“El que no sabe de dónde viene, no sabe adonde va.” - Proverb my dad used to tell me
“The one who doesn’t know where they come from will not know where they are going.”
“Entre más profundo la raíz, más santo el palo.” - Combo Chimbita
“The deeper the root, the holier the tree.”
Introduction
This project will explore the theory and practice of decolonizing educational spaces. It is my life’s purpose to reclaim knowledge ways that colonialism has tried to erase. Through this curriculum unit, students will develop skills to critically analyze how racism shows up in their academic education. They will explore storytelling techniques and movements of oral tradition in order to empower their linguistic and cultural identities.
The vision for this project is rooted in Antiracist Black Language1 and Ethnic Studies Pedagogies. The U.S. educational system has robbed my students and me of our ancestral languages, history, and cultures to enforce a white supremacist lens, which favors eurocentrism and White Mainstream English.2 Antiracist Black Language dismantles linguistic racism forced into English Language Arts (ELA) classes and the rest of society; it creates space and opportunity for students to engage in decolonizing themselves through their perceptions and use of language. Ethnic Studies is seen as a part of culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) and addresses the whitewashed history students are told to memorize year after year.3 Cuauhtin claims that Ethnic Studies aims to go deeper than additive or superficial approaches to traditional CRP by revitalizing knowledge that was “forcibly lost, stolen, erased, and replaced”4 with the intention of healing the harms done by white supremacy and dismantling its institutional structures.
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