Learn Decolonial Pedagogy
What you will be able to do
- Identify whether an educational practice reproduces the banking model (teacher deposits knowledge into passive students) and articulate what makes it so.
- Describe problem-posing education as an alternative and explain how it differs structurally from the banking model.
- Given a knowledge system (a curriculum, a library classification, a database schema), identify whose knowledge it centers, what forms of knowledge it privileges, and what it excludes.
- Explain why “decolonize” is not a synonym for “diversify” or “critically examine” — what decolonization specifically requires (following Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang).
Prerequisites
None. This skill is a starting point.
Lessons
- Decolonial Pedagogy — the banking model, problem-posing education, engaged pedagogy, decolonizing methodologies, Red Pedagogy, land-based education, and the “decolonization is not a metaphor” corrective
This is a single lesson. Work through it fully.
Scope
This skill covers the major thinkers and frameworks in decolonial pedagogy as represented in the vault: Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Sandy Grande, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang.
It does not cover:
- Lesson design or curriculum design (covered by separate pedagogy skills that depend on this one)
- The full breadth of critical pedagogy (Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, and others are mentioned but not developed)
- Indigenous pedagogies in depth (the schools/indigenous-pedagogies page goes deeper, but land-based education in particular cannot be learned through text alone — it requires sustained relationship with place)
- Non-anglophone decolonial thought (Frantz Fanon, Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, and others are not yet represented)
Verification
After completing the lesson, try this: pick any educational practice you have experienced (a class, a textbook, an online course, a training program). Describe it in terms of the banking model: who holds the knowledge, how does it flow, what role does the learner play? Then describe what a problem-posing alternative would look like. Finally, identify one epistemological assumption the practice makes — what kind of knowledge does it treat as legitimate, and what does it exclude?