Education Commons^™

Unsettling Colonial Structures In Education Through Community-Centered Praxis, Kimberley Greeson, Steven Sassaman, Katherine Williams, Abby Yost

Journal of Critical Scholarship on Higher Education and Student Affairs

In the context of settler colonialism in the US, mainstream education practices function as ongoing enactors of colonial processes. Decolonizing pedagogy seeks to challenge these dominant practices by centering place, Indigenous epistemologies, and rehumanizing values. In this paper, we discuss how faculty and students used community-based experiential learning projects (CBEL) to challenge these dominant and normative educational structures. By integrating an anti-racist and anti-colonial lens, CBEL projects themselves can work to dismantle power structures, build community, and promote experiential learning in a variety of educational spaces. The student projects presented here seek to unsettle colonial educational frameworks of white supremacy …