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Decolonizing Teacher Education in Immersion Contexts: Working with Space, Place and Boundaries

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Redefining Teaching Competence through Immersive Programs

Abstract

In this chapter, we discuss how, although a number of higher education institutions in the Global North are attempting to decolonize and Indigenize (e.g., Dei, 2007), many of their practices continue to be colonizing (Tuck & Yang, 2012) unwittingly harming the bodies and minds of the Other (Thiong’o, 1987). Drawing on theory developed through our long-term engagement with pre-service teachers in a course with a critical immersive component, we propose that (a) educators explicitly acknowledge the loci of their enunciation and to use this as a starting point for developing educational relationships ‘otherwise’ and (b) learning with and alongside the Other is a deeply ethical venture requiring a decolonizing pedagogy that can be conceptualized as working within the places, spaces and boundaries of critical interculturalism.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Our use of the term ‘settler’ in this context is to highlight that settler colonialism (i) is different to others forms of colonialism, (ii) involved appropriation of land to establish new and improved versions of the societies they left, (iii) is not temporarily contained in the arrival of the settler but is reasserted each day of occupation, and (iv) is therefore a structure not at event (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 5).

  2. 2.

    ‘Intergenerational trauma’ is ‘The cumulative impact of trauma experienced by both children and their parents as a result of Canada’s residential school policy continues to have consequences for subsequent generations of children’ (Menzies, 2010, p. 67).

  3. 3.

    We use whiteness not as an essential category, but as a concept with ‘a constantly shifting boundary separating those who are entitled to have certain privileges from those whose exploitation and vulnerability to violence is justified by their not being white’ (Kivel, 1996, p. 19).

  4. 4.

    In doing this we do not assume homogeneity across all colonizing European countries. However, since the focus of this chapter is on English language and literacy education, we focus on the British experience.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Regina, Regina, SK, Canada

    Fatima Pirbhai-Illich

  2. Graduate School of Education, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Fran Martin

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  1. Fatima Pirbhai-Illich
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  2. Fran Martin
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Correspondence to Fatima Pirbhai-Illich .

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  1. Pennsylvania State University, Brandywine, Media, PA, USA

    Daniela Martin

  2. Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Elizabeth Smolcic

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Pirbhai-Illich, F., Martin, F. (2019). Decolonizing Teacher Education in Immersion Contexts: Working with Space, Place and Boundaries. In: Martin, D., Smolcic, E. (eds) Redefining Teaching Competence through Immersive Programs. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24788-1_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24788-1_3

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-24788-1

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