Cultivating Epistemic Disobedience: Exploring the Possibilities of a Decolonial Practice-Based Teacher Education

Abstract

Even as momentum builds for critical, culturally sustaining, and decolonial approaches to pedagogy, curriculum, and teacher education, efforts in practice-based teacher education remain epistemically linked to Eurocentric, colonial objects of schooling, and shallow notions of justice. Yet attention to the what the day-to-day work of teaching is critical to novices’ development, especially when the challenges we hope they will embrace—disrupting oppression and advancing liberation—are so complicated. Clear, concrete models of decolonial repertoires of practice are needed to ensure our teacher education efforts produce skilled practitioners prepared to advance the decolonial project in education. In this article, through a decolonial reading of the practice-based literature, and an examination of rehearsal deployed with decolonial intent, I argue for a decolonial practice-based teacher education that will cultivate educators to engage in epistemic disobedience, learning how to teach while resisting the coloniality that permeates schools.