Literacies for Disentangling Colonizing Educational Practices

This research strand considers the ways in which particular forms of literacy have been entangled historically as colonizing tools and the ways that those uses continue to perpetuate racializing, exclusionary practices in school-based literacy instruction. Some examples of work undertaken in this area include the following: Decolonizing Literacies:  Disrupting, Reclaiming, and Remembering Relationship in Literacy Education (Duchscher & Lenters (Eds.), 2024). Funded by a SSHRC Connections (Outreach) grant, Dr. Towani Duchscher, and I facilitated a series of public workshops led by literacy scholars and community artists and anti-racist activists, which resulted in the production of this edited volume to which all of the workshop leaders contributed. It provided an opportunity for an array of voices to be centred in what is typically, solely a scholarly domain and thus brought a fresh and important approach to the matter of decolonizing literacy instruction in school settings.  And our work in the area of play and outdoor literacy learning has led to an understanding of the ways in which educational endeavours to move guided play to the outdoors holds both the possibility for encouraging ethical relationality with the more-than-human but can also simply reproduce existing and persistent narratives of colonization.