Teaching Toward a Decolonizing Pedagogy

Honorable Mention-2021 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book AwardTeaching Toward a Decolonizing Pedagogy outlines educational practitioner development toward decolonizing practices and pedagogies for anti-racist, justice-based urban classrooms. Through rich personal narratives of one teacher’s critical reflections on her teaching, urban education scholarship and critical praxis are merged to provide an example of anti-racist urban schooling. Steeped in theoretical practice, this book offers a narrative of one teacher’s efforts to decolonize her urban classroom, and to position it as a vehicle for racial and economic justice for marginalized and minoritized students. At once a model for deconstructing the white institutional space of US schooling and a personal account of obstacles to these efforts, Teaching Toward a Decolonizing Pedagogy presents a research-based ‘pueblo pedagogy’ that reconsiders teacher identity and teachers’ capacities for resilience, resistance, and community-based instruction. From this personal exploration, emergent and practicing teachers can extract curricula, practices, and dispositions toward advocacy for students most underserved and marginalized by public education. As an exemplar of decolonizing work both in classroom practices and in methodologies for educational research, this book presents tensions and complexities in school-based theorizing and praxis, and in teacher implementations of anti-racist pedagogies in and against the current US model of colonial schooling.

Dr. Trinder’s writing is captivating and poetic. She not only draws, but wins, the reader over to her side. Prepare yourself to embark on an insightful, intellectual and deeply personal journey.Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D., College of Education, University of Texas at Austin and author of Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring"In this achingly personal book, Vicki Trinder recounts her efforts as a white teacher to co-create an authentic learning community with her Mexican immigrant students. Grounded in theory and illuminated throughout by "crisis moments" over the course of a single school year, Trinder’s narrative deftly interrogates her privilege, wrestles with her identity as a teacher, and examines her struggles to upend the curricular erasure of her students and their cultural inheritance. Never placing herself above or outside the complicated issues she tackles, she reminds us that even as she works to counter the injustices of a colonized education system, she is also at times a reluctant cog in its wheels. Her honest self-examination and lingering uncertainties will resonate with any teacher who understands that the true high stakes of teaching in public schools have nothing to do with tests.Gregory Michie, Ph.D., author of Holler if You Hear Me and Same as it Never Was.

Victoria F. Trinder is a Clinical Assistant Professor in Curriculum and Instruction whose scholarship examines critical examples of teaching and teacher education in the context of the colonial project. Dr. Trinder currently directs the undergraduate Urban Elementary Education Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago.