What is it about?
This article explores potential barriers, tensions and possibilities of enacting anti-racist practices in Initial Teacher Education. This challenges educators to radically reconceptualise the ontological and epistemic foundations that inform their praxis.
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Why is it important?
The prevailing teacher education policy of standardisation has led to accusations of a lack of commitment to decolonial and anti-racist practices. This perpetuates the reduction of education to standardised methods and educators as transmitters of such measures. Our findings suggest perceptible evidence of teacher educators' growing curiosity and commitment to exposing ITE's complicity in the reproduction and sustenance of the logic of coloniality of knowledge and relational inequities. However, the momentum to establish and sustain decolonial praxis comes from individual educators. Their concerns and desires to address this work reveal significant barriers and lack of will within an ITE policy that upholds colonised ideals under the guise of traditional values and a standardised yet characteristically 'white', curricula. Thus, it becomes imperative for teacher educators to engage in epistemic disobedience (Mignolo, 2009)—learning how to teach whilst interrogating their positionality and resisting colonial ways of thinking about and doing teacher education.
Perspectives
Writing this article was a pleasure, a manifestation of radical imagination of possible anti-racist futures. We hope this article resonates with teacher educators and infuses hope.
Josephine Gabi
Manchester Metropolitan University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Decolonial praxis: Teacher educators' perspectives on tensions, barriers, and possibilities of anti‐racist practice‐based Initial Teacher Education in England, The Curriculum Journal, August 2022, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/curj.174.
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