Decolonial praxis: teacher educators' perspectives on tensions, barriers, and possibilities of anti‐racist practice‐based Initial Teacher Education in England

Gabi, Josephine ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3629-0719, Olsson Rost, Anna, Warner, Diane and Asif, Uzma (2023) Decolonial praxis: teacher educators' perspectives on tensions, barriers, and possibilities of anti‐racist practice‐based Initial Teacher Education in England. The Curriculum Journal, 34 (1). pp. 83-99. ISSN 0958-5176

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Abstract

The impact of colonisation, cognitive imperialism, and Eurocentric modes of knowing, being and doing has had an effect on Higher Education, including teacher education. Colonial epistemologies, epistemicide, academic dependency, disempowerment and intellectual inferiority are challenged by liberatory pedagogies that present opportunities to reconceptualise ontological and epistemic foundations to inform antiracist practice and decolonial praxis. However, prevailing teacher education policies of standardisation in England raise difficult obstacles against decolonial and anti-racist practices. By acknowledging the existence of institutionalised forms of coloniality, which includes the reproduction of colonial-modernist-western modes of thinking and doing, a re-imagined decolonial reality can be envisioned. We argue that this process can engender humanising, antiracist, and epistemically liberating pedagogies within teacher education, which can encourage the co-existence of a diverse plurality of forms of knowing, being and doing. Through conversational semi-structured interviews with nine teacher educators, enriched by a critical analytic ethnographic study, the findings suggest perceptible evidence of teacher educators' growing curiosity and commitment to exposing ITE's complicity in the reproduction and sustenance of the logics of coloniality of knowledge and relational inequities.