Book Review: Decolonizing Educational Research: From Ownership to Answerability
By Leigh Patel, 2016, Routledge, soft cover.
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| Brenden is from FADA, UJ |
Leigh Patel’s book “Decolonizing Educational Research: From
Ownership to Answerability” offers a decolonial critique of progressive social
justice oriented approaches to educational research. Its argument hinges on the
notion that ideas such as achievement, inclusion, access, opportunity,
addressed by educational research remain very much aligned to the ideologies of
settler colonialism.
Employing Bakhtinian notions of answerability she puts
forward the notion that educational research must address itself to learning,
context and knowledge. For her, decolonial theory offers a poignant way of achieving
that. The decolonization approach is a powerful antidote to the moves to
innocence that mask much of the interest embedded in liberally- minded research.
Decolonial critiques create space for pause and reflection in social justice research.
This enables us to ask critical questions about whom we are answerable to in
our knowledge endeavours. For Patel, the mode of unreflective progressivism in
educational research not only stymies reflection but “become [s] a vehicle for
settler logics and heteropatriarchal racist capitalism”. This is unpacked by
Patel in terms of the tendency of educational research to mine communities for
data; to take advantage of social ills to promote a self-serving and
self-sustaining interventionism, to focus-in on reforming deficient subjects
and the tendency for progressive research to present knowledge in commodity
terms as territory, human capital and private property.
For me, the book offers an especially trenchant critique of
notions of epistemic access, a concept which is essentially hinged on
unproblematised notions of private property and privilege. Here, following a
settler logic, social justice research might run the risk of defeating its own
ends. It stands to undermine the rights of indigenous, marginalised and
oppressed people. Patel’s main point is that giving disenfranchised learners
‘access’ to powerful knowledge in order to close the achievement is not by any
means a radical project. Patel urges her readers to ask questions about the
assumptions that are often present in educational research. For instance she
encourages us to ask why private property is the guiding but unseen metaphor
that informs practices of inclusion. Why do certain groups of learners and
students come into the dominated position in the first place, as subject for
reform (in terms of what Paulo Freire might term “assitancialism”. Who defines
educational achievement, what is worth accessing?
Preferring us to think in terms of educational debt rather
than in terms of reform, the author suggests that what requires transformation
is not the student but the system itself. It is the system itself that is in
need of reforming. Patel asserts strongly that the genre of educational
research is in itself a colonial construct complicit in the processes of
domination. Education must be seen as
being in debt to those people it intentionally or unintentionally oppresses. Patel
goes beyond this point by asserting that “educational research through both
meaning and matter, has played a deleterious role in perpetuating and
refreshing colonial relationships among people, practices and land”. In order
to undo this role a relational approach to decolonising educational research is
necessary, one that honours learning, context and knowledge.
The book, as a position piece, presents a cogent critique of
the kind of social justice that is promoted by progressive liberalism in the
United States. The American model of equal opportunity, closing achievement
gaps and so on might feel somewhat lacking in topicality to a South African
reader increasingly familiar with the more radical ideas of social justice
linked to Marxism, Pan-Africanism, Fanonian thought, Freirian approaches to
education and critical theory recently popularised by the student movement.
However, that is not to say that the book is by any means irrelevant. Rather,
as South African educational institutions do everything that they can to play a
game of catch up with the so-called developed world in their pursuit of
excellence and ever-increasing competitiveness, critiques such as those offered
by Patel remain important.
