Covid and the Liberatory Potentials of Local Knowledge: Disrupting School Expectations for Knowledge Production by Vanessa Anthony-Stevens and Daniel D. Liou

As schools shut down during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Vanessa met with five new teachers as part of a research project to learn about their preparation to teach in rural schools in the Pacific Northwest. Vanessa posed the question, what surprised you most about teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic? One teacher, Ms. Tolson reflected,

I wasn’t just teaching the individual child anymore, in the controlled setting of my classroom. I had to see the child in a community and familial context. I learned about their family and their living conditions. My standard approach to content wasn’t cutting it. I was no longer in control and couldn’t pretend to be. It was hard.

Upon reflecting on the insights these teachers have gained from the pandemic, and their ability and willingness to connect teaching to the sociopolitical context of their local communities, we are motivated to think about the role of local knowledge in reshaping educator preparation (teachers, administrators, librarians, and activists) for social justice (Milner 2017). Coloniality, referred to as the dominant construction of knowledge systems and the social practice of rationalizing the logics of knowing in the sustainment of white dominance, has played a central role in controlling official knowledge in the modern creation of schools (Khalifa et al. 2018; Maldonado-Torres 2013; Mignolo 2011). For this reason, we consider coloniality as a form of epistemic injustice, where the flow, ranking, and erasures of nonwhite knowledges bring upon a series of ethical issues in shaping what is taught, how it is taught, and to whom (Fricker et al. 2016). As a result, societies have been hierarchically constructed through oppressive systems in perpetuating economic exploitation, social and cultural marginalization, hetero and cisgender normativity, English monolingualism, and singular/standard learning styles and assessment in schools.

While the Black Lives Matter Movement have reignited calls for racial justice around the world, conservative organizations, White parents, and public officials organize to counteract racial justice efforts with state laws that put pressure on teachers and librarians to ban books on race, gender, and sexuality. In this book-restrictive climate, efforts towards decoloniality have become more difficult or even impossible as many school leaders and teachers are put under strict scrutiny while white normativity (Ward 2008) serves as the only acceptable standard for knowledge construction. Under this political context, school leaders are one of the key gatekeepers of knowledge(s) (Dei & Adhami 2022) in a system that delegitimizes students’ knowledge of race, gender, and sexuality through white filters of the world. 

As antiracist and anti-oppressive knowledges are heavily controlled in schools, many educators have narrowly focused on ways the pandemic highlighted the inequity of student performance outcomes, diminished the ability for students to maintain their well-being and cultivate their own intellect, and tested the resilience of instructional capacity (Kuhfeld et al. 2022). In doing so, schools have continued to decontextualize our local experience and ability to produce liberatory knowledges. A return to the same educational system in the post pandemic era means defaulting to the same expectational status quo that has not worked for communities stratified at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and other politically constructed differences.

Ladson-Billings (2021) contends that our nation must learn from the pandemic and the ways in which it exposed many oppressive elements of the society. To build on her call for reconsidering society’s normative approaches to education, we argue that educators must question our acceptance of reality by troubling the beliefs and expectations underlying the notions of normalcy. We refer to conditions of acceptance as the moral, ethical, and epistemological basis for coming to accept what we know. It is the formation of one’s beliefs and expectations in shaping one’s knowledge, consciousness, and relationalities with our surroundings.

From this perspective, the teachers in Vanessa’s study inspired us to consider the role of local knowledge in preparing educators to bring about a more compassionate, just, and liberatory school system. It led us to rethink about the fundamental difference between “being in a relationship” in the forms of co-existence versus “being in a relationship with” where interpersonal and place-conscious connections are based on more liberatory notions of humanity for increasing sustainable lives and deepening equitable flows of interchange.

COVID, an extreme interruption to the status quo, presents an opportunity for the future educator preparation to shift educators’ practices to be in relationships with the communities they serve. Such relationships should be based on (a) intimate knowledge of students and their historical relationships with colonialism, (b) enact asset-based sympathy as a condition of solidarity, (c) form connections based on relational equity, and (d) co-construct knowledge with students for a more liberatory future (Liou & Liang 2020). By doing so, educators may be further supported to understand the local, place-based and situated nature of how their students live and experience the world.

For educational leaders to support teachers in valuing local, place-based and situated knowledges, we propose the following pathways and strategies to transform curricular expectations for local knowledge(s): (a) revisit and leverage federal laws and legal precedents that have consistently ruled against book banning in schools (Board of Education v. Pico 1982), and assist teachers resist the knowledge-restrictive climate (Liou & Deits Cutler 2023a); (b) access federal or state professional development funds to afford school leaders and teachers time and resources to elicit and co-construct knowledges with families, explore students’ lives outside the school walls, and to consider whose voice is present or negated in the classrooms; and (c) leverage state standards to support the connection of local knowledges within approved curricular materials. 

Furthermore, we have also seen local communities resist book bans, including teachers (Liou & Deits Cutler 2023b). Teachers have agency to form, reform, and transform relationships in their local contexts; and we acknowledge teachers’ expectations are one of the most direct and powerful influences on schooling ecology (Liou et al. 2019). Consideration of local histories, local representation, and multiple perspectives by teachers makes space for multicentric knowledge. That is, the full acknowledgement that there are multiple perspectives, multiple manifestations of excellence, and multiple histories that influence our households. Multicentricity allows us to reject the pervasive universality of a single way of knowing (Dei 2016), to make space for local experiences and diversities to have a seat in the teaching and learning circle.  

One of the key facets here is that attending to the full experiences and knowledges of students includes all types of knowledge present in a community, regardless of different identity factors (Milner 2017). As educators and leaders, we can support our classrooms to be places that construct local knowledge relationships where no one form of knowledge is superior to another. Building from the local to the global can help us think of the conditions of acceptance, and repackages what is fundamentally decolonial work. Making clearer the collaborative work needed to bring about transformations to disrupt the limited and shortsighted conditions of engagement and atomized learning goals.

Importantly, we consider troubling the conditions of acceptance to support educators to attend to coloniality itself, not just its byproducts. How we prepare educators to account for local knowledges (Mignolo 2011), also referred to as situated knowledges (Harraway 1988), the variations and textures we experience in our actual lives, is a strategy for which educators can reject the acceptability of the present human conditions. Ms. Tolson’s reflections of her teaching during Covid demonstrates the importance of attending to the local manifestations of coloniality as a legitimate and significant source of knowledge for learning spaces. Lessons from Indigenous, place-based/land-based knowledge situates knowing as being in-relationship-with rather than assuming or imposing standardized, place-neutral, and normative ways of being (Stevens 2020). Times of crisis can help us take the longer view on interrogating what is needed to bring about education based in love, and care for actual humanity and planetary well-being. 

The knowledge(s) we choose to accept in the post-Covid era matters. We believe reframing the conditions of acceptance in shaping new norms can be a starting point to re-calibrating power inequities to bring about a world of human compassion and self-determination.

About the Scholars

References

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