Professor Noah Romero Publishes Book on Decolonizing Education and Receives Grant to Implement Related Programs
By exploring minority-led subcultures of skateboarding, punk rock, and unschooling communities, Romero illuminates approaches to pedagogy that dismantle Eurocentric imperialism and embrace informal learning, community engagement, and social justice.
Romero, who is Hampshire Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies, teaches courses at the College such as Education for Liberation: Decolonizing Teaching and Learning and Decolonial Undergrounds: Indigenous Sovereignty and Self-Determination Through Subculture. In his new book, Decolonial Underground Pedagogy: Unschooling and Subcultural Learning for Peace and Human Rights (Bloomsbury Publishing), Romero examines the roles of informal and community-embedded learning in actualizing transformative education and shows how decolonizing education can take place outside of school settings.
Grounded in the author's own experience in minority-led Filipino subcultures, the book introduces a conceptual framework of subcultural learning and decolonizing education centered on the Philippines and its diaspora in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. Romero argues that educational paradigms with peace, human rights, multiculturalism, social justice, and decolonization at the center can extend beyond the classroom, curriculum, and teaching and into communities. By showing how minoritized people are redefining identity and knowledge through embodied community-responsive pedagogies, the book contributes to wider debates on Indigeneity, gender justice, human rights, peace studies, and decolonizing education.
Romero was also recently awarded a $40,000 grant from the Wild Gifting Project for an initiative called Embodied Liberation, through which he'll research, develop, and implement anti-colonial education programs in collaboration with local arts organizations. This is just the most recent funding he’s received for his work, following awards from UNESCO and the National Endowment for the Arts.
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