Chapter 1: Toward the Internationalization of Teacher Education for Social Justice: Interrogating Our Relation to Difference in Between Here and There

I often see myself in the teacher candidates I meet in my Bachelor of Education courses. Entangled in the humanist language of Canadian multiculturalism, for years I imagined school and society as benevolent sites open to the Other. Similarly caught up in humanist discourses, students from dominant “White” cultures often find it difficult to believe that systemic racism and other forms of exclusion continue to exist in our schools and in broader societal contexts. They arrive in the program with an understanding of colonialism as a historical period rather than a worldview that continues to live on in our minds and bodies through binaries that hierarchically divide up the world and our place in it. My own assumptions began to unravel during the years I lived in Islamabad, Damascus, and Tehran. However, it was not until I had the critical language to re/read my own encounters with difference that I could appreciate the enormity of the personal and public tasks we face as educators in this era of globalization. To engage the question of how we might further the project of decolonization in teacher education, I turn to life writing as curriculum inquiry. By juxtaposing theory with stories of lived experience in between here (working with teacher candidates at a large Canadian university), and there (living and traveling abroad), I write decolonizing perspectives into the internationalization of teacher education for social justice.