Lingering Colonialities as Blockades to Peace Education: School Violence in Trinidad

Williams, Hakim Mohandas Amani

doi:10.5040/9781474233675.ch-008

Cited by 16 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…Just as we decommission statues, we should decommission a lot of what passes for knowledge in our teaching.' Greater research on education at all levels can allow for critical engagement and analysis of where coloniality lingers in schools (Williams, 2016), and where we can highlight 'pockets of hope' (de los Reyes and Gozemba, 2001) -places where, against the odds, educators are imparting a humanising and justice-centred curriculum towards a decolonial future. This article contributes one such example to the ongoing scholarly conversation by examining a small-scale model in our discussions of the possibilities and praxes of a decolonial education.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Decolonial approaches to school curriculum for Black, Indigenous and other students of colour

Bajaj

2022

Lond. Rev. Educ.

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This article analyses findings from a research project examining the Pear Tree Community School in Oakland, California, USA – a small, social justice-focused school primarily serving Black, Indigenous and other students of colour in grades from kindergarten to Grade 5. Through this multi-year case study, which included observations, interviews and focus groups, this article presents data from interviews with teachers and administrators who explain how they decolonise their primary school classroom curriculum, particularly amid national and global issues, such as heightened racial violence and increasingly polarised political discourse, which adversely impact the families and communities to which students belong. Teachers and administrators share concrete examples of decolonial approaches at the school level and within their classroom curricula that centre the lived experiences and histories of communities of colour. This article contributes an empirical study of one school’s decolonial approaches at the early grades level to the emerging scholarship on decolonising education.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Decolonial approaches to school curriculum for Black, Indigenous and other students of colour

Bajaj

2022

Lond. Rev. Educ.

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“…Both of these strands are evident in the varied scholarship and practices of critical peace education (e.g. Shirazi, 2011; Williams, 2013; 2016).…”

Section: Postcolonial Theory and Critical Peace Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Getting to “no”: Locating critical peace education within resistance and anti-oppression pedagogy at a Shi’a Islamic school in Lebanon

Zakharia

2017

Research in Comparative and International Education

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This paper critically engages observations from a school that was aligned with a resistance movement in Lebanon during a post-war period of sustained political violence (2006–2007). Focusing on the pedagogical practices at one community-centered and community-led Shi’a Islamic urban school, the paper draws on extensive ethnographic data to illustrate how teachers and students, together, negotiated resistance and peace learning through a critical and participatory process at a school whose curricular content, structure, and pedagogy explicitly addressed both direct and structural forms of violence. Drawing on rich, illustrative classroom data, I examine the production and enactment of peace knowledge as resistance to the status quo. This knowledge production does not exclude the performance of militarism and heroic resistance as forms of praxis, creating dissonance for understanding peace education as a field of scholarship and practice. This dissonance, I posit, is critical in forging possibilities for transformative change. The paper brings postcolonial theory into conversation with critical peace education to consider how larger structural, material, and political realities serve to mediate learning processes and value biases in peace research.

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“…Teacher respondents, like Ms. Seepersad, insisted on expending the energy and time necessary to become more acquainted with the students' backgrounds, because this provided an entryway to better understand the students' 'anger problems.' Too often, analyses of violence in schools center on the symptom and the immediate, directly-observable student behavior, failing to impugn this veneer of putative youth 'deviancy' and 'delinquency' (see Williams 2016 for an extended critique of this discursive violence).…”

Section: Teachers' Nascent Praxes Of Carementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Ohsako 1997, 16 This sort of proactive, preventative and positive-peace oriented approach flies in the face of the knee-jerk inclinations to embrace interventions that are increasingly draconian, myopic, shortterm, and reactive. I characterize teachers' nascent praxes of care as a form of critical peace education in rupturing lingering colonialities (Williams 2016) 1 which I perceive to be blockades to sustainable peace in Trinidad's (TT's) 2 schools and society-at-large. There is a decolonizing potentiality to these nascent praxes of care, because they represent a counterhegemonic approach to school violence that opts for 'nurture [ing] bonds of belonging' among students instead of a colonially-cultivated and -perpetuated 'punitive regulatory framework' (Morrison and Vaandering 2012, 139).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Teachers’ nascent praxes of care: potentially decolonizing approaches to school violence in Trinidad

Williams

2016

Journal of Peace Education

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Zero tolerance, punitive and more negative peace-oriented approaches dominate school violence interventions, despite research indicating that comprehensive approaches are more sustainable. In this article, I use data from a longitudinal case study at a Trinidadian secondary school to focus on the role of teachers and their impact on school violence; I show that institutional constraints are not fully deterministic, as teachers sometimes deploy their agency to efficacious ends. In combining Noddings' postulations on care and Freire's notions of praxis as a symbiosis of reflection and action, I explicate the nascent praxes of care of six teachers at this school, as they strive for more positive peace-oriented approaches to school violence. I characterize these praxes as nascent because they are not fully interrogative of the structural violence of the entire system. However, I do argue that these nascent praxes possess decolonizing and transgressive potentiality in the face of a logic of coloniality that reinforces hierarchy, exclusion, and marginalization in the Trinidadian educational system. I conclude by contending that these nascent praxes must be scaled-up to more mature, radical praxes, including the cultivation of a systemic praxis of care; in other words, a deeper and broader postcolonial peace education.

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Lingering Colonialities as Blockades to Peace Education: School Violence in Trinidad

Cited by 16 publications

References 0 publications

Decolonial approaches to school curriculum for Black, Indigenous and other students of colour

Decolonial approaches to school curriculum for Black, Indigenous and other students of colour

Getting to “no”: Locating critical peace education within resistance and anti-oppression pedagogy at a Shi’a Islamic school in Lebanon

Teachers’ nascent praxes of care: potentially decolonizing approaches to school violence in Trinidad

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