Within a neo-liberal model of education, power is held by policy-makers, curriculum developers and teachers, while pupils are positioned as objects of instruction and parents as consumers who seek schools offering best value for money. We have argued that in such a system, teacher pedagogies are largely based on mainstream ways of being and knowing, that perpetuate a form of education that continues to divide the world and to marginalise (and thus fail) students who are perceived as Other (Martin & Pirbhai-Illich, 2016).

Across the globe, and in particular in the European Union, immigration and neo-liberal economies have created crises that have affected education. These cannot be understood as something to be overcome through current structures and practices which we see as colonizing (to colonize is to enforce the past on the present, rather than to engage with the challenge of the present in its radical alterity). Crises therefore demand that we engage with them in their difference, in order for something to creatively emerge from our interaction with them. It is this creative emergence that, for us, defines an educational event, and that we wish to explore in this paper.

‘Conventional’ understandings of education are, for the most part, colonizing. It is based on a model that wishes to replace perceived ‘incorrect’ or ‘lesser’ knowledge with ‘correct’ or ‘better’ knowledge, and correct knowledge is determined by the mainstream and people with power. As such, difference is seen as something to be removed, the subaltern (perceived incorrect/lesser) position is replaced by the dominant (perceived correct/better) position. For example, culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP) (Ladson-Billings, 1995) was introduced to close the academic achievement gap between African American and mainstream students. Our research focuses on how, as an educational reform, it has been taken up by white educators in North America and New Zealand in ways that focus on surface features and the needs of the “Other”, on narrow understandings of culture, on deficit dispositions towards difference, and on the teacher self as the agent in changing the Other. It is this form of education that we see as colonizing and that we wish to challenge.

Question. What concepts and processes are needed for education reform in pluralistic societies?

Theoretical framework. This papers reports on the conceptual aspects of the project. We worked with colleagues from a range of diaspora, indigenous, and white mainstream communities, who are united in their desire to challenge the hegemony of Eurocentric education and to create new educational spaces that are more socially and environmentally just, by extending the concept of culturally responsive pedagogies to include decolonization (Grosfoguel, 2011; Mignolo, 2007), Indigeneity (Battiste, 2013; Cote-Meek, 2014) and interculturalism (Dervin, 2011; Martin & Pirbhai-Illich, 2016). We argue that effective culturally responsive pedagogies require teachers to firstly undertake a critical deconstruction of Self in relation to and with the Other; and secondly, to consider how power affects the socio-political, cultural and historical contexts in which the education relation takes place. Educational reform is seen to be inherently critical and intercultural, where mainstream and marginalized, colonized and colonizer work together to decolonize selves, teacher-student relationships, pedagogies, the curriculum and the education system itself.

Battiste, M. (2013) Decolonizing education: Nourishing the learning spirit. Saskatoon, SK: Purich Publishing Ltd. Cote-Meek, S., 2014. Colonized classrooms: racism, trauma and resistance in post-secondary education. Halifax: Fernwood. Dervin, F. (2011). A plea for change in research on intercultural discourses: A ‘liquid’ approach to the study of the acculturation of Chinese students. Journal of Multicultural Discourses. Vol. 6, No. 1, March 2011, 37-52. Gay, G. (2002) Preparing for Culturally Responsive Teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 53, No. 2, March/April 2002 106-116 Grosfoguel, 2011). Decolonizing post-colonial studies and paradigms of political-economy: transmodernity, decolonial thinking, and global coloniality. TRANSMODERNITY: journal of peripheral cultural production of the Luso-Hispanic world, 1 (1), 1–37. Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). But that’s just good teaching! The case of culturally relevant pedagogy. Theory into practice, 34 (3), 159–165. Martin, F. & Pirbhai-Illich, F. (2016).  Towards Decolonising Teacher Education: Criticality, Relationality and Intercultural Understanding, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 37:4, 355-372, Mignolo, W. (2007) Coloniality: The Darker Side of Modernity. In: Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality, Cultural Studies, vol. 21, nos. 2-3, pp. 155-167.