Decolonizing Education - A Conversation with Estelle Baroung Hughes

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

I see the schools of the future being a place where parents will ask, are my children safe in this space? Are my children of color able to be taught by people who look like them? Will they have role models in your institution? So the work that you're doing today will help you be a better school for tomorrow.

Hi everybody, welcome back and thanks for joining us again for another episode of the Future Learning Design Podcast with me, Tim Logan. This week I'm speaking with Estelle Baron-Hughes, who is the founding president of Africa Learning International. This is an NGO focused on Sustainable Development Goal 4, quality education for all across Africa. As a Cameroonian citizen, Estelle is passionate about the cultural wealth of her 250-languages country. So the focus of the NGO is to honor the diversity of African nations by supporting cultural culturally responsive education across the continent. They do this by providing teacher professional development, running master teacher programs, sharing educational resources and opportunities, and organizing conferences and teacher exchanges. As an educator, Estelle specializes in international education. She's a teacher, researcher, and educational coach. She's currently a language and literature teacher at the International School of Geneva and acts as a teaching and talent development consultant to ENCO Education, where she was part of the founding team. Estelle is also an active blogger and an amazing musician. And you can find Estelle on Twitter @estellehughes20 or find her on LinkedIn @estellehughes.

Hello.

Hi Estelle.

How are you?

I'm good, how are you?

Very well, thank you.

Brilliant. Well, thank you. It's such a privilege to be able to talk to you about this stuff, and so thank you for taking the time. I really appreciate it. But I wanted to start, obviously, the The whole kind of premise of this podcast is thinking about what the future of learning design, of curriculum, of education generally might be. And it's quite easy to stay in the comfortable space of pedagogy, curriculum, et cetera. But actually one of the things I haven't looked at so much, which I'm really excited to talk to you about, is how we go a little bit kind of further and deeper thinking through in terms of values and underlying principles of that future education, for example, justice and equity, et cetera, because I think that's a really important part of the conversation that sometimes we maybe steer away from because it's challenging, you know, that we have to reflect on our own beliefs and principles in order to have that conversation. Right. So I just would love to kind of begin thinking about that with you. What would it mean? Obviously 2020 saw a lot of huge moments in terms of forcing people to think about this with George Floyd and Black Lives Matter and all of those tragic but important moments. What would you say was the role then of education and thinking about the future of education? What would make it genuinely anti-racist rather than just a focus on the kind of equality type focus that we've had in the past?

Uh, the shift that has happened since the murder of George Floyd is tremendous in education. Absolutely. Some people talk about cultural wars. I prefer seeing it as cultural revolution, actually. To focus on anti-racism and how the future of education could embrace it better. I want to say that in diverse schools, which most schools are at the moment with all the migration that is taking place in the world, more than at any time in history, we have to think about becoming anti-racist schools. And what does it take? How does it work? A lot of literature has been written on the topic, obviously, but through my experience, I want to say that there are probably 3 or 4 steps that are crucial in building an anti-racist school. First of all, I would say it's important to go through the stage of vulnerability, which means acknowledging that you have a problem. And we do have a problem with racism in diverse schools because schools are like society. What happens outside also happens inside. So you want, as a school, to acknowledge your privilege, to acknowledge it also in an intersectional way. For example, myself as a Black educator, I do acknowledge the fact that I am also someone who is working in a privileged school. I've got papers to live in Europe quite comfortably. So my situation might be different from that of another educator, and I need to perceive that. I think it's important in anti-racism to empower people of color in general who desire to lead the anti-racist process, give them strong support, logistical, institutional, so that they can do that work together with allies in a, in a way that alleviates what we call racial battle fatigue. Because when people are sharing their experiences on racism encountered within the institution, it obviously triggers a lot of trauma. It's not easy. So it's a decision to help that comes with a burden. And people have to be aware of the fact that yes, colored people, BIPOC people need leadership in this area, because they're the ones who have experienced racism, but they also need space to heal, and they also need to have people in front of them who are not brutal, who understand that we are dealing with trauma. So that's the, that's the first thing, the vulnerability. The second one being empowering people of color, but you cannot do this without establishing a common language and clear targets after listening to the BIPOC voices. Policymaking, obviously, creation of anti-racist mechanisms in the school community, tackling systemic racism. When you do that, I will finish by saying that it's important to keep an ear on the road. No defensiveness, being aware of what's happening within the school and seeing it as the sign of something more systemic. What I mean here is If a racist incident happens on Monday and another one on Tuesday, another one on Friday, please do not approach them as isolated incidents. Try to see where things have gone wrong in your institutions and how you can address it in a systemic way rather than as a case-by-case approach.

Yeah, interesting. It strikes me that there's definitely a humility that we need to have about it. I mean, because as you say, it's quite easy to become defensive and make it a personal conversation. And obviously there is an important personal responsibility in it, but there's also, as you say, kind of a systemic picture, which we need the leadership for. But I guess what also struck me as you were speaking there is that quite often, particularly in international education, you know, you look around at the constitution of the boards and the leadership teams of those schools and not entirely, of course, but predominantly they are white middle-aged males, right? There's some challenges there around, as you said, we need to find and empower other leaders in the organization to take on that process and lead that process. Yes.

You're talking about humility. The first way to demonstrate it is to give space to critical BIPOC voices. You know, not only to the voices that want to tell you what you want to hear, be able to hear the difficult story, the difficult experience. And obviously the aim here is to dismantle systemic racism. So if there's no person of color in your leadership team, if there are very few of them in your staff, you by definition have a problem with systemic racism. And you need to acknowledge it and address it.

Yeah. And it's also an irony, you know, particularly within IB schools for the kind of philosophy around international education from the IB and how we're, we really want to empower young people to understand that their perspective is only one perspective and really engage with other critical voices and critical perspectives comfortably, understanding that not everybody agrees, but that It's an important dialogue to have.

Yeah.

There's an irony there.

Absolutely. It's a matter of doing what you preach. Eventually, ultimately what we are doing in terms of anti-racism in an institution is for the benefit of the young ones, of our students. Why do we need more teachers of color? It's because the students need to see mirrors. They need to have safe spaces where they can unpack negative experiences with people who look like them. Sometimes it feels safer, right? So it also means that the existing staff of color in the schools need to be trained to listen, to hear, and to give advice to these young students who are seeking their support and help. But what happens often is that Everybody is trained in the same space. And here we have to acknowledge that the needs are different and accept that creating safe space, creating momentarily separated spaces for discussions that are well targeted, if the aim is eventually to highlight inclusion, I'm okay with that.

Yeah. That one-size-fits-all approach that often happens in school, you know, it has all sorts of challenges. And also that idea of psychological safety, just on a, in a workplace, as well as an educational environment for the young people, not easy to create, but like for me, I think it's just vitally important so that we can have these kinds of vulnerable conversations. Otherwise it's really hard to connect and understand one another if we're not in that safe space to do that.

Yes, yes, I think everybody needs a safe space. Even the perpetrator of racist acts needs a space where the culture of the school is to be vulnerable, is to express yourself in humility. If that is the case, then the perpetrator can more easily acknowledge what has happened and feel that this mistake can be overcome. But if the school is defensive, the message that we are sending to the community—parents, teachers, students—is that it's not okay to make a mistake, including within this very difficult area of discussion that anti-racism is. So we're going to cover up at any cost.

That's not what you want to create. No, of course we're not racist, right? That's the response that you get from a leadership team or from a school, you know.

Yeah, and it comes from a place of loving your institutions sometimes and wanting it to keep a good image for the potential clients. So from this space of supporting the school, you're actually undermining it for the future, because I see the schools of the future being a place where parents will ask, are my children safe in this space? Are my children of color able to be taught by people who look like them? Will they have role models in your institution? So the work that you're doing today in your your institution will help you be a better school for tomorrow.

Yeah, brilliant, thank you. And, and then stepping on from that, I guess, but still very much related, is that I really enjoyed your writing about decolonizing the curriculum, and that clearly has a connection. But in terms of— often we think it's about bringing diverse voices into the conversation, whether it's the different literature we study, or in different ways we try to bring diversity into the school. But one of the things you said there was, if the visibility offered to the students' cultures happens through a faulty lens, it does more harm than good, which I thought was really interesting. Absolutely. Perhaps you could, you could explain that a little bit more in terms of why areas or the potential harm.

Yeah, so I'll give you a very clear example. You take a curriculum where you find the classics from the usual Anglo-American canon, Shakespeare, Salinger, etc., but to works from other parts of the world, you don't see the classics, for example, you see lighter literature, young adult, recent literature, which could be of good quality, but doesn't show that in these parts of the world as well, we are able to write as well as Shakespeare did, for example. Once I read from, from an African American writer, Toni Morrison is our Shakespeare. So we need to have really important writers from diverse canons. So that, that's one thing. And the second thing that I want to highlight is how the deficit narrative is perpetrated when students see themselves represented in negative and pessimistic light all the time in the curriculum. For example, if we're talking about Africa, it's going to be about trauma and war. If you're talking about South America, it's going to be about drug dealers and cartels, or also different parts of trauma, or they're parts of the world that are often addressed through a single narrative. And that, I think, does more harm than good to the students who are sitting in the classroom and seeing themselves portrayed negatively, uh, be it from a compassionate desire to discuss world issues. Yeah. Interesting.

And again, just as you said about leadership coming from a place of protection or love for their organization, there's all mostly good intentions on part of the educators, right? In terms of raising awareness about, for example, in individuals and societies courses or humanities, raising awareness about different issues around the world. But as you say, that can quite easily fall into a trope of the underdeveloped Africans who need our help to— yes, absolutely—

better themselves. The plight of Afropessimism is tremendous in INS and a trap to avoid by all means. This single story of Africa needing help really needs to be dismantled. Africa is also a place of inspiration, of nobility and beauty, and we don't say that enough in our curriculum. Absolutely. And it's also I think there's also a lot of afropessimism in everything that is linked to community and service learning, the idea of going and helping and understanding how fortunate we are as opposed to the unfortunate Africans. All of this is very damaging to African kids.

Yeah, I had a really wonderful conversation with Katherine Berger Kay on service learning, and exactly that in relation to trying to take a strengths-based approach to service learning and thinking about where do we find the assets and the strengths in this community and how can we support in building on those rather than go in from a deficit idea of these needy people who need our help. Absolutely.

It's a good way to flip it. Learning from the communities we are approaching, because, you know, this is a very special encounter. We might not see them again. Who are they? Instead of coming with your preconceived ideas, I've had a situation situations where students were telling me about not giving the fish but teaching the populations how to fish, and I systematically asked them, can you fish? You know, can you fish in the first place? Please be more humble and try to learn through this experience before even trying to help.

Yeah, listen before speaking. Yes, absolutely.

And marvel, marvel. Don't come with this lens that stops you from seeing the beauty of what is around you.

And so that idea of decolonizing the curriculum, I know you've done some work on that at International School of Geneva, thinking about that. And is it a school-wide process that you would start at for that, or is it something that individual teachers would start with one by one, or is it— could it be both? Or what, you know, what would be your advice there on, on a school that was serious about taking this on and how to proceed with that?

I think obviously you have to move away from the individual initiative and make it a school-wide process to decolonize curriculum, self-reflection on, you know, deficit narrative and who is visible, who isn't, is crucial. And I think it's the first step. Second step, obviously, is when we have made everybody visible, what is the story being told about everybody? Do we still have remnants of Western domination and Afropessimism, etc.? Who is talking about the culture which is represented? Obviously, the idea of having alternate voices talking about a culture, talking about a culture that is not yours— excellent literature has been written like this. But if that's all you can find in the curriculum, then we have a problem. Make sure that the voices that are audible in your curriculum come from the people who are represented. This way, maybe we can avoid— not always— we can avoid deficit narratives. Children need to be equipped with critical thinking tools as well to deconstruct narratives that they find in the book from an anti-racist perspective. After studying a novel or a play, they should be given the opportunity to express themselves on how they felt as the person represented in this narrative and why, and how the author whether could have crafted the story in a different way to maybe represent the truth of that voice a little bit more. I think that critical thinking is key, representation is key, and voice is key. Yeah, brilliant.

And I mean, for me, international schools as highly diverse environments should be leading on this kind of approach because you know, it's such a fertile context in which to be able to have these conversations. I mean, you know, you and I have worked in schools with 50, 60 different nationalities represented in the student body. Yes, that's such a fertile environment in order to have really rich conversations. Totally.

Unfortunately, the diversity of the student body is not always represented in the staff body and in even less in the leadership body. So that's where we have a real problem with anti-racism and other forms of discrimination. The voice is going to come from the people who are in the room. Very, very concrete example, you have a text with the N-word in it. I think that people feel sometimes that they have to keep away from this text, not touch it, Therefore excluded from the curriculum. But the question that— that is, there is a discussion that is needed about the very delicate question of this word. And if there's no one of color in the room, we are walking in the dark a little bit. We need to know that hearing that word is like receiving a punch in the gut when you are a person of color, but it's different if it's in a text by an African-American author is different from reading it, for example, in Huckleberry Finn. Why is it different? Okay, and, and if it's in a text written by Wilson, for example, am I allowed to read it all the same? I would say not really, but it's important for you to see it there and to know that it's used in this context, but you have not really the right to pronounce it at any point of time. So these are discussions that need people of color in the room.

Yeah. To just understand that context, it's huge, isn't it? Yeah. Interesting. And then just to move then slightly, I wanted to talk to you because your, your involvement with ENCO Education is also very interesting to me, thinking about the way that we can provide more affordable models of international education, or, you know, just high-quality education, however international it is, in different contexts. And I know ENCO Education was set out to try to provide affordable private education in Africa, and that to me is quite an interesting model. But then also that question of the role of private education in the context of Africa, and then, you know, empowering local governments and the public sector in Africa to provide higher quality education itself, right?

I was the founding head of teacher talent at ENCO Education, um, no longer with the organization, but we keep collaborating around teacher training. So this will be my view, not, not as a representative of ENCO Education. I think that ENCO Education is a symbol of the fact that Africa doesn't necessarily need to be helped to create quality education. It has been that the organization ENCO Education has been founded by Cyrille Conchu, who's a fellow Cameroonian. The CEO is, yes, Éric Pinault from France, but this, this collaboration does show that two people, one from Africa, one from outside of Africa, can work together in a way that it can inspire and create models that others can duplicate. I'm quite proud of what ENKO Education is doing in Africa, growing affordable for middle-class schools on the continent, and also someone who has been in the organization in a very reflective and flexible way, that the idea is to little by little, learning from, from challenges and opportunities, provide more and more qualities to the, to the children who are going to ENCO schools.

It's interesting because I've been having this conversation as a separate project, thinking about the way that we finance education because I think for me, that's very interesting. And as you say, it's really important that the community itself is developing and kind of investing in not only their own children's education, but the community's education for the betterment of everybody. And it's that, some tensions for me around that idea of private sector offer. And, you know, I've worked in Zimbabwe, Uganda, Tanzania in education, and, you know, usually the public sector schools are not as well developed. They're not as well resourced and they are offering generally a lower standard of education than the private sector. And it's a question for me, you know, with no agenda really, but what are the tensions for you around the way that the private sector and the public sector in Africa can work together, or, you know, can one support the other?

Oh yes, of course. Since 2000, with the, with the conference in Dakar, promoting education for all. A lot of teachers have been recruited to make sure that everyone receives a primary education. So then we started to understand that education for all is not enough. We need quality education for all. And with, with the Abidjan Principles, the idea that it's the responsibility of the governments to make sure that this quality happens has been underlined. Obviously, with the growth of private education on the African continent, we have more and more disparity between public and private, quality being most of the time on the side of private. What I'm trying to do with my organization, Africa Learning International, is to create bridges between the local and the international. African teachers working in local schools and African teachers working— and teachers in general working in international schools on the African continent collaborating through projects that create synergies. I think that it's a good way to make sure that there is some form of trickle-down between private schools and, and local schools. The idea also, I think, is to continue with the effort focusing on teacher training, because where does quality happen? It's between that relationship between teacher and students. So ALI is trying to create opportunities through free conferences and going into schools and training teachers to contribute to the development of teachers on the continent. So this, this gap between private and public is not going to be resolved in a day. So the first step is awareness, making teachers and schools from the private sector from the international sector understand that they have this responsibility to collaborate and to support schools with less resources. And I think that in that situation, we definitely have a potential inspiration from both parts, as schools from the private sector and school from the public sector cross-inspiring. Yeah, nice, thank you.

I mean, yeah, it's definitely a big economic political question as well as, of course, an educational one in terms of tax revenue and all those kinds of things. So I agree, it's an interesting question about how do we encourage the strengths and the qualities that exist in the private sector to support, but without, as you said before, without that kind of patronizing, helping the needy, back to that trope, but actually just thinking about how do we create those collaborations that benefit everybody.

Absolutely. I think that that's a mindset that needs to be nurtured. The idea that basically we, we are one, we are in different spaces, but we belong to the same continent and we have things to do together. That being said, I think that the challenge that African education is facing at the moment is really the fact that the inputs are very exterior. And my dream is to see really African governments investing more in education, but also for us to seek our internal cultures, our internal strengths, to reinforce from the inside rather than from the outside, as it's happening at the moment. The education in Africa is a source of business, is a source of international aid for development, and not enough something that springs from inside our culture and our realities.

Yeah, if it's aid-based, it's not— A, it's not sustainable, and B, it's kind of recreating those same narratives around dependency and all of those things. So yeah, it's interesting. But I think teacher training, as you're doing with African Learning International, the teacher training aspect is such an important part of it, and it's just—

yeah, thank you. Totally. I learned a lot from this adventure of going to Kenya, to Cameroon, to Senegal to train teachers, I think I'm the one who learns the most. But what I feel happens when teachers are given the opportunity to reflect on their practice is it re-motivates them. I tend to highlight the importance of their role. We tend to also think about, you know, 21st century students for Africa, what should they look like? So I think that this motivation of teachers who are working with huge classes, with salaries that are sometimes inadequate, it is important to recenter ourselves on why we are doing what we do and why it is important for the children who we are teaching. We are basically changing the face of Africa for tomorrow, and we need to be aware of that as teachers.

Amazing. Yeah. And I wish they were more valued in terms of obviously salaries and, and because it's incredible work and very important work. Yeah, amazing. Well, thank you, Estelle. It's a real pleasure to be able to talk to you. I mean, there's so much interesting and important work that you're doing, but also just, I really appreciate the opportunity to have a conversation about some of these things, which I think hopefully will be useful for other people as, you know, they go back to their schools to think about what does this mean for us and the decisions we make around curriculum or around leadership and all of those questions we've been talking about. So thank you very much.

Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to do this.

No, not at all, not at all.

Amazing. Take care, all the best.

Thanks, Estelle. Bye-bye. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.