BEdA Handbook
Decolonizing English Instruction

Description for program track

We are excited to announce an exciting opportunity for BEdA's Black, Indigenous (America’s First Peoples), and other faculty of color who teach pre-college and college English in the Washington community and technical college system.  For BEdA Black, Indigenous and other People of Color (BIPOC) English faculty at predominantly white institutions, discourses about anti-racist pedagogy are consistently designed for our white peers and held in white spaces that often harm us or use our personal experiences and insights as teaching tools. This space seeks to center BIPOC faculty's unique struggle to reconcile our systematically-marginalized racial and ethnic identities with hegemonic practices of teaching English writing.

We resist and disrupt the concept of outcomes and in its place, we advocate and demand a community of care and a village of resilience. Our intention is to lift and speak to the burdens of teaching a colonizer’s language from inside our Black and Brown skin, of being BIPOC English instructors teaching English, making space to breathe and invite rest.

Guiding Light

• • Identify how individual race and ethnicity has evolved over time and assess what that means as a BIPOC English professional and in practice.
  • Examine the historical context
  • Focus on anti-coloniality and transformation in curriculum design and classroom and institutional practices.

*The conference track Decolonizing English has been built as a Black, Indigenous and Persons of Color (BIPOC) space.  This space seeks to center BIPOC faculty's unique struggle to reconcile our systematically-marginalized racial and ethnic identities with hegemonic practices of teaching English writing.  Participants who are non-BIPOC are asked to register for other conference track areas. Non-BIPOC colleagues will be removed from this intentionally built space.