Engaging the Struggle for Decolonial Approaches to Teaching Community Psychology

Abstract

Community psychology's history has traditionally been described within the context of U.S. history, silencing contributions from people of color from the Americas, Asia, the Pacific Islands, and Africa. In a MA/PhD specialization in Community Psychology, Liberation Psychology, Indigenous Psychologies, and Ecopsychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, we are attempting to steer into critical dialogues about modernity, coloniality, and decoloniality, closely examining our curriculum and pedagogy, including our approaches to fieldwork and research. Turning to Indigenous psychologists, decolonial and critical race theorists, and cultural workers within the U.S. and from the Global South, we are attempting to challenge coloniality in the social sciences, community psychology, and in our own thinking and teaching to unmask hegemonic assumptions and open space for decolonial theory and practice. In this paper, we explore ways in which we are working with our graduate students and faculty to co‐construct a decolonial curriculum that integrates decoloniality so that knowledges from historically silenced locations, as well as anti‐racist and other decolonial praxes can co‐exist and thrive.

Teaching toward Decoloniality in Community Psychology and Allied Disciplines: Editorial Introduction

“…Watkins, Ciafolo, and James () describe the motivations for and challenges of constructing a decolonial and racial justice curriculum against the backdrop of academia, psychology, and US colonial histories within a Depth Psychology MA/PhD program. The authors describe how they operate across the four domains of critical community psychology, Indigenous psychologies, integral ecology, and liberation psychology to provide the conditions for students to move their identification away from the hegemonic center and onto hidden knowledge systems.…”

Engaging critical methodologies in qualitative research methods with undergraduate psychology students

“…The paper presents a case study, sharing methods with those which have proved successful in this body of community psychology scholarship. Such scholarship has included: explicating the theoretical framework and positions of the authors (Moane & Quilty, 2012;Sonn, 2004), mapping the development and implementation of a programme (Watkins et al, 2018), drawing upon student feedback and our own experiences to facilitate critical reflection (Lykes et al, 2018;Moane & Quilty, 2012), and to consider the implications, with special attention to power in the processes of knowledge construction given the Higher Education context. Coherent with these methods, the paper first illuminates the key elements of community critical methodologies that guide the teaching practices, before detailing the development and implementation of an innovative learning stratagem focused on exploring the topic: "what does psychology offer community?"…”

“…This paper aligns with these endeavours, recognising that scholarly and pedagogical practices necessitate the interdependent and iterative processes of reflection and action (Smith et al, 1997). The paper is inspired by, and seeks to build upon the contributions made to the field of community psychology, drawing upon community critical, feminist and decolonial thinking which harness teaching and learning processes, and too, enact these efforts from within higher education contexts (Lykes et al, 2018; Moane & Quilty, 2012; Sonn, 2004; Watkins et al, 2018).…”

“…The paper presents a case study, sharing methods with those which have proved successful in this body of community psychology scholarship. Such scholarship has included: explicating the theoretical framework and positions of the authors (Moane & Quilty, 2012; Sonn, 2004), mapping the development and implementation of a programme (Watkins et al, 2018), drawing upon student feedback and our own experiences to facilitate critical reflection (Lykes et al, 2018; Moane & Quilty, 2012), and to consider the implications, with special attention to power in the processes of knowledge construction given the Higher Education context.…”

“…Undergraduate programmes can be vast in the scope of subject areas covered and overfull, leaving little room for critical and community psychology content. In many subject areas, students encounter, and are required to reproduce, implicit dominant psychological discourses (Parker, 2005; Watkins et al, 2018). For example, there is rarely time and spaces to explore positivist scientism assumptions that underpin psychological theories and evidence.…”