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Narda Razack, Associate Dean External York University, Canada. Reflections on teaching and learning abroad: decolonizing theory, pedagogy and practice from Southern and Western eyes.
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Narda Razack, Associate Dean ExternalYork University, Canada • Reflections on teaching and learning abroad: decolonizing theory, pedagogy and practice from Southern and Western eyes
“Unless Western social work practice is adapted to indigenous systems and environments, its efficacy is dubious” (Mwansa, 2012, p. 365)
Some questions • Why did I agree to be part of this research? • At what cost? • Who gains in these transnational exchanges? • What were the compelling reasons to agreeing to join the team?
The Social Work in Nigeria Project • How did my dilemma begin • My role
Decolonizing strategies • Our ultimate responsibility is to engage in a ‘process of effective teaching that is sensitive to individual student’s readiness to be receptive’ to discussing particular world issues (Lee & Greene, 2003:2).
Decolonizing strategies: pedagogy as resistance • Subedi and Daza (2008) remind us that we need to interrogate past and present local and global conditions in order to learn different strategies to view ourselves and the world.
Dixon and Rousseau (2005) state how narratives ‘provide a ‘counterstory’ to challenge the dominant one.
According to Smith (2006) ‘these transnational spaces (in the North) are not purely national or local spaces, but are instead spaces that are intersected by identities and moments that simultaneously speak to local, national, and global movements’ (p. 551).
Agency • The question of agency cannot be separated from the ongoing reconfiguration of power discourses that silence subaltern subject. This means that colonized subjects simply do not comply with dominant discourses but refashion and appropriate what is forced upon them... (Subedi and Daza, 2008, pp.3-4).