Childhood, Power, and Decolonial Praxis

-Childhood is not a neutral category. The beliefs we carry about children-how they learn, how they should behave, whose knowledge counts-are shaped by centuries of colonial thought, reproduced daily in homes and classrooms that rarely examine their own assumptions. This course offers an interdisciplinary examination of childhood through a decolonial lens, drawing on critical pedagogy, ecofeminism, disability justice, Black radical thought, and indigenous epistemologies. It asks not only how colonialism has shaped our understanding of childhood, but how that understanding lives in our bodies, our parenting, and our teaching.

-The course moves through three phases: identifying colonial frameworks in educational systems, developmental psychology, and cultural narratives about childhood; locating those frameworks in learners' own histories and daily practices; and translating theory into praxis through concrete tools and commitments for raising and educating children differently.

-What makes this course distinctive is its insistence that decolonial work is not only intellectual but embodied. Most courses addressing colonialism and education focus on curriculum reform: on what is taught. This course goes further, examining how we understand childhood itself, and building in structured writing and reflection practices designed to bridge the gap between knowing and changing.

-The course draws on a deliberately wide range of traditions, reflecting the reality that colonialism took different forms in different places, and that decolonial praxis must be as diverse as the communities doing it. It is taught by a practitioner who is an immigrant, Muslim, parent, and educator who has been doing this unlearning for almost two decades, in the classroom, the home, and on the page.

This course is designed for a parent, educator, or immigrant (or all three) who has felt the tension between the values they hold and the frameworks they were handed. They have noticed the colonial assumptions baked into their child's curriculum, their own childhood, their family's relationship with assimilation. They have things they want to unlearn, and stories they want to tell that the mainstream doesn't have space for.