Looking Across Borders to Consider Education and Schools
As a researcher, I use my training in anthropology to study education experiences. It causes me to ask the question, “How did we come to practice things this way?” As educators, we accept practices as a given and these practices start to feel natural. Early on in our career, we are socialized into thinking about education in a particular way (Williams, 2003). To question these practices we have to be aware of what they are. An international comparison can illuminate elements of culture, which we were unaware of. By looking at education across our man-made political borders, we see things which we have taken for granted (Williams, 2003). In this essay, I will explain why and how I look across man-made borders, how doing so can shape my view of education, and use my engagement with Rhodes Must Fall as an illustration of how I engage with global south scholars. As I engage with the ideas, which Rhodes Must Fall scholar-activists wrote about, I consider how this compares to visions of justices which emerged from similar movements in the United States. This comparison highlights that movements in the United States could be more concerned with collective freedom.
There are few countries which have not been touched by colonialism. Yet our response to our colonial past and present is not the same in each nation (Tuck & Yang, 2012). Our present day acts of resistance are shaped not only by differing constraints but also by differing imaginaries for our futures. Our colonial past has suppressed different aspects of our memories. Across the world, nations are imagining the way forward and how to emerge from our colonial situations. Yet the imaginations are not all the same. The differences can become a place for exploring decolonial imaginations. What can we learn from each other?
I research education in the Caribbean but I work in higher education in the United States. On the way of exploring how to form my research question(s), I have had the opportunity to reflect on the decolonization imaginations and movements from the global south. Although my research looks at education outside the United States, it has provided rich lessons for how I approach educating students within the United States. Through global south scholars’ perspectives on education, such as Freirean pedagogy, I see a different purpose for education. Specifically, I see the intellectuals in independence movements in the Caribbean, and most recently the Rhodes Must Fall movement using education as a path to freedom. The imaginations from the global south cause me to interrogate what justice looks like in the United States. In the United States, the dominant view of justice is how well someone succeeds economically (Hill & Kumar, 2009; Tuck, Guess & Sultan, 2014).
In order to effectively compare education practices, we have to believe that knowledge and discourse from the global south are legitimate on their own. When we accept knowledge in the global south as legitimate, the act of transferring knowledge from the global south to the global north is itself a decolonial act. The legitimacy of knowledge from the global south is not based on successfully undergoing our critique. When we approach with an attitude of critique, we risk measuring global south knowledge against our own knowledge and attributing legitimacy based on our shared experiences. I choose to approach global south dialogues seeking to understand the arguments and trusting global south scholars and educators to imagine new futures. When I accept their knowledge, I can consider what that means for my work as an educator in the United States. I can ask what blind spots are the blind spots which global south perspectives reveal in my work as an educator.
To illustrate, I will consider a comparison of contemporary student movements. In 2015, Rhodes Must Fall started at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and then taken up by students in Oxford, England (Ahmed, 2017). Following the 2014 “I too am Harvard,” students in Oxford first used a model which centered race. However, after this, they shifted to decolonization perspective of Rhodes Must Fall (Nkopo, Madenga, & Chantiluke, 2018). During the same year as Rhodes Must Fall, a group of black students at the University of Missouri, called Concerned Students 1950 protested and these protests spread onto other campuses in the United States (Ndemanu, 2017).
Although located in the global north, Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford activists positioned themselves as people with origins in the global south. Instead of describing themselves as members of British society, they described their origins within the global south (Chantiluke, Kwoba, & Nkopo, 2018). We also see a parallel move made by activists in South Africa. Rhodes Must Fall activists in South Africa do not use the South African constitution as a tool in their activism. Their maneuver could be described as a symbolic rejection of the state’s legitimacy (Ahmed, 2017). Although they look different, these two approaches are decolonial in nature as both position themselves outside of the colonial structure (Newton, 2013). Even though the Oxford movement happened in the global north, it bears resemblance to decolonization features of global south movements. What do these movements offer us about a way forward that we did not get from the Concerned Students 1950?
The race based movements, which emerged from the Concerned Students 1950 protests at the University of Missouri had recurring demands across campuses (Ndemanu, 2017). The most common demands were “increase in faculty of color,” “diversity training for faculty and staff,” “increase in students of color” and “a required racial/social justice course for all students” (Ndemanu, p. 238). These demands, focused on items which benefit the students in the current structure. Decolonization however asks us to interrogate the structure and consider how it shapes our understanding of our demands. It reminds us to look for alternative understandings of society (Tuck & Yang, 2012). “The attainment of equal legal and cultural entitlements, is actually an investment in settler colonialism” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 18). Rhodes Must Fall considered the labor movements of workers on campus and included the workers’ demands within their demands (Ahmed, 2019). While I am hesitant to call including workers’ demands an expression of Tuck and Yang’s call for dismantling settle colonialism, the Rhodes Must Fall movement highlighted a blind spot. Movements can consider the ways students can be included while neglecting those who continue to live in the margins of a broken system. The Rhodes Must Fall movement challenges me to think, “Is it really freedom if I do not include others?”. If my goal is simply a better experience for me or my students, does that really fix a broken system, or does it maintain an unequal society? Their demands are a reminder that if I only ask for myself, I am only perpetuating power structures and reinforced the importance of considering higher education’s structure.
References
Ahmed, A. K. (2017). # RhodesMustFall. Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education, 9(Fall), 8-13.
Ahmed, A. K. (2019). The Rise of Fallism:# RhodesMustFall and the Movement to Decolonize the University. Teachers College.
Chantiluke, R., Kwoba, B., & Nkopo, A. (2018). Rhodes Must Fall: The Struggle to Decolonise the Racist Heart of Empire: Zed Books Limited.
Hill, D., & Kumar, R. (2009). Introduction: neoliberal capitalism and education. In D. Hill & R. Kumar (Eds.), Global neoliberalism and education and its consequences.
Ndemanu, M. T. (2017). Antecedents of College Campus Protests Nationwide: Exploring Black Student Activists’ Demands. The Journal of Negro Education, 86(3), 238-251.
Newton, M. J. (2013). Returns to a Native Land: Indigeneity and Decolonization in the Anglophone Caribbean. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 17(2 (41)), 108-122. doi:10.1215/07990537-2323346
Nkopo, A., Madenga, T., & Chantiluke, R. (2018). Skin Deep: The Black Women of Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford. In R. Chantiluke, B. Kwoba, & A. Nkopo (Eds.), Rhodes Must Fall: The Struggle to Decolonise the Racist Heart of Empire: Zed Books Limited.
Tuck, E., Guess, A., & Sultan, H. (2014). Not nowhere: Collaborating on selfsame land. Decolonization: Indigeneity, education & society, 26(June), 1-11.
Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, education & society, 1(1).
Williams, J. H. (2003). Why compare? Why all educators should think internationally. International Educator, 12(4), 18-25.
Biography:
Stephanie Bent holds a Masters of Education in Anthropology and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University and a Masters of Science in Higher Education-Student Affairs from Florida State University. While at Teachers College, Ms. Bent studied ethnic identity construction among Caribbean-Americans. Currently, a 3rd year PhD Student in the Higher Education, Student Affairs and International Education Policy program at the University of Maryland-College Park, her research interests center around Caribbean students’ experiences in tertiary education, with specific topics including, how Caribbean values and culture shape educational practice within the Caribbean, identity development of Caribbean tertiary students living in and outside the Caribbean, leadership development of Caribbean students, and understanding how Caribbean tertiary education contributes to national development. Ms. Bent uses decolonization as a research paradigm.