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Educational Projects for Decolonization: Anti-Authoritarian Allyship and Resistance Education in the Americas

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Educational Projects for Decolonization: Anti-Authoritarian Allyship and Resistance Education in the Americas EDUCATIONAL PROJECTS FOR DECOLONIZATION: ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN ALLYSHIP AND RESISTANCE EDUCATION IN THE AMERICAS by Anthony Meza-Wilson B.A., University of California – Berkeley, 2003 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in The Faculty of Graduate Studies (Society, Culture, and Politics in Education) The University of British Columbia (Vancouver) June 2012 © Anthony Meza-Wilson, 2012 Abstract This thesis covers the topic of decolonizing anti-authoritarian educational spaces in North America. It outlines historical perspectives on anarchist and anti-authoritarian alternative educational movements that are non-coercive and opposed to hierarchy including the free skool, Modern School, unschooling, and the free university. Further, it examines indigenous educational spaces that originate in decolonizing social justice struggles such as the survival schools, intercultural bilingual education, and educación autonoma. The analysis focuses around discursive practices by free skools in producing a vision of freedom and liberation, and enacting a decolonization agenda. The thesis draws on theory by indigenous women, most centrally Sandy Grande and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, as a way of engaging anti-authoritarian education for decolonization with a critical indigenous lens. The first section of analysis consists of content analysis of web-based free skool mission statements. I code for discursive units that refer to forms of freedom and liberation, defined as overcoming oppressions presented by Iris Marion Young in Five Faces of Oppression. The results of this quantitative analysis demonstrate that free skools, in mission statements, have a tendency to prefer addressing labor/consumer exploitation and powerlessness as sites of oppression significantly more frequently than cultural imperialism, the site of oppression where colonialism is enacted. This demonstrates that free skools place a value in their mission statements of discursively engaging a limited vision of freedom and liberation that disproportionately excludes decolonization in envisioning liberation. The second section of analysis focuses on documents such as curriculum, readings, and personal narratives produced for and by decolonizing anti-authoritarian educational projects such as Unsettling Minnesota, the Purple Thistle Institute, and POOR Magazine's PeopleSkool. My engagement with these documents has determined that in many ways these projects find affinity with the work of Sandy Grande and Linda Tuhiwai Smith. In this way, the documents are useful in understanding a theoretically supported anti-authoritarian education for decolonization and in the formulation of future work that can build upon this base. ii Table of Contents Abstract.................................................................................................................................ii Table of Contents.................................................................................................................iii List of Tables........................................................................................................................iv Acknowledgements...............................................................................................................v Dedication.............................................................................................................................vi Introduction...........................................................................................................................1 Situating myself...........................................................................................................3 Theoretical Framework..........................................................................................................8 Research militancy and critical engagement................................................................9 Anti-authoritarian educational theory........................................................................12 Theorizing power in anti-authoritarianism and decolonization.................................15 Indigeneity and the “politics of recognition” in educational practice........................17 Indigenous feminism and decolonizing theory..........................................................18 Critical decolonizing educational theory...................................................................19 Contextualizing an Anti-Authoritarian Decolonizing Education........................................21 A brief history of education for nationalism and citizenship in the United States.....21 Historical perspectives on libertarian anarchist education.........................................24 The Modern School movement..................................................................................25 The Hobo College......................................................................................................29 Unschooling...............................................................................................................30 Free schools................................................................................................................33 The free universities...................................................................................................34 Free skools.................................................................................................................35 Indigenous anti-colonial education............................................................................39 State-sanctioned indigenous intercultural education..................................................41 The survival schools...................................................................................................44 The EZLN educación autónoma................................................................................47 Anti-authoritarian education for decolonization........................................................48 Methodology........................................................................................................................51 Discourse analysis......................................................................................................51 Definition and discussion of discursive themes.........................................................53 Content analysis, case selection, and emergent coding of discursive themes............57 Social engagement of activist discourses of decolonization in radical pedagogy.....59 Analysis...............................................................................................................................64 Quantitative analysis of free skool values..................................................................64 Toward an unsettling curriculum...............................................................................67 Unsettling ourselves...................................................................................................67 The Purple Thistle Institute........................................................................................74 POOR Magazine Escuela de la Gente/PeopleSkool..................................................77 Indigenous Free Skool................................................................................................78 Conclusions.........................................................................................................................80 Works Cited.........................................................................................................................83 Appendix.............................................................................................................................90 Appendix A: Content Analysis Coding Chart............................................................90 iii List of Tables Table 1 Discursive themes with example discursive units …....................................................52 Table 2 Percentage prevalence of discursive themes …........................................................... 64 iv Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to acknowledge the Musqueam people on whose unceded land the University of British Columbia resides. I hope that this thesis plays some part in the just return of your lands. I would also like to acknowledge the Tsleil-Waututh and Sḵ wxwú7mesh people, on whose unceded and ancestral lands I currently live. I know I live here without your permission and I hope my presence here assists your struggle for self-determination and dignity. My utmost thanks to Mona Gleason, my superstar supervisor for giving me thorough feedback, encouragement, and for reminding me that my work is important and useful for the world. Thank you as well to Glen Coulthard, not only for agreeing to sit on my committee but also for his tireless work with challenging unjust systems of colonialism. Thank you also to Pierre Walter for reading my work with encouragement and enthusiasm, and for supervising my independent study on free skools, which was integral to this thesis. The crew at the Purple Thistle are awesome and have helped keep me sane through graduate school, particularly the Eat the Rich! folks, Fiona, Ander, Maya, Sasha, Kevin, Marita, and the rest. Carla, Mike Jo, Matt, Marla, and Dani, you have kept me rooted and connected to a true community. Thank you to Eli Meyerhoff and Wes from Santa Cruz for talking to me on the internet about free skools. My thesis support group deserves
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