Hello DeColonial Feminists! Recently we decided that it was time to reconvene our group and to start actively posting on our blog again during the spring 2010 semester and hopefully, beyond. We have been thinking about the links between decolonial thinking and education, whether in the classroom or outside of it and, of course, in between spaces. We might formulate a series of questions that address different aspects to this broad topic, some of which Dalida brought up in a recent email:
- What is the curriculum of decolonial feminist education?
- What is our archive?
- What are the forms of knowledge and pedagogies that emerge from a decolonial feminist praxis?
- What are the ways of knowing, senses and sensibilities, that we wish to honor, produce and/or access?
- Where does decolonial feminist education occur?
- What do formal institutions of learning in the U.S. have to do with decolonial feminism?
- What does decolonial feminism have to say to those institutions?
- What does decolonial feminist education look like as a transnational project?
As part of our goal in answering and addressing some of these questions, we want to begin putting together some readings that we can undertake together around these questions. And maybe we will decide that reading brings us to a limit, at which point we must look to other media as well as part of a decolonial educating practice and praxis. Here are some additional questions to think about: How does our performance as teachers in the classroom affect our students? How can we work to bring other media into classrooms or disciplines that are traditionally "text" based? Moreover, what are the implications of new pedagogies on the embodied experiences of students and teachers alike? That is to say, how does a student's relationship to something like physical movement change in a decolonial classroom setting and how might transformations in the classroom impact actions and spatial relationships beyond the institution?
Body, space, movement. Three things I see as relevant to the discussion...
In order to collaboratively create a dialogue on this topic, what readings would you be interested in undertaking? Here are a few obvious texts to include in a running bibliography:
Augusto Boal,
Theatre of the Oppressed
Paulo Freire,
Pedagogy of the Oppressed Chela Sandoval,
Methodology of the Oppressed
Feel free to add some questions you find interesting and some suggestions for reading so that we can stitch together a bibliography and get a reading schedule in place in time for our next meeting on Monday, March 15th. Perhaps by then we can settle on a few themes to start exploring with more depth. Hope to see and talk with more of you soon.
