Abstract
Despite the popularity of social justice frameworks, today’s polarized socio-political environments call for a justice-forward approach where educators blend equity and culturally-responsive pedagogies with experiential approaches to learning. The TALLS (Toward a Liberated Learning Spirit) model for developing critical consciousness infuses established equity practices with indigenous approaches to learning and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Six Steps for Nonviolent Social Change. By re-engaging curiosities, TALLS guides learners from academic detachment through an unlearning process toward embodied liberation. Readers will be invited to disrupt common misconceptions that reproduce postcolonial paradigms to foster learner development of critical consciousness.
Highlights
Despite the popularity of social justice frameworks, today’s polarized socio-political environments call for a justice-forward approach where educators blend equity and culturally-responsive pedagogies with experiential approaches to learning
The authors define a process of liberated learning that facilitates a shift from traditional practices of academic detachment through an unlearning process toward direct action and embodied liberation
Throughout this cyclical process, the Toward a Liberated Learning Spirit (TALLS) model pulls together the aforementioned common principles of inclusive and culturally-responsive pedagogies and the foundational concepts of the Learning Spirit, trust and tender resistance, cultural wealth, nonviolent direct action, and reflection to move learning from academic detachment to direct action and liberated learning
Summary
Traditional pedagogical practices in the United States were developed within systems defined by colonization, including the establishment of educational practices shaped by philosophies that privileged the education of some bodies based on racialized conceptions of an individual’s value (Todd, 2018). As traditionally and formally educated white, Christian, heterosexual, and cis-gendered women in the U.S South, facilitating courses for undergraduate and graduate students as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion programming for university faculty and staff, the authors acknowledge the complications of, and the necessity of recognizing, the both/and nature of working to decolonize higher education while owning personal histories (including benefiting from white supremacy and systemic injustice) Through this complication of simultaneously having power and seeking to disrupt hegemonic power structures, the authors identified some key limitations of the varying approaches to social justice education, including the lack of space in the teaching and learning process for educators and students, alike, to shift their understanding and embodiment of various positionalities. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Vol 21, No 2, June 2021. josotl.indiana.edu
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