De/colonizing the Education Relationship: Working with Invitation and Hospitality

Abstract

Our previous studies have shown that culturally responsive pedagogies (CRP) are not successful across all contexts: they have not been developed for culturally plural classrooms; white pre-service teachers have developed a teacher onto-epistemology that makes CRP unintelligible to them. In this article we report the findings of a Culturally Responsive Language and Literacy Education (CRLE) course that we revised to locate CRP within a broader, de/colonizing framework that aimed to disrupt pre-service teachers’ colonial habits of mind and being. At the heart of this process was an eight-week tutoring element during which pre-service teachers worked one-on-one with a marginalized student who had been failed by the education system. We investigated how pre-service teachers opened up inviting and hospitable spaces for learning, how they maintained students’ engagement over time, and whether this led to changes in their praxis. We invited pre-service teachers to withdraw allegiance to the hegemony of modernist/colonial models of education and to begin to let go of the socialized teacher onto-epistemology that they were invested in. Our findings show that the concepts of invitation and hospitality helped the pre-service teachers to begin to operationalize new teacher ontologies and to divest themselves of colonial ways of being, but that such fundamental changes to the self would be a lifelong process.