Decolonising the curriculum is a complex, although not elusive phenomenon in initial teacher education (ITE). It is, however, to be actively and persistently pursued to enable anti-racist pedagogies and agendas to become embedded within student teachers’ schema. Calls across higher education for humanising and epistemically liberating pedagogies (Carmichael-Murphy & Gabi, 2021) challenge ITE educators to reconceptualise the ontological and epistemic foundations of their praxis. However, prevailing policies of standardisation and increasingly centralised curriculum demands and requirements in ITE, often sever links between culture and education for racially-minoritised student teachers who navigate complex and conflicting terrains to become teachers (Warner, 2022). Slow and limited progress in addressing hidden oppressions in the bureaucratic structures and curricular content has been identified as leading to racial harrassment, stereotyping and alienation of Black and Asian student teachers (Warner, 2022). This has raised accusations of a lack of commitment for decolonial and anti-racist practices that allow structural racism and narrowed policies to thrive (Bhopal & Pitkin, 2020).  Indeed Domínguez (2019:47) argues that 'teacher education remains a deeply colonial endeavour’ and believes we are poised at a static zero point where the training of teachers requires specific and uncompromising intervention to avoid the damaging reification of colonial practices.

This paper reflects on an ethnographic study that explored circumstances, contexts, and influential factors as experienced by university teacher educators engaged in anti-racist practice and explored the possibilities of turning decolonial thinking into praxis. These experiences were investigated through qualitative thematic analyses with nine collaborators at one university. Enriched by a critical analytic ethnography as a methodological orientation for decolonial inquiry, we are able to tell our stories from a ‘place of personal-political-pedagogical-philosophical crisis’ (Mackinlay, 2019: 203). Our approach is anchored in challenging disembodied practice-based research and undoing forms of coloniality in curricula and relational encounters, moving towards embodying transformative praxis (Thambinathan & Kinsella, 2021). This is underpinned by recognising and examining how teacher education is complicit in disembodied curricula and practices purported by White, Western epistemologies (Ohito, 2019). These serve to separate knowledge from experience, but embodiment acknowledges and is empowered by understanding ways in which experiences bring fuller dimensions to how we know and understand the world. We are also conscious of how our own entanglements with coloniality and other institutional structural factors that govern ITE curriculum delivery may complicate the research process. Thus, as we seek decolonial and dialogical reflexive spaces, we recognise the idea of ‘body-knowledge-space configuration’ that informs our research and praxis. We examine ourselves so that in attuning more finely to notions of race, racism and antiracism within teacher education, we can move from the colonial binary matrix that works at stratifying and segmenting us into perpetual victimhood of oppressor/oppressed, or victim/saviour to understanding how racism’s subtleties thread through the curricula of ITE and can be countered. We take cognisance of Denzin’s (1997:225) argument that 'a responsible, reflexive text announces its politics while it ceaselessly interrogates the realities it invokes while folding the teller’s story into the multivoiced history that is written’ where ‘no interpretation is privileged’. Consideration is given to power relations in social research situations, particularly as insider researchers and where our identities are complex constructs that we negotiate to serve epistemological purposes. This enquiry, therefore, acknowledges and makes visible the link between positionality, relational ethics, and decoloniality. This does not mean that we possess a decolonial universal truth or that there is one way to conceive and develop decolonial praxis in teacher education.

Our findings suggest perceptible evidence of teacher educators’ frustrations yet deepening commitment to exposing ITE’s complicity in the reproduction and sustenance of coloniality of knowledge and relational inequities (Gabi, Olsson Rost, Warner, Asif, 2022). In the context of their specialist areas, they felt greater autonomy and ownership in attempting to reframe national requirements and reveal, with more accuracy, about inequity in education. They also disclosed how they felt teaching had become conceptualised and normalised as an ideologically ‘instrumentalised profession’, lacking emphasis on intersectional, antiracist and the critical consciousness necessary to circumvent damage-centred colonial narratives. A lack of incentive from ‘above’, as shown in current ITE curricular requirements, places the emphasis on the initiatives of individual educators or enlightened teacher education departments, to become crucial agents in developing decolonial praxis (Bhopal & Pitkin, 2020).

Bhopal, K., & Pitkin, C. (2020). ‘Same old story, just a different policy’: Race and policymaking in higher education in the UK. Race Ethnicity and Education, 23(4), 530–547. http://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2020.1718082 Carmichael-Murphy, P., & Gabi, J. (2021). (Re)imagining a dialogic curriculum: Humanising and epistemically liberating pedagogies in HE. Journal of Race and Pedagogy, 5(2), 1–18. https://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/rpj/vol5/iss2/4 Doharty, N., Madriaga, M. & Joseph-Salisbury, R. (2021). The university went to ‘decolonise’ and all they brought back was lousy diversity double-speak! Critical race counter-stories from faculty of colour in ‘decolonial’ times. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 53(3), 233-244, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2020.1769601 Domínguez, M. (2019). Decolonial innovation in teacher development: praxis beyond the colonial zero-point. Journal of Education for Teaching, 45(1), 47–62, https://doi.org/10.1080/02607476.2019.1550605 Gabi, J., Olsson Rost, A., Warner, D., & Asif, U. (2022). Decolonial praxis: Teacher educators’ perspectives on tensions, barriers, and possibilities of anti-racist practice-based initial teacher education in England. Curriculum Journal. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1002/curj.174 Johnson, A., & Joseph-Salisbury, R. (2018). ‘Are You Supposed to Be in Here?’ Racial Microaggressions and Knowledge Production in Higher Education: Racism, Whiteness and Decolonising the Academy. In Dismantling Race in Higher Education : Racism, Whiteness and Decolonising the Academy (pp.143-160). Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60261-5_8 Warner, D. (2022) ‘Black and Minority Ethnic Student Teachers stories as empirical documents of hidden oppressions: using the personal to turn towards the structural’ in British Educational Research Journal. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3819