Document Type

Toolkit

Publication Date

7-2021

Abstract

If you’re here, you’re in one of three places-:you are ready to start doing some work, you have already been doing some work, or you would like to find out what it means to do the work of decolonization in your classroom. Me too.

By way of introduction, I am no expert on decolonization, universal design, or anti-racism. Rather, I am a teacher who felt a deeply rooted need to respond to the steep and terrifying rise of white supremacy these past five years in a tangible way. My response: I engaged everything I could find that would help me understand my own privilege, my own vulnerability, and my own responsibility as a classroom teacher. From 2019 to 2021, I did two years of course work at the University of Colorado, Boulder and the University of Northern Colorado in the topics of Queering Educational Practices, Universal Design for Learning, Decolonization, and Anti-Racism. These two years of work generated five full notebooks of learning, questioning, and hard reflection.

This guide (which I hope you will both use and contribute to) is the distillation of the notes and materials from that work. Rather than a checklist which would be easy to judge (rightly so) and quickly dismissed, this booklet offers a series of questions that I have been asking myself in order to continue to create a learning environment that centers genuine opportunity and is welcoming for all learners.

All learners.

I thought I would share these questions with you in the hopes that you, too, might find value in asking these questions.

The goal: to create course work that honors and elevates all learners, not just learners who look and act like the person we see in the mirror every morning. Am I willing to take a hard look at what I am doing, why, and be willing to fumble forward? Will I take steps to question, challenge, and queer my practice in order to better meet the needs of all learners?

-Kelly Langley-Cook kelly.langleycook@unco.edu

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