SoE Voices: Dr Cheryl McLean (Rutgers University) and Dr Cassie Kill

Decolonizing teacher education: Preparing teachers to teach all students
Dr Cheryl McLean (Rutgers University)

Imagining the anti-ableist university
Dr Cassie Kill

Dr. Cheryl McLean is a literacy and English teacher education scholar. Her research examines youth literacies across digital, multimodal, and community contexts; critical literacy; culturally relevant pedagogies; and decolonial approaches to curriculum, instruction, and teacher preparation. She has published on educational justice related to identity, race, language, and culture, and is committed to preparing critically conscious, community-engaged, and transformative educators.

Even as efforts to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives intensify, the imperative to decolonize teacher education remains. Now more than ever, programs must move beyond superficial reforms to reimagine curriculum, pedagogy, and policy in ways that confront colonial foundations and cultivate justice, criticality, and joy. This talk explores the urgent project of decolonizing teacher education, drawing on the frameworks of culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogies and critical decolonial scholarship. Anchored in my recent research and praxis-oriented models, I examine how teacher preparation can center Indigenous, Black, and diasporic knowledges; cultivate critical consciousness; and redesign curriculum and field experiences to disrupt systemic inequities. Ultimately, I argue that preparing teachers to teach all students demands more than reforming existing structures that shape teaching and learning. It calls for a fundamental reimagining that begins with critical action, is guided by ethical responsibility to community, and is sustained through a pedagogical commitment to liberation, creativity, and joy.
 

Dr Cassie Kill works across disciplines including education, sociology and cultural studies. Her interests include interrogating institutional practices of equality, diversity and inclusion; questions of youth voice; and critical engagements with participation and co-production.  

This paper is based on collaborative work carried out with Dr Daniel P. Jones, University of Sheffield.

Equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) work in universities has risen to prominence in recent years, with rhetoric about ‘the inclusive university’ being loudly espoused at many institutions. However, despite the public narrative of equality and inclusion, universities are still commonly experienced as elitist and exclusive organisations. Whilst many university workers are deeply committed to challenging such inequalities, there are enduring problems with the deeper logics of the institution. As Goodley puts it:

'EDI risks becoming a policy distraction if we fail to challenge the ableist and colonial architectures of the university' (2024, p. 7).

From within current horizons, it is easy to focus on achievable solutions, on piecemeal reform of the existing academy rather than deeper, fundamental change. However, approaching ableism as a practical problem to be rationally solved overlooks its entanglement in wider relations of inequality and the thought patterns that define and continually reproduce modernity’s violence. I will suggest that academic ableism is what Vanessa Machado de Oliveira has called ‘a complex predicament’ (2021, p. 30). It is not – as modernity conditions our imaginations to believe – simply a ‘complicated problem’ (Machado de Oliveira, 2021, p. 30) that can be solved with a well-designed action plan, but a ‘moving, multidimensional, and largely unruly, unmanageable, and unpredictable’ (Machado de Oliveira, p. 30) set of arrangements which need to be addressed differently.

Considering the multiple paradoxes of attempting to work against ableism from within the academy, innovative approaches are necessary which support other imaginaries to emerge. In this presentation, I explore how making a piece of polyvocal poetry at a collaborative ‘zine making workshop – organised and facilitated by Daniel and held at the University of Sheffield – surfaced other possibilities for reimagining the anti-ableist university. In the 'zine session, I recorded my own thoughts about the anti-ableist university, alongside phrases and ideas from the group discussion; later editing the text into a piece of poetry.

Understanding the poetry writing as a research-creation methodology, I will reflect on the experience of the session, and analyse the resultant text as a series of propositions, which offer ‘affective lures’ (Shannon, 2021) for the university otherwise. I explore how the poem grapples with the desire and frustration of labouring in the impasse (Berlant, 2011) of the currently existing university, and argue that the experience of writing the poem, and the resultant text, demonstrate the potential of collaborative creative methodologies as a means to cultivate other ways of imagining and feeling about the university.