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Throughout the past few years, I have taught toward what I have termed a "decolonizing pedagogy." 1 Decolonizing pedagogy is concerned with both theorizing and teaching toward specific aims. In my seminar on the history of education, this dual concern has resulted in a tension and a conceptual dissonance that arises when attempting to teach while adhering to two of decolonizing pedagogy's fundamental premises and principles: the need to work from what I have conceptualized as "theoretical heteroglossia," 2 which incorporates differing theoretical orientations toward a unified analysis of the workings of educational institutions in neocolonial contexts; and the need to work toward the dual goal of assisting students in developing a critical consciousness of educational history and in achieving the academic literacies necessary for their success as graduate students.Guided by Paulo Freire's premise that people's consciousness of oppression (or their lack thereof) is directly related to action that either favors or counters the workings of oppression, 3 a fundamental goal of my seminar is to provide a context in which students construct an understanding of the present as a product of the past. I want students to understand that the present is unintelligible (a reality that can be neither decoded nor discursively constructed) without a reading of the past. More important, I want them to understand that the lack of an approximate mapping of the past that can inform a critical understanding of the present reduces us to ontological orphans who are unfamiliar with and disconnected from the genealogy of

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