This panel offers diverse perspectives on the history of education by drawing upon Geography, Curriculum Studies, Black Studies, and Critical Ethnic Studies to depict how progenitors of liberatory education from various ethnoracial formations–Black, Native, and Latina–unsettled the dominating framings of race and racial formations of their respective eras. Here, decolonial thought–or the process of unlearning the singularity of Western knowledge to produce and validate multiple epistemologies–underpins and coheres the myriad of historical actors seeking liberation in each of the panelists’ papers.

To begin, Nocera launches the discussion by mapping the lineage of “early black history” and intercultural education, and argues that these two movements are more interconnected–rather than antagonistic–in their efforts to connect racial identity and notions of citizenship in their curriculum and teaching. Next, Tanner illuminates how the understudied confluence of race, religion, and reds (i.e., the communist scare) led to the termination of native federal trust status, and goes on to contextualize the tensions and possibilities of how this sociopolitical rupture shaped the schooling experiences of Native Americans in the post-WWII era. Illuminating dynamic hemispheric exchanges, Velàzquez cogently historicizes the genealogy of first-generation Puerto Rican and Latina college women whose activism grappled with racial and gendered logics and demanded a structural intervention to meaningfully institutionalize Latinx culture into the university landscape. Concomitantly meditating on space, Wallace concludes the session with a history of the interdependent social movements for anti-slavery abolition and Black education in 19th century California, which he explores through the interstitial geographies of Black liberation chronicled in the archives of anti-slavery abolitionist and teacher Rev. Jeremiah Burke Sanderson and the California Colored Convention.

Collectively, these papers offer a comparative analysis of how educators can serve as decolonial change agents. These archives demonstrate how their organizing efforts advanced knowledge and institutions that bolsters social, economic, and political justice in the United States. Moreover, they illuminate best practices for negotiating, resisting, and wielding the liberatory power of education to upend race as a technology of modernity that exacerbates inequality. Moving beyond matters of recognition, this panel will serve as witness to how formal and informal tools of freedom dreaming in education disrupts the singularity of dominant Western knowledge.

Intertwining our diverse academic research focuses, this panel will invigorate rich discourse on the evolving notions of power and domination in U.S. schools as evident in the histories of our various educational stakeholders demanding decolonial forms of knowledge and being that resist empire, reject gratuitous violence, and bloom otherwise worlds.