Equity in Higher Education for Students in the Margins
摘要
There is a rubric for enacting anti-discriminatory education to be found in the combined theoretical areas of culturally sustaining and trauma-informed education. While each theory on its own can inform a teaching practice rooted in anti-oppressive methods, the combination of the two is a loving step forward for educators interested in disrupting colonial legacies of Eurocentric domination and whiteness in academia, as well as the neoliberal disembodiment required by a capitalist institution striving for marketability. Where culturally sustaining pedagogy argues for a model of teaching which decenters whiteness, recognizes the fluidity of cultural subjectivity and the credibility of non-Eurocentric knowledge, trauma-informed pedagogy asks us as educators and learners to be cognizant of the deeply pervasive nature of different forms of trauma. Students with a trauma history are often the same students who are culturally marginalized and in a state of cultural and emotional disconnection due to the subjugation of their subjectivities in Westernized academic spaces. In this chapter, I summarize some background literature on culturally sustaining and trauma-informed pedagogies, before moving into specific suggestions for a framework of anti-discriminatory pedagogy.