The truth is, most of the novels, historical accounts, art, and other works created by and about black people are labeled for teachers as “suggested” rather than “required.”. We can all agree that students should know the significance of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s work and legacy. Our brains are wired to consistently decide what to embrace or what to reject. By Wayne Au. Guided Instruction. She earned her Bachelor of Music Education at The University of Texas at Arlington. Submit an article Journal homepage. As Southern … Ultimately, decolonizing the K-12 curriculum starts at the individual level. They also need to know about the Tuskeegee Experiments, Henrietta Lacks, and mass sterilization in ICE facilities. The questions help to unearth prejudices in areas such as skin complexion, national origin, language, gender, and sexual orientation. With all due respect to our military and innocent lives lost, history courses spend enormous chunks of time on World War II year after year at the expense of ignoring America’s centuries of sins. While the Common Core standards do not explicitly address anti-racism, conservative stakeholders often lean on the uniqueness of a state’s culture, history, and economy to dodge more inclusive policies. Decolonizing the curriculum is about critiquing the prejudices and biases that inform both the number of Western works in the curriculum and the works themselves. Decolonising education would necessitate that the focus of educational activity not be on what young people think, but on how they think, that they think. ET, transfer of Tuluwat Island to the Wiyot Tribe, Decolonizing Land: A Conversation with Professor Elizabeth Ellis, Mobilizing Indigenous Histories for Rights and Reparations: A Roundtable Discussion with Professors Doug Kiel, John Maynard, and Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, Decolonizing Land: A Conversation with Professor Whitney Martinko, Learning How to Learn: A Critical Life Skill, The Achievement Gap Has Driven Education Reform for Decades. So many brave Gen Z activists are calling for a better, more accurate curriculum. Unfortunately, mainstream public education has long distorted the image of Dr. King to perpetuate their ideal of politely angry black people. Scholars such as Connell (2007), Chen (2010) and Alatas (2006) have provided ample evidence of the ways in which epistemologies, knowledge systems, theories, research and publication practices continue to be controlled by Northern, Western and neoliberal capitalism. That’s a problem. How do we put back together a fractured, self-consciousness in an educational setting that negates the affective, conative, and cognitive domains of Black learner … As the author's personal history suggests, it is more than simply another way of reading and interpretation, but enables an engagement with, a bearing witness to, the gross inequalities of the world today. States’ rights are an important aspect of why curricula remain largely whitewashed. Allow students to see, hear, and think about the injustices our country has committed. — Martin Luther King, Jr., “Drum Major Instinct” (1968). Decolonizing Your Thanksgiving Curriculum - Webinar Workshop. Teachers of color have had to learn the context and feign enthusiasm for all-white “classics” for decades. The United States massacred, enslaved, displaced, imprisoned, and persecuted innocent people for hundreds of years. I found them easy to agree with – as far as they went – but disappointingly superficial. 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