The project of creolizing education emerged from concerns with the failures of U.S. public schooling as a public good. Many argue and assume that the public good schooling provides is increased economic mobility (see for instance Haskins, Holzer, & Lerman’s report on increasing economic mobility through postsecondary education). In other words, the assumption is that the more formal schooling one achieves, the more money one is guaranteed to make. However, there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Consider, for instance: one can earn more money with a technical education—for example, in mechanics, electronics, or carpentry—when compared to the low-wage worker with a high school degree; many undergraduates receive a college degree, accrue hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, and struggle to find employment in their field; and even those with PhDs compete among themselves to find stable employment, as evident in the hundreds of applications for a single tenure-track position and the myriad of poorly paid adjunct professors upon whom colleges and universities rely. If schooling is a public good because it provides increased economic opportunities, then schooling is failing to fulfill its role as a public good.
An additional concern with schooling as a public good in the United States is based on the dehumanizing experiences many students face in K–12 schooling, particularly low-income youth of color. There is extensive research done around the failure of largely Eurocentric and Anglophone curricula to respect the humanity and knowledges students bring to the classroom, the attempt to erase non Euro-American culture and assimilate students into a belief in the sanctity of Euromodern ways of knowing and being, the racialized belief in the inferiority of non-white students by teacher and administrators, and the entanglement of the criminal justice system with schooling in disciplining and punishing students (often referred to as the school-to-prison pipeline and more recently the school-to-deportation pipeline). Schooling is not only a questionable public good because it fails to provide economic opportunities, but also suspect because of the harm it inflicts on many young people.
Furthermore, transnational mobility—for a variety of reasons—has and will continue to occur, but U.S. schooling does not adequately attend to the incredible diversity in many U.S. classrooms. Contemporary public schooling presumes the ability to meet the needs and interests of an extremely diverse student body through a largely uniform approach to the schooling of all students, except for some arguably minor efforts at differentiation or modification. For instance, I worked in Connecticut with Caribbean and Latin American high school students who recently arrived in the United States. There were multiple cultures, languages, religions, and perspectives students brought with them. However, their unique insights, needs, and interests were considered secondary if at all by the school, and all students were expected to participate in and meet the following predetermined expectations of schooling: acquisition of English, mastery of predetermined subject matters with an overemphasis on the “natural” sciences, mathematics as opposed to the humanities and arts, and ultimately integration into the workforce after graduation, or with a slight delay between the two for those who attended colleges/universities.
There is also the role of prisons and deportation to capture the overflow that does not seamlessly integrate. Contemporary public schooling does not acknowledge the fact that pluriversality is evident in such a diverse U.S. classroom; it does not understand there may be other ideas of what schooling can and should entail, and it presumes that what it provides is something universal and necessary for all students.
Though there are modifications made which attend to student diversity—attempts to diversify curriculum, teach in languages other than English, hire teachers of color, and so on—the structure of schooling largely remains the same. Standardized testing remains the primary form of determining who is “successful” and thus worthy of additional opportunities, and students are still pitted in competition against one another to be deemed worthy. Moreover, curricular and instructional modifications are the primary strategy for school reform, which leaves a project of schooling that holds the economy as sacred and human beings as dispensable largely intact. Responding to these challenges requires understanding that we certainly do need distinct curricular and instructional approaches, but we also need to assure that schooling serves the human beings within it. The question becomes teleological rather than exclusively procedural: What is the aim of schooling?
Consider creolizing schooling. Rather than simply dismissing schooling as a public good, the work of creolizing schooling adds this question to the aim of schooling: If schooling is going to be a pubic good, what are the purposes and procedures of schooling that might make it a public good? Together, the purpose of creolizing schooling is to support us in meeting our needs and interests so we may all live well. In short, the creolizing classroom aims to facilitate teaching and learning so we may construct that which is shared and necessary to live well.
The project of creolizing schooling underscores political education as the central project of schooling. It is based on what Jane Anna Gordon in Creolizing Political Theory argues are at least three principles of creolization: building from the commonalities across our differences, respecting the most salient of our differences, and recognizing that the political is always open to contestation and negotiation. Rather than the numerous deficit-based perspectives of schooling that perceive students as incapable and/or in need of salvation—particularly so for students of color—the creolizing classroom instead sees students as capable political agents who are developing their ability to engage in political matters in the process of taking political action.
What is the instructional approach in the creolizing classroom? Participatory Action Research (PAR) becomes the process through which we engage with teaching and learning. PAR facilitates an education based on the challenges we face in our communities. Students select the challenges they want to address, and the work in the creolizing classroom is about better understanding these challenges and working to resolve them. Students certainly do read, write, engage in mathematics, and so on. However, why they do so and the content they engage with is not predetermined. Instead, the reason for doing so emerges from the challenges they face, and so the tools to respond to those challenges are selected based on what serves to effectively respond to these challenges. Distinct projects will call for different knowledges.
For example: the acquisition of a second or additional languages may be a key aspect of living well in a linguistically diverse neighborhood; mathematical knowledge is necessary when seeking to construct a community center, both for the budgetary concerns as well as the calculations necessary for its construction; scientific knowledge is important when considering where to locate the factory—or if it is at all desirable to construct the factory—that may bring jobs to a community, but may also pollute the rivers necessary to live well; artistic knowledge becomes important for turning brick walls into a canvas for murals that reflects the beauty of the community. In all of these situations, the necessary knowledges are not predetermined and fixed, but rather emerge from the projects students undertake to meet their needs and interests so we may all live well. All of these forms of knowledge can also be explored through the joy of learning them.
The instructional shift in the creolizing classroom raises a curricular question: Where do predetermined curricula stand in the project of creolizing schooling? The creolizing classroom also understands the idea of “objective” disciplinary or subject matter—in the sense of standing independent of human communities’ role in constructing them—to be an illusion. In other words, human beings construct disciplines and determine the subject matter that falls under the category of such disciplines. Curricula for students emerge from a complex negotiation between what counts as essential knowledge that students must know that is tied to the formation of these seemingly distinct disciplines. For instance, the “objective” content presented in classrooms dedicated to the “natural” sciences is actually an extensive and complex negotiation between what does and does not count as knowledge, what does or does not count as scientific knowledge, what are the appropriate ways of conducting science or scientific inquiry, what do we expect students to know of the extensive body of knowledge that is understood as science, how do we build a scope and sequence for someone to earn the qualification of “scientist” (for example, prerequisite courses, necessary experiences), and so on.
Rather than presuming that there is an independent body of knowledge students must learn, the creolizing classroom understands that all the content grappled with in the classroom is the result of choices we make. The creolizing classroom holds that schools need not predetermine curricula, but instead that what students want and need to learn will emerge from their engagement with social reality. Schools become a site of facilitating access to the knowledges that reveal themselves to be necessary for the labor of constructing a shared world in which we all live well.
A final concern to address before closing is the fact that while the creolizing classroom includes political education, there are other things which students might be interested in learning based on their unique interests. The cultivation of individual human potential is a vital aspect of education, without a doubt. However, the development of individual human potential need not be the focus of creolizing schooling. The creolizing classroom can focus on political education, and other educative spaces beyond schools can serve—and do serve—as sites for the development of individual human potential. The combination, in other words, contributes to human flourishing. Those who want to be boxers, for example, understand that school is not the place to learn to box well. Educators could respond with understanding other spaces as educative—the boxing gym, for instance—and invest funds, time, and energy in those spaces accordingly. Schooling, in other words, need not serve as a panacea to all of society’s ills. However, if schooling is compulsory and is advanced as a public good, then it should provide alleviation of societal maledictions premised upon being ill-informed, ill-prepared, and misguided. The public good of schooling can be the political education and relational flourishing included in the creolizing classroom.
Josué Ricardo López
Josué Ricardo López is Assistant Professor of Decoloniality and Equity in Teacher Education at the University of Pittsburgh. His work examines the relationship between education, schooling, and mobility in responding to transnational challenges under settler colonial rule in the Western Hemisphere.
