Accountability as praxis: a dialectical conversation on decolonising teaching methods

ABSTRACT

This article engages two teacher educators committed to social justice. We dialogue about our different pedagogies, ideologies, and approaches to education, learning from each other’s mistakes and assets. To aim for decolonial accountability to the communities impacted, we engage in dialogue with each other to better understand how to refine our approaches and increase the efficacy of our critical pedagogies. The piece begins with vignettes of our educational efforts that failed to decolonise, and dialogically converses to model culturally responsive and sustaining accountability upon reflection. The purpose of this article is to unveil this process with peer educators as a decolonising accountability measure. Ultimately, we assert that educational practices that enable critique, conversation, and invite self-reflexivity are decolonising. Our recommendations to engage in dialogue with other educators stem from a desire to continue refining our pedagogical skills and holding ourselves accountable to a praxis of decoloniality.

KEYWORDS:

• Teaching methods
• teacher education
• racial justice
• decolonising pedagogy
• culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogy
• critical whiteness

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all of our wonderful students, past, present, and future, for their dedication to teaching, and their patience with our own evolution as educators along the way. Thank you to all the culturally responsive and sustaining scholars, who have provided mentorship to us, either through friendship, camaraderie, or by way of their offerings in writing. We also must thank our children for being our continued muses for a better, more accountable and just future. Our love for you drives our commitment to accountability.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emily Alicia Affolter

Emily Alicia Affolter is the director of and faculty for Prescott College’s Sustainability Education Ph.D. Program, working with doctoral scholars on the nexus of social and environmental justice as enacted in teaching, leading, and learning. Prior to this role, she worked as a Senior Research Scientist and Equity Consultant at the University of Washington’s Center for Evaluation & Research for STEM Equity. She earned her Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction with a focus on Multicultural Education from the UW working alongside Dr. Geneva Gay, founder of culturally responsive teaching. Dr. Emily Affolter is a Fulbright-Hays scholar whose research focused on curricula combating xenophobia in the K-12 Spanish language classroom arena. Her current scholarship, dissemination, and facilitation highlight culturally responsive, equity literate, and sustaining pedagogies for teachers, faculty, and leaders in K-16 settings and STEM higher education. Additionally, Emily’s latest endeavours explore decolonising research praxis and critical climate justice initiatives.

Abby Yost

Abby Yost’s research examines the intersection between colonial processes and education, examining the efficacy of instructional methods and structures intending to decolonise. She lives in Southern Arizona, and works in collaboration with public schools and Indigenous communities. Dr. Yost teaches decolonising pedagogy and postcolonial literary theory at Prescott College in Arizona, and directs the Departments of Arts and Humanities, and Social Justice Studies. She is currently coordinating the Indigenous Teacher Education and Organizing Certification programme in collaboration with Maasai community leaders in East Africa at Prescott College’s Dopoi Center.