Reflections on operationalizing an anti-racism pedagogy: teaching as regional storytelling

Abstract

ABSTRACT Responding to rising social tensions and ongoing theoretical and political changes in the study of geography, we advocate for greater operationalizing of anti-racism pedagogies within the field. Such pedagogies undermine long-standing geographic knowledge systems that marginalize and misrepresent people of color while also distorting and misinforming the worldviews of a White society. Drawing from classroom successes and uncertainties, five educators explore the anti-racist possibilities of geography education as a form of “regional storytelling.” Regions, one of geography’s formative constructs, play a central role within popular and academic understandings of racial differences and identities. Making exclusionary moral judgements about regions and associated populations has long been at the core of the colonization and racialization process. Contributors use reflexive storytelling – understood here as both a classroom instructional method and a way to create supportive spaces for educators to reflect on their praxis – to identify and discuss strategies for carrying out anti-racist, regionally-based teaching, the instructional decisions and challenges faced in the classroom, and perceptions of student response and anxieties. We also reflect on how the wider regional and racial positionalities of teachers and students shape the way an anti-racist pedagogy is enacted, interpreted, and realized within the higher education classroom.