New Imaginaries For Decolonizing The Classroom

By Frances Rosenberg

January 28th and 29th I attended the International Festival of Decoloniality, hosted online by the University of Derby. Through presentations and workshops, dozens of us—thinkers and doers from around the globe—explored possibilities of decolonization, in the realm of education primarily (although not exclusively). As we shared and discussed and listened, I found myself thinking more and more about what it would mean to truly decolonize the classroom.

This festival came right in the middle of a 4-week Decolonization Reading Course I’ve been facilitating here in Copenhagen, a course that deviates more and more from traditional university courses the more it progresses. In the course, multiple participants have brought up the necessity of embodiment, groundedness, and creativity when it comes to “learning” how to decolonize, and even understanding the concept to begin with. During the festival, sitting and listening to inspiring presentations on decolonizing curricula, I came to realize it was exactly that focus on method that my students had brought up which was missing in a lot of discussions around decolonization in education spaces. If we’re decolonizing curriculums, thus focusing on content—what about method?

Although these ideas are only in their early stages, I feel inspired to formulate a sort of blurry map which I will try to follow, explore, and expand upon as I continue to facilitate and learn. This map would take us through a grounded, place-based contextual experience, in our particular bodies, in community with other particular bodies, to a space of collaborative creativity. The primary, interconnected paths on this map are thus the following: groundedness, embodiment, and creation. 

Groundedness

I have long known the importance of place. I was raised on the ancestral lands of the Cayuga Nation, in the forests around what is now called Ithaca, New York, and spent much of my childhood running and playing in the more-than-human ecosystems around me. The particular species of tree, bird, mammal, and insect wove together the tapestry of my upbringing, as much as any human society I took part in. 

When I moved to Copenhagen four years ago I found myself feeling a bit weightless, lost in an ecosystem that looked familiar and yet foreign at the same time. A couple years back I took some time to learn the names of the trees around me, making it a goal to touch and call by name one hundred different species. I have written before about how unhealthy our colonial-capitalistic separation of human and nature is, and I’ll reiterate it here. Until we learn the names of our more-than-human neighbors, until we remember to be in place, I don’t think any real paradigm shifts can take root within us. 

Robin Wall Kimmerer, ethnobotanist and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, writes in her deeply powerful book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants on the necessity of place-consciousness and reciprocity with the more-than-human world you find yourself in. She speaks on the possibility, and indeed the obligation, of becoming “Indigenous to place.” In a follow-up essay calling on the American public to do just that, Kimmerer writes, “You, right now, can choose to set aside the mindset of the colonizer and become native to place, you can choose to belong.” 

What would this mindset look like in the context of the classroom, the university? How can we learn in a way that fosters connection to land? One inspiration I have drawn from is this 1981 bioregional quiz, which asks biology students to consider the implications of their local knowledge on not just how they learn, but how they live as well. 

Embodiment

Even from a purely Western intellectual approach, embodiment has been proven to be crucial to education. Embodied Cognition Theory (ECT), one peer-reviewed meta-analysis argues, stresses “the importance of bodily engagement and perceptual experience for learning… emphasizing the crucial role of bodily movements and sensory experiences in the cognitive process.” They showed how embodied learning “significantly improved learning performance”—a finding reiterated in many other studies (see here, here, and here for example). 

But part of the process of decolonization involves, while not necessarily dismissing these Western intellectual approaches, then certainly at least bringing them down off the pedestal of the-only-knowledge-that-counts. So what other kinds of less-accepted forms of knowledge have shown us that embodiment can help students to learn, and is perhaps even essential to learning?

Lived experience, I would argue. Camille Litalien says, “everything substantial I have ever learned, I learned through being in my body.” What can we learn—and unlearn—when we bring the body to the forefront?

Creation

In the third year of my bachelors at Bennington College, I took a course called Nature in the Americas, taught by the wonderful David Bond. In this course we explored the fundamental and slippery question: what is nature? Furthermore, how has nature been theorized, experienced, altered, pushed aside, and animated in the history of the American continents? After a semester of fascinating reading, writing, and discussing, David asked us to create a final project that engaged with these questions in whatever format we found best suited. I remember one student created ceramic pieces representing soil and ice transformations, another wrote a personal narrative. I chose to tear up old national geographic magazines, class notebooks and readings, and other found materials to turn them into a collage book circling around the core question of what the word “nature” even is. 

(select pages from my Nature collage book)

So why do I tell this story here, in the context of decolonizing the classroom? Because it was through the very act of creation that I landed on some of the most interesting questions (and yes, far more questions than answers!) that this subject had to offer. Through working with paper and plastic materials, I found myself reflecting on the tactile elements of nature and human intervention. Through looking at pictures of processed food alongside pictures of animals I came to wonder where the line is that delineates nature from not-nature. And across all of these thoughts came the overarching question that haunts me to this day—who decides?

Through creation, and possibly even co-creation, can a classroom dedicated to decolonization find its way to unforeseen questions and ideas? I believe that creativity has the power to unlock ways of being and knowing that nothing else can. And perhaps, in the very act of creating itself, we are transformed and transform one another. 

Where does the map lead us?

So, put it all together and what do you have?

I’m still working on answers to these questions, and indeed I don’t even think that finding the answers is the point at all. Rather, I look forward to exploring the possibilities that these questions give life to, both within the classroom as I continue to facilitate future courses, and in my own personal journey toward decolonizing the self. 

I welcome any comments, thoughts, or critiques, as I believe all the best learning arises out of dialogue.