Jones (2020) explains that “curriculum violence occurs when educators and curriculum writers have constructed a set of lessons that damage or otherwise adversely affect students intellectually and emotionally” (p. 48). She further explains that curriculum violence is not contingent upon intentions, as intentionality is not a prerequisite for racism or harmful teaching. Despite good intentions, we can be complicit in this violence. Inoue (2019) illuminates this contradiction between good intentions and the perpetuation of curriculum violence explaining that, while we believe that students have a right to their own language and we claim to embrace our students’ linguistic diversity, we continue to uphold standards and classroom practices that work against them. Curriculum violence is present in postsecondary literacy from the propagation of “standard English”, to glorification of linear thinking as “clear” thinking, down to course materials that reinforce the invisibility of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (Young, 2020).
Curriculum violence is present in postsecondary literacy from the propagation of “standard English”, to glorification of linear thinking as “clear” thinking, down to course materials that reinforce the invisibility of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.
While theory, research, and conscience urge us otherwise, the disconnect between good intentions and our curricular and pedagogical choices persists. Antia and Dyers (2019) explain that the vestiges of colonization and the subsequent power imbalances “continue to exist in [our] minds, lives, languages, dreams, imaginations, and epistemologies” (p. 91). In other words, the inability to enact our good intentions through meaningful curricular redesign is largely due to our inability to remove our colonized gaze. Decoloniality challenges this gaze by exposing the “asymmetrical power relations inherent in the conditions with which much contemporary disciplinary knowledge is constituted and mediated” (Antia & Dyers, 2019, p. 91). Likewise, Afrofuturism provides a lens through which the past, present, and future can be re-imagined in ways that counter the oppression of colonization (Barber, Anderson, Dery, & Thomas, 2018; Becker, 2019; Grue, 2020).
Works Cited
Antia, B. & Dyers, C. (2019). De-alienating the academy: Multilingual teaching as a decolonial pedagogy. Linguistics and Education, 51, 91-100.
Barber, T. E., Anderson, R., Dery, M., & Thomas, S. R. (2018). 25 Years of Afrofuturism and Black speculative thought: Roundtable with Tiffany E. Barber, Reynaldo Anderson, Mark Dery, and Sheree Renée Thomas. TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 39, 134-144.
Becker, D. (2019). Afrofuturism and decolonisation: Using Black Panther as methodology. Image & Text: A Journal for Design, 33(1), 1-21.
Grue, M. N. P. (2020). An Afrofuturistic vehicle for literacy instruction. Journal of College Reading and Learning, 50(1), 33-44.
Inoue, A. B. (2019). How do we language so people stop killing each other, or what do we do about white language supremacy? Transcript of 2019 Conference on College Composition and Communication Annual Convention keynote address. Retrieved from https://docs.google.com/document/d/11ACklcUmqGvTzCMPlETChBwS-Ic3t2BOLi13u8IUEp4/edit [Google Scholar]
Jones, S. P. (2020). Ending curriculum violence. Teaching Tolerance, 64, 47-50.
Young, V. A. (2020). Black lives matter in academic spaces: Three lessons for critical literacy. Journal of College Reading and Learning, 50(1), 5-18.
