Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

662 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
the diverse knowledges, experiences, and accounts of history, ideas, and lived experiences and
struggles. Such possibilities require that the educator enacts and applies his or her agency in
the classrooms. There must be accountability in terms of how educators can evoke power to
address issues of minority schooling. In fact, in the contexts of schooling in North America
there are multiple sites of power and accountability. Educators are urged to frame educational
“praxis” in terms of agency and deliberation, as well as a constant confrontation of the varied
forms of domination and subjugation in the schooling lives of youth. The implications of radical
scholarship in Euro-American contexts today therefore are to theorize inclusive schooling work
beyond the boundaries of adherence to the sacredness of educational activity. We must all develop
an anticolonial awareness of how colonial relations are sustained and reproduced in schooling
practices. To have a decolonized space requires a decolonized mind. Colonialism is situated in the
psyche and we cannot create decolonized schools without decolonizing the minds that run them.
We believe in political action for change. Consequently, there is power in working with resistant
knowledge. Resistance starts by using received knowledges to ask critical questions about the
nature of the social order. Resistance also means seeing “small acts” as cumulative and significant
for social change (Abu-Lughod, 1990, pp. 41–55). It will for example require shifting away from
Eurocentric/Western theorizing and discursive practices toward a radical lens that interrogates
hegemonic discourses and centers the exigencies of the marginalized. It will mean embracing the
epistemologies of anticolonial agency.
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