ABSTRACT
Perhaps many who read a book on postcolonialism, childhood, and education would expect to find hundreds of pages filled with teaching techniques and practices that would treat everyone equally and result in “social justice and freedom for all.” As is obvious by now, we believe that challenging colonialism, oppression, marginalization, and exclusion are much more difficult. The process is and will continue to be a struggle; the will to, and exercise of, power that is harmful and oppressive has existed for centuries and shows no sign of yielding. This power is most likely physical and hierarchical, as well as infusive and weblike. Further, processes and methodologies of decolonialization do not take a linear, goal-oriented, rationalist form. Decolonial possibilities can offer knowledges from the margin, unthought-of perspectives/life experiences, hidden histories, and disqualified voices as positions from which to reconceptualize discourses, individual values, and actions. However, decolonialist practice no longer accepts dichotomous thinking or predetermined action strategies; theory and the real world as recognized opposites (or other opposites for that matter); or, interpretations of the world that cannot conceptualize the possibilities for diverse knowledges that are the lives of human beings. Decolonial practice must be emergent while at the same time planned, must be individual while at the same time community based, must recognize dominant discourses while at the same time turning them upside down. There can be no models for decolonial practice because these models would most likely colonize. Decolonialism requires recognition of
colonialism while at the same time challenging the dualistic thinking created by constructions of colonizer and colonized. We cannot provide decolonial methods or models, as we would surely then create for ourselves positions as colonizers.
