Inviting you, students, to reflect critically on how you can participate in the decolonization of scholarship, engagement, and dialogue - without delivering mandates - is, in itself, a decolonizing move.Ī decolonial ethos also urges me to acknowledge that I am not an expert in any of these topics. Many of the texts on my list contain the word “pedagogy” or “teaching” in the title - officially, most of these books were written for instructors, and if you are a teacher, I hope you find some use in this series as well! However, as bell hooks emphasizes in her own seminal work on liberatory education, Teaching to Transgress (1994), students share in the responsibility of creating an anti-oppression learning community, for their own sake and for the sake of others (9). I’m calling the series Decolonizing Dialogue - a reference both to the kinds of dialogue that enact decolonization and to the need to decolonize our dialogue practices themselves. Then I present reflection questions that encourage us all as students to dialogue with these ideas and link theory to our own practice and goals in scholarship, civic engagement, and dialogue. I first explain some of the major ideas contained in the week’s text. This fall, I’m reading books on anti-oppression and decolonial approaches to teaching, learning, and community engagement, with a focus on the role of dialogue in these approaches.Įvery week, I blog about what I’ve learned that week.

Sarah Ropp and I am a postdoctoral fellow with the SNF Paideia Program and the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy at Penn, which stands on the ancestral lands of the Lenape people, who are still living in Pennsylvania today. Introduction to the Decolonizing Dialogue Reading Series

Freire oppressed