CEEN Seminar: Working towards de/colonising educational relationships: The journey

Speaker: Honorary Professor fatima Pirbhai-Illich

This seminar aims to provide a longitudinal autoethnographic account of my own reactions and actions towards hostile and blatant racist and discriminatory remarks made by teacher candidates who were tutoring minoritized and marginalised students that had been failed by the K-12 education institution in Canada. Although racism is embedded in many institutional practices, the subject for the mainstream has been difficult to approach, unpleasant to discuss, thought to be a thing of the past, or it is ignored. As many teacher candidates believe that they do not hold racist views the topic is external and immaterial to their daily lives. This belief is made possible because dominant groups are positioned to define themselves as a blank, unmarked space in comparison to a definable ‘other’ where the “unmarked norm is a space of privilege, an identification that gets to define standards according to itself “(Schick & St. Denis, 2005). The narratives that I present will demonstrate how I and a later stage, in collaboration with Dr. Fran Martin navigated through this unfamiliar, complicated and sensitive terrain, at all times being conscious of the unique, situated, contradictory and dynamic nature of our identities and the multiple lenses that we used to disrupt the ways in which teachers could shift from
hegemonic ways of ‘doing’ education to de/colonizing pedagogies and educational relationships.

Biography
Fatmakhanu (fatima) Pirbhai-Illich, is a transnational feminist, Professor of Language and Literacy Education in the Faculty of Education at the University of Regina, SK. Canada, Honorary Professor and an Associate Member of the Creativity & Emergent Education Futures Network in the School of Education, University of Exeter. fatima has worked in tertiary level teacher education for over 25 years and her community-based research focuses on social, ecological, and human justice. She has been the past President of the International Chapter for the National Association for Multicultural Education, and has previously received awards for leadership and service for her roles both as Chair of the annual dissertation award committee and for the Program Chair for the AERA Critical Educators for Social Justice (CESJ) Special Interest Group. She has also received the YWCA Women of Distinction award for education and mentorship and recently together with Dr. Fran Martin, they received an award from Chengdu University of Technology for Quality Publication for the article, ‘Internationalisation of Higher Education: A critical analysis of the intercultural dimension of a visiting scholar program. Among others, she has been a first reviewer for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), an external reviewer for the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNCF) and a Rapporteur for the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Over the past several years, Fatima and Dr. Fran Martin have been working towards de/colonial pedagogies in language and literacy education and de/colonial relationships in HE.

RSVP: k.a.chappell@exeter.ac.uk to receive the Zoom link