first year courses, in partnership with departments. Our research and development work suggests that there is uncertainty among many academics about how exactly to take up the decolonial challenge in their own classroom practices.

To help bridge this gap, we've come up with a series of questions to encourage academics across faculties to unearth some of the norms, assumptions and everyday practices that are taken for granted and which may be entangled in the "hidden curriculum". This might help us to think through the "how" as well as the "what", as a first practical step towards "decolonising" our teaching.

These questions are based on discussions held during 2017 in a working group called "Decolonising Pedagogy in the Humanities". The group was made up of course conveners, teaching assistants, tutors and student representatives.

The questions were split into two themes: curriculum and pedagogy (or ways of teaching). Many questions emerged. We've distilled them into just 10 sets, with some supplementary thoughts, that lecturers could start asking as they work towards decolonising pedagogy.

Crucial questions

1. What principles, norms, values and worldviews inform your selection of knowledge for your curriculum? (think about absences as well as presences, centres as well as margins)

2. Do you articulate your own social and intellectual position, from which you speak when lecturing?

3. For whom do you design your curriculum? Who is your ideal, imagined student and what assumptions do you make about their backgrounds, culture, languages and schooling?

4. Does your curriculum reflect its location in Africa and the global South? To what extent does it draw on subjugated histories, voices, cultures and languages?

5. How does your teaching recognise and affirm the agency of black and first-generation students? How does your teaching legitimate and respect their experiences and cultures?

6. Can you speak indigenous or regional languages and relate to the cultures and lived experiences of all students? Do you draw on these valuable resources in your teaching?

7. How does your curriculum level the playing fields by requiring traditional/ white students to acquire the intellectual and cultural resources to function effectively in a plural society?

8. How do you build a learning community in your classroom where students learn actively from each other and draw on their own knowledge sources?

9. How do your assumptions about curriculum knowledge play out in the criteria that you use to assess students? What can you do to make your assessment practices more fair and valid for all students, without inducing high levels of anxiety? What assessment methods could show what all students are capable of, drawing on their strengths and promoting their agency and creativity?

10. How far do your teaching and assessment methods allow students to feel included without assuming assimilation?

What to do with the answers

When we ask questions such as these, we can begin to unearth some of our hidden practices. These practices can make students feel distanced or excluded from our disciplines and classroom interaction. Asking these questions also allows academics to become active learners within their own classroom, while creating more hospitable environments for learning.

Crucially, this allows students and staff to engage better with course content and with one another.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Questions academics can ask to decolonise their classrooms

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The curriculum is not just the "stuff" that students must learn to be knowledgeable and skilled in a particular discipline. It's about more than just content. Sociologists of education argue that "curriculum" is a highly ideological hybrid discourse. This means that it includes implicit ways of knowing, ways of doing and ways of being - as well as content.