Watch: Decolonizing Education, Sandy Grande & Edwin Mayorga
As part of Native Heritage Month at Swarthmore College 2015, the Native American Students Association and the Department of Educational Studies at Swarthmore College hosted a discussion between Dr. Sandy Grande and Edwin Mayorga on the role of education in colonialism and the process of decolonizing the education system.
Sandy Grande is an Associate professor and Chair of the Education Department and the Director of the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) at Connecticut College. Her research and teaching are profoundly inter- and cross-disciplinary, interfacing critical Indigenous theories with the concerns of education. Her book, Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004) is currently being published in a 10th anniversary edition. She has also published several book chapters and articles including: “Accumulation of the Primitive: The Limits of Liberalism and the Politics of Occupy Wall Street,” The Journal of Settler Colonial Studies. ”Confessions of a Fulltime Indian,” The Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, “American Indian Geographies of Identity and Power: At the Crossroads of Indigena and Mestizaje,” Harvard Educational Review; and, “Red-ding the Word and the World” In, Paulo Freire’s Intellectual Roots: Toward Historicity in Praxis. Bloomsbury Academic. New York, New York. Eds. Robert Lake & T. Kress. (2013).
Edwin Mayorga is an Instructor in the Educational Studies Department and Latin American and Latino Studies (LALS) program at Swarthmore College. His research focuses on cultural political economy, U.S. Latinxs and urban education & policy, racial/ethnic studies, teacher-lead social movements, and teaching for social justice. Much of his energies are focused on the Education in our Barrios Project, a digital, critical participatory action research (D+CPAR) project that centers on working alongside youth in Latinx core communities in Philadelphia and New York City. He is co-editor of the book: What’s Race Got to Do with It? How Current School Reform Maintains Racial and Economic Inequality (Peter Lang; 2015; co-edited with B. Picower). At Swarthmore he is also co-leading the Critical Education Policy Studies group. Prior to Swarthmore, he was an elementary school teacher in New York City and was a member of the educator-activist group, the New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCoRE).