Decolonial Cartography in Teacher Education: Mapping New Possibilities for Praxis and Relationality in the Classroom

Any discussion of colonial tensions, including in the context of schooling, teaching, and learning, necessarily invokes the geographic; asking us to reflect on the tensions between the global north and global south, the epistemic construction of the “West,” in our curriculum, and the ways in which our pedagogies and classrooms literally demarcate and shape our relationality with marginalized youth in schools. Teacher education particularly has long been defined by its colonial geography, encouraging novice educators to stay on well-worn paths of “what works” rather than venturing into the unknown, or charting new paths towards unfamiliar practices or relational understandings. Yet moving beyond the ways in which our institutions are dominated by coloniality requires re-thinking and re-mediating these geographies that educators and youth find themselves in together. By exploring an example of teacher education praxis involving novice educators and youth participating together in decolonial sensemaking, this chapter suggests that doing the work of southern theory involves positioning ourselves as teacher educators, and our novices, as decolonial cartographers, charting routes into important, but unfamiliar terrain, and imagining new, more liberatory possibilities for schooling. This work requires imagination and disobedience, but is critical to decolonizing schooling, and producing a more humanizing world.