Upending Colonial Practices: Toward Repairing Harm in English Education

Speaking Spanish in White Public Spaces: Implications for Literacy Classrooms

“…We believe that teacher educators and researchers must work toward including these uncomfortable current events in curricula and engage in what de los Ríos et al. (in press) are calling a decolonizing English education, a process that decenters whiteness and works toward decolonizing the field. We also believe that we must facilitate learning activities with youths that allow them to express how these incidents make them feel in public, in their classrooms, and across their schools.…”

“…Disrupting the hegemony of English requires teachers to recognize the long‐standing colonial roots of literacy education, particularly within English language arts education (de los Ríos et al., in press). Related to the issue at hand, literacy educators can participate in acknowledging the racist and racializing experiences that Latinx community members are currently facing.…”

Toward an Indigenizing, Anti-Colonial Framework for Adolescent Development Research

“…For instance, current trauma-informed approaches in systems tend to operate from individualistic paradigms of trauma and exclude considerations of systemic racism, colonialism, and historical trauma (Golden, 2020;Petrone & Stanton, 2021;Thomas et al, 2019). Similarly, academic success is determined by indicators ensconced in colonialism and white supremacy (de los Ríos et al, 2019). Invariably, then, Native youth are colonially positioned as failures, then blamed for these failures, which further reifies their marginality.…”

“We Believe in Collective Magic”: Honoring the Past to Reclaim the Future(s) of Literacy Research

“…Literacy research has always been a contested space used to shut out, surveil, and silence Black and Brown bodies, at once a site of imperialism, coloniality, resistance, transformation, revitalization, and liberation (Freire & Macedo, 1987). In the last few years alone, our fellow literacy scholars of Color have highlighted concerns with the “centuries-long harm emerging from and perpetuated by English education onto racially and linguistically minoritized US communities” (de los Ríos et al, 2019, p. 2) and the role that LRA has played in maintaining colonial ways of being through practices such as town halls that make claims about democratic rule while excluding who the late poet and activist, June Jordan, has referred to as silent minorities (Toliver et al, 2019).…”