Learners first: decolonizing school–university partnerships

Intentional, caring and culturally affirming school and university partnerships should be built on the pillars of mutuality, reciprocity and an appreciation for human dignity. Embodying the lens that partnerships must center humanizing principles is essential to combating oppressive and colonial ideologies present in SUPs. Partnerships must be built on frames and tools that combat colonialist ways of engagement, partnering and transmission of knowledge. According to Walsh and Backe (2013), “school–university partnerships were significantly accelerated by the 2001 No Child Left Behind legislation, which highlighted the enormous inequity in educational outcomes in our country” (p. 594). Furthermore, the proliferation of these types of partnerships has been mostly one-sided, based on the needs of university partners (Walsh & Backe, 2013).

The building blocks of effective school and university partnerships must adopt a decolonial approach for both parties to fully and authentically dismantle the hierarchical ways that partnerships often develop in education settings, usually centering the needs of university partners based on perceived dominance and expertise. We believe that university partners must be deliberate from the conception of such partnerships to combat perceived overseer, dispossessor and cultural imperialist logics that advance a top-down standpoint, much like the principles and tools used in colonial power and conquest. According to Masta (2019), “education is one such structure that maintains, reinforces, and replicates colonial ideology through curriculum, policies, and practices, both historically and in the present day” (p. 179). As such, the practices of SUPs become a site of analysis that must be interrogated to ensure that colonial ideologies are not replicated in developing and maintaining partnerships. Often, in SUPs, the university partner may have more resources, expertise and knowledge to support the work in schools and school districts in their local context. However, careful attention should be given to the social, human and cultural capital that school partners possess. These include the ways of knowing, being, deep expertise and constructivist interpretation of the world that schools or individual educators bring to the partnership.

Therefore, the decolonial approach to SUPs must focus on whose knowledge is centered in the formation of a partnership. In other words, valuing the cultural knowledge that students and educators hold is paramount and a key pillar in every practice, policy and professional learning experience developed.

According to Maldonado-Torres (2007):

In addition to Maldonado-Torres (2007), Shahjahan et al. (2022), in their review of literature on the term decolonization or decolonizing, highlight that education and higher education are important sites for replicating coloniality. Shahjahan et al. (2022) state that “higher education institutions have played a key role in grounding systems of knowledge production (disciplines, institutions, and the formation of professionals in each of the disciplines) and perpetuating coloniality” (p. 74). This continuation of coloniality (Grosfoguel, 2013; Shahjahan et al., 2022) is key to understanding the power relations and knowledge claims in contemporary SUPs. Maldonado-Torres (2007) argues that coloniality “refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations. Thus, coloniality survives colonialism” (p. 243). As such, coloniality is maintained in all aspects of contemporary life through books, concepts of academic performance, culture, self-concept and image, and in our hopes and dreams of what's possible (Maldonado-Torres, 2007). Below, we discuss two decolonial frameworks that should be considered in SUPs.

Regardless of how a SUP functions within a school, district or network of schools, university faculty and staff are often positioned as the holders and creators of knowledge. While research has increasingly focused on the importance of reciprocity between schools and universities (Hanreddy, 2019; Zygmunt et al., 2024), there is room for us to expand how we think about the types of knowledge that practitioners, students and communities bring to partnerships and how we might respect and value that knowledge, particularly within urban schools serving students who have not been successful within traditional school settings. Given these realities, the frameworks of humanizing pedagogy (Salazar, 2013) and community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) are useful frameworks to draw upon as we work toward decolonializing SUPs.

Within a socio-historical context that continuously subjugates Black, Brown and other people of color, humanizing pedagogies are approaches to teaching that affirm the lives of historically marginalized people. More specifically, they are practices that “values the students' background knowledge, culture, and life experiences, and creates learning contexts where power is shared by students and teachers” (Bartolome, 1994, p. 190). In the context of traditional professional learning, workshop students are educators participating in professional development, and the teacher is an external facilitator who imparts knowledge to them. Similarly, SUPs, especially those created through external funding mechanisms, often reflect paternalistic relationships between university faculty and researchers and school-based staff.

Freire (1970/2008) argues, “when people are already dehumanized, due to the oppression they suffer, the process of their liberation must not employ the methods of dehumanization” (p. 67). Humanizing pedagogy with educators, or what others have called humanizing professional learning (Allen et al., 2022; Peercy et al., 2024), collapses the hierarchies that exist within technocratic professional development and engages facilitators and educators as co-learners engaged dialogically in constructing new knowledge (Allen et al., 2022). Within urban schools in particular, decolonial SUPs need to be humanizing and reflect relationality, reciprocity, humility and respect for the knowledge and experiences of school partners. Though there is a dearth of literature that engages humanizing pedagogy or humanizing professional learning as a framework for SUPs, these bodies of literature allow us to infer how humanizing pedagogies within SUPs can further decolonial goals.

Allen et al.’s (2022) study of a professional learning community that supported urban school educators in learning about and engaging humanizing pedagogies found that the humanizing professional learning community was itself humanizing and helped educators to feel validated as professionals with agency and expertise. Three essential aspects of this research that are relevant to how we think about the role of humanizing pedagogies in decolonial SUPs are that the PD content itself affirmed the humanizing and justice orientation of educators, the PD sessions were dialogic and functioned as a healing space.

Applied to decolonial SUPs, humanizing pedagogies as a framework centers the community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) and ways of knowing and being of school partners. It also prioritizes relationality as partners work to achieve the goals of the project, which are reflective of a decolonial ethos. Understanding that just as Black and Brown students experience urban schools as dehumanizing spaces that deny their value and brilliance (Bartolome, 1994; Love, 2023), educators working within these spaces are also dehumanized by neoliberal policies and the working conditions and expectations created as a result (Hsieh et al., 2025).

In addition to the humanizing pedagogy framework, community cultural wealth is another framework for the work of decolonizing SUPs. Deriving from critical race theory, community cultural wealth as a concept is not new and is a necessary tool in SUPs because it values the emic perspectives richly rooted in the epistemic stance of the 17 schools in the charter network. Community cultural wealth combats deficit and damaged ideological tropes of students and communities of color (Yosso, 2005). As such, Yosso (2005) asserts that community cultural wealth “is an array of knowledge, skills, abilities and contacts possessed and utilized by Communities of Color to survive and resist macro and micro-forms of oppression” (p. 77). Similarly, for Acevedo and Solorzano (2021), “community cultural wealth (CCW) as an asset-based framework challenges the deficit notion that Communities of Color do not possess ‘cultural’ capital” (p. 1470). For both Yosso (2005) and Acevedo and Solorzano (2021), community cultural wealth combats oppression such as racism, pathological views of communities of color and tropes of underachievement of students of color which are often present in colonialist narratives of schooling and education.

Community cultural wealth, at its core, has six types of capital that center on the experiences of communities of color and promote the navigation of oppressive systems and structures (Yosso, 2005). The first type of capital, according to Yosso (2005), is aspirational capital, and it includes hopes, dreams and visions for the future, despite current experiences of marginalization and disenfranchisement. Second is linguistic capital, which involves language and communication codes that are emic to communities of color and support an asset-based perspective of literacy. Third is familial capital, which is a way of being and knowing cultivated by one's familial networks, which include kinship and fictive kin. The fourth type of capital is social capital, and this captures the resources cultivated and used in communities of color. Fifth is navigational capital, which underscores how communities of color traverse spaces and structures that were not created for them. The last type of community cultural wealth is resistant capital, which involves the tools and strategies used by communities of color in their quest for freedom and liberation.

These types of capital are reflective of some of the foundational principles needed in decolonial SUPs. Therefore, community cultural wealth is a strengths-based, culturally responsive, anti-oppressive and protective standpoint and framework describing the lived experiences of communities of color. The concept of community cultural wealth has been used to describe the types of capital that racially just teachers of color bring to teacher education programs and the profession (Burciaga & Kohli, 2018). Likewise, Rodela and Rodriguez-Mojica (2020) used the concept to examine equity leadership from the perspectives of Latinx administrators. Samuelson and Litzler (2016) examined the experiences of undergraduate students of color and the types of community cultural wealth they used to persist in engineering. Overall, community cultural wealth has been used broadly in education as a counternarrative to decenter Eurocentric ways of knowing and being, coloniality and to recenter the types of capital outlined by Yosso (2005).

This paper is based on our work with our school partners from a charter network of 17 urban schools in the Midwest. Demographically, the 17 schools served Black and Brown students who were economically disadvantaged but socio-culturally rich in knowledge and expertise. The administrators and educators are mostly Black and Brown and approach learning from a strengths-based perspective rich in social justice, culturally responsive teaching, culturally relevant social-emotional learning and healing-informed pedagogies.

The university partners were led by teacher educators from two Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), one from the Mid-Atlantic and the other in the Southern United States. Our work was conducted over a period of two years, and a total of 12 Black teacher educators from two HBCU teams were fully immersed within the context of the schools. We led hours of professional learning at the school and district levels, facilitated professional gatherings such as conferences and supported the charter renewal process. The teachers and students of the 17 charter schools in this large Midwest, urban school district were majority Black and Brown. From the HBCU side of the partnership, we approached SUPs from the positionality of a deep sense of care, respect for the ethos of dignity preserving practices and the soul-cultivating work of the educators in this school system. Furthermore, we created all activities and learning opportunities, from the paradigmatic lens of working alongside our school partners instead of working over or in front of them as is frequently seen in master narratives of SUPs. Overall, we were compelled to work with the system of charter schools because of our joint commitment to the liberation of Brown and Black people.

Our partnership was influenced by HBCUs' rich legacy of educating Black students, therefore, we centered the epistemological assets of our school partners and curated a relationship of mutual collaboration, liberation, humanization and radical care. This was important for us as university partners who value community ways of knowing, indigeneity and non-Eurocentric ways of knowing. We adopted a decolonial stance that we, the university partners, were learners first, which allowed us to gain an emic perspective from our partners, resulting in more culturally relevant and purposeful professional learning opportunities that were mutually beneficial. Therefore, we view our work from a decolonial standpoint, which is reflected in our counter narratives in the next section.

We understand the complexity of decolonization and the long-term process of dismantling colonial structures. We view decolonization as both hope and process. As critical scholars of race and racism in education, we recognize the fact that a discussion of racism cannot be forwarded without attention to the colonial ideologies that feed it. Thus, we are committed to decolonizing our classrooms, research, and partnership practices. Our praxis, then, requires us to seek frames of reference that center the language of liberation, which encompasses counter-narratives steeped in asset-based perspectives.

Our work with the system of charter schools was grounded in the epistemological framing that the university team members were learners first. We approached our work with this urban charter school system, with Maldonado-Torres (2007) work in mind that what it means to be human, as well as the construction of knowledge, and associated power positions must be decolonized to humanize marginalized groups' experiences, productions, artistic expression and forms of capital. We share two foundational counternarratives that challenge the top-down structure that typically reflects the ways that universities engage with school partners. These narratives reflect how we build community and mutuality in ways that support a more humanizing SUP. Thus, these counternarratives are meant to confront the master narrative of who creates knowledge and which knowledge claims are elevated, utilized and seen as valid. Stanley (2007) describes a master narrative as a “script that specifies and controls how some social processes are carried out. Furthermore, there is a master narrative operating in academia that often defines and limits what is valued as knowledge and who is entitled to create it” (p. 14). Thus, we approached our work fully knowing the importance of combating master narratives, which often inflict judgment and sanctions on communities of color and other marginalized people if they don't resemble and replicate Euro-Western ways of knowing and being.

As a decolonial posture, we intentionally positioned ourselves to build trust, cultivate relationships with administrators, central office staff and educators to observe, understand and seek clarification about the types of capital, practices, policies and interpersonal relations we observed before we began our professional development work across the system. In essence, based on school visits, observations and conversations, what emerged was that this system of charter schools challenged master narratives of how schools should function, the efficacy of urban educators and the nature of school and university engagement. The dignity affirming practices and relationship building we observed within each of the schools reflected transformative practices and policies that we freedom dreamed about in our pre-service classrooms and in our scholarship. As a result, the university team of professional development facilitators were compelled to begin our work by honoring the historical, experiential, sociocultural and indigenous ways of doing and being from the charter school community. The nature of our work as shared above is what we define as counternarratives. This is articulated in Stanley's (2007) definition of counternarratives that:

The following sections present two counter narratives to illustrate how our SUP and associated professional development represented a decolonized learners first paradigmatic lens, where the university partners were learners in each of the charter schools we visited, each policy we reviewed and each practice we observed. A summary of differences between colonizing and decolonizing SUPs that emerged from this work can be found in Table 1.

The first step in decolonizing SUPs is engaging in non-hierarchical relationship building. This means that timeframes and methodologies must be flexible to accommodate the ecosystem of the school partner. Oftentimes, a master narrative of university partners is the creation of schedules and timelines that are incongruent with the daily schedules, routines and procedures of school communities. As such, non-hierarchical relationship building is imperative in the beginning and pre-execution phase of professional development.

The narrative of relationship building in SUPS is often fraught with master narratives of the university partner as producers of expert knowledge and devaluation of the social and cultural capital that form the foundation of the knowledge production of the school partner. The university team previously worked with many school districts and led numerous professional development workshops collectively, so we knew the mechanics of how to show up and had amassed a vast knowledge base. From our first meeting with the district office of the charter system, we recognized how the leaders of the charter system set the tone for communication, prompting us to recognize that our perspectives were etic to their ecosystem and that emic learning needed to occur before any official work with the schools commenced. The master narrative where the school presents the problem and the university partners tell them how they will approach or solve the issue was flipped. Instead, in a counter narrative move, the school partner required that emic learning take place first in the form of building relationships among the university team, the central office team and school-based educators and administrators. In addition, any decision making, final products and professional development was funneled through the charter system first to ensure congruency with their mission, goals and values.

Hence, the counter-narrative of non-hierarchical relationship building is that the university partner must create pathways to cultivate, readjust and reframe the partnership based on the need to engage with the school community fully. A decolonial approach to partnerships recognizes that to cultivate non-hierarchical relationships, university partners must operate from the premise that “decoloniality can be understood as first philosophy: it is the effort to restore love and understanding. This includes the critique of coloniality, on the one hand, and the affirmation of all practices and knowledges that promote love and understanding, on the other” (Maldonado-Torres, 2007, p. 22). Non-hierarchical relationships involve intentionality, love, understanding, care, empathy and commitment to humanization. To carry out non-hierarchical relationship building, the university team engaged in two approaches: (1) full immersion, and (2) extending opportunities.

First, with a learner first stance from the university partners, the team engaged in fully immersing ourselves in the school community. The first step in the full immersion process was a two-day introductory kick-off meeting with staff and educators from the charter network's central office and individual schools, along with the university team, and other partners involved in the suite of professional development. These two days were spent building community and relationships, hearing from each other and engaging in activities. This event allowed the various parties to actively listen to the needs of the charter school network and allowed for direct engagement with them as people first. Information from the university team was shared, but this was meant to spark dialogue and solicit feedback from the charter network. This two-day event sparked deep reflection for the university team and conviction that our approach had to be cemented in humanizing approaches which are decolonial with a deep attention to the ways of knowing and being present in these mostly schools of color. Hence, we embarked on our work after this initial meeting by visiting, observing and spending time with educators, support staff and administrators in each of the 17 schools in the charter network before developing professional development offerings. These observations were shared with the school system, and adjustments were made before we engaged in professional development. This took time, intentionality and helped the university partner craft culturally responsive professional development for the local context of the schools.

The second counter narrative in building non-hierarchical relationships was the intentional sharing of open opportunities at the university level for educators from the charter school network. Of note, the university partners spent considerable time in all 17 schools and continued to nurture the relationships established at the two-day event. This allowed the university team to gather data on training and development opportunities that were beneficial to our school partners. The university partner aligned the needs of the charter network with opportunities on our university campuses to help the educators enhance their efficacy with students. For example, educators from the charter network were able to attend two education conferences directly related to teaching, engaging and supporting students of color, as well as in restorative justice practices. This allowed school partners to build and broaden their networks. Not just university opportunities, but based on the needs of our partners, our professional development sessions always integrated self-care and wellness activities for educators. This is the kind of love, care and humanization of professional development that is present in the decolonial approach to SUPs.

Another way that we engaged in the process of decolonizing our partnership with the network was by designing responsive service and professional learning supports. Approaches to professional development that are reflected in master narratives represent one-size-fits-all approaches to teacher learning and development that are decontextualized, passive, dehumanizing and do not respect the knowledge of teachers (Kohli et al., 2015; Allen et al., 2022). More specifically, neoliberal education reforms that prioritize bureaucratic, top-down accountability measures conceptualize professional development as a way of teacher-proofing instruction by offering pre-packaged professional development to schools and school systems. This practice is intensified within historically under resourced and underperforming urban schools where standardized curricula and professional development to address the opportunity gap of students is normalized. Within this master narrative, educational disparities are not attributed to the perpetuation of systemic inequities but rather to individuals within the school – teachers and students. Within this master narrative, teacher knowledge and experiences are not acknowledged and valued, but are seen as elements requiring remediation.

As stated in the non-hierarchical relationship building counter narrative, university partners met with network leadership, school administrators, teachers and students over the course of a year to experience first-hand the unique culture of each school and develop relationships. Toward the end of that initial learning phase, we were compelled to reimagine project goals and supports to provide logistical support for the network's charter renewal. To address charter renewal needs, we created tools that would facilitate schools' preparation for renewal visits, developed professional learning supports that complemented schools' culturally relevant curriculum and created professional learning workshops that focused on social emotional learning (SEL), an area they would be evaluated on during the charter renewal process.

A central component of our work was the extent to which our professional learning support was tailored to the unique strengths, needs, and systems that the network of schools had in place. For instance, after visiting each of the schools and meeting with faculty, staff, school leaders and students, we had an operational understanding of the ways that educators engaged in dignity preserving practices and what they called “disorienting experiences” to support students' social and emotional growth. Additionally, educators supported students in envisioning an empowered future for themselves, their families and communities. Many schools in the network provided disorienting social and academic learning experiences, which were activities that supported students with new social involvements and experiential knowledge of topics such as entrepreneurship, investing and other career and technical skills. These opportunities provided students with a vision of a future that was of their own design.

Given the strengths-based and contextualized teaching that we observed across network schools, it was important that we similarly honored the cultural wealth reflected in teachers' and staff practices. As stated earlier, standardized professional development is not responsive to educators' lived experiences within their schools (Kohli et al., 2015). To ensure intentionality and contextualization, we troubled our previous professional development facilitation so that we did not carry master narratives into our work with the network. This allowed us to integrate what we had learned about the schools, reference examples of practices we observed and mirror for them how their current SEL practices reflected and exceeded the SEL framework endorsed by the school district.

We saw educators as experts in their school context and as co-learners. Given this orientation, we learned as much from them as they learned from us. For example, during one of our professional learning workshops, we deconstructed the “relationship skills competency” in SEL to reflect new perspectives university partners gained engaging with network schools. We recognized that navigating racialized systems of oppression, as their students had to, required discernment in ways that the Euro-western models of relationships in certain SEL models did not include. After observing and hearing how educators went above and beyond to help their students feel safe, seen and accepted, we tailored this workshop from that perspective, uplifting the social, navigational and resistant capital of educators and students of color (Yosso, 2005). This serves as an example of how we recognized and built upon the community cultural wealth of educators despite master narratives that framed their students as unsuccessful when they attended schools in the larger school district. Within the network of charter schools, educators leveraged and recognized the navigational capital that their students needed to develop in order to survive white spaces (Anderson, 2015). We may not have understood the relationship skills competency through this lens without recognizing and valuing the culturally grounded knowledge of the network educators we learned with and from.

Another example of our responsiveness to our school partners were two conferences we were invited to co-organize for educators based upon their needs and what they were requesting as an organization. For both events, we created a full day of learning centered on what they wanted to know including how to develop helping and healing practices and culturally responsive classroom management. The second all-day event was an off-campus winter retreat for three of the schools in the network. The retreat was intended to help educators to recharge and reconnect as they went into the latter part of the school year, a time of the year noted for educator, school staff and student burnout. Event organizers knew that the winter was a difficult season during the school year and invited us to facilitate sessions that would help educators to ground their work in who they were, how their lived experiences, skills and purpose inform who they are professionally and their why for serving young people. The invitation to participate in such an event encapsulates a key decolonial counternarrative. Our partnership had gone beyond a transactional relationship to one of mutual respect and appreciation for our ability to see and value what network educators contributed to their school communities. It also reflects how we centered and elevated educators' cultural knowledge and commitments as the foundation for their pedagogy as opposed to external conceptualizations of quality teaching.

The counternarrative of responsive service and professional learning is that if university and other partners intend to engage in decolonial partnership with K-12 schools and school systems, supports must be responsive and designed to reflect an emic perspective of who the school partner is including their strengths, goals and existing practices and policies that can be built upon. In this way, educators become thought partners in their professional learning instead of passive recipients. While many university partners may believe that they are engaging in this way, one must evaluate to what extent they prioritize spending time in various settings with school partners, including in student-led or centered spaces, before they design professional learning supports so that what is offered reflects and builds upon the collective wisdom and experiences of the school partner.

These two counternarratives emerged from a co-learner and co-laborer approach that was the hallmark of our partnership with the network of charter schools. This decolonial approach informed our thinking, challenged the traditional ways that professional learning and partnerships are cultivated and allowed us to weave decolonized theories into the pedagogical and dignity-preserving ways of educators in the charter system to provide a roadmap for others to follow when embarking on SUPs. Thus, centering the community knowledge of the educators is a key tenet of decolonization. We present our counternarratives to honor the effectiveness and culturally affirming ways that the charter system of 17 schools was unapologetic about centering the needs of students of color and the communities that loved and supported them. Starting with a decolonized standpoint and frame of reference is the disequilibrium needed for university partners who want to engage with communities of color, from a damaged ethos and as communities in need of outside master narratives to create change. We started from the standpoint that we are learners, and this created a sense of mutual vulnerability that allowed for authenticity and a deep sense of joint liberation.

NAPDS’ (2021) commitment to equity, anti-racism and social justice in the Nine Essentials represents significant progress toward creating socially just schools where all students are able to thrive. An important component of realizing and enacting these commitments, however, is also recognizing the roots of inequity and racism and how those roots live within us as individuals and the policies, practices and taken-for-granted ways of being embedded within our institutions. These commitments require us to unearth the ways that oppressive ideologies, like colonialism, guide SUP work particularly given cultural disconnects and the hierarchical nature of interactions with schools led and attended by Black and Brown educators and students. Below, we offer two areas we see as fruitful starting points.

A decolonized approach to SUPs has implications regarding shifts in mindset and positionality. On the university side of the partnership, the team must engage in pre-work. This is work done before official professional development activities commence. In the pre-work phase of the partnership, the university partner's schedule must be flexible to allow for the deconstruction of self, society and system analysis. Such critical analysis must involve critical reflection regarding deficit ideologies and the socio-cultural context of the community partner. Additionally, a shift in mindset and positionality must take into account the epistemic premise of valuing community ways of knowing or the voice-of-color theses, a key pillar of critical race theory. Without a doubt, engaging in pre-work is a necessity in the beginning phase of the partnership to dismantle master narratives that are often replicated in colonialist forms of SUPs.

A shift in mindset and examining one's positionality are central to the decolonial frameworks of humanizing pedagogy and community cultural wealth because they prompt the university side of the partnership to not only embody a learner first stance but these stances disrupt the ability to enter SUPs with a master view of what kinds of knowledges might be needed for the context of not only the school community but the community at-large. In particular, positionality in both decolonial theories decenter individualism with collectivist and dignity-affirming frames of love, care and community knowledge.

A shift in mindset and positionality, as an implication, is also rooted in the counter-narratives of non-hierarchical relationship-building, responsive service and professional learning support, because university partners must understand that their perspective is etic to the school community, and they must interrogate the theories, methodologies, practices and habits of mind that formed their educator lens. The two counter narratives dismantle damaged tropes of communities of color and positioned our school partners as owners and active participants of their destiny.

Decolonial SUPs also require university partners to be aware of and responsive to school and community contexts. Urban districts are often viewed as struggling not because of the ways that systemic racism creates barriers for students and educators (Diamond & Gomez, 2023), but because of the perception that teachers are ineffective and students are deficient. These perceptions are compounded by anti-Black racism that characterizes Black educators as incompetent (Bristol & Goings, 2019). It is arrogant to believe that one can successfully provide standardized professional learning workshops without having a sense of the systems and structures of a school through collaborative and communal planning. Thus, non-hierarchical SUPs require facilitators and researchers to get to know a school or school system, value the knowledges and experiences of educators and cultivate professional learning experiences that provide educators with an opportunity to intentionally reflect on their practices and ground professional learning content in the realities of their unique group of students and who they are as educators. In this sense, non-hierarchical facilitators and researchers are able to decenter themselves and center the knowledges and experiences of educators. This is particularly significant when working with educators of color who, despite their effectiveness with students of color, are not perceived as skilled educators (Acosta, 2019).

Returning to our counternarratives, non-hierarchical relationship building and responsive service and professional learning supports can only be enacted when SUPs are grounded in relationality, reciprocity, humility and respect for the knowledge and experiences of school partners. Acknowledging the ways that anti-Black racism and colonialism devalue the cultural knowledges and practices of Black and Brown educators, researchers and university-based educators must employ decolonial frameworks, such as community cultural wealth and humanizing pedagogies as articulated in this paper, to supplant colonial logics and epistemologies that create educational inequities in the first place.

SUPs are an important aspect of educators' professional development, ranging from initial teacher preparation to continued education for in-service teachers. However, SUPs that devalue and pathologize the emic knowledges of urban teachers of color and their communities do the field of education a disservice. Educational outcomes for Black and Brown students have served as an indication that we have not done a particularly good job of preparing pre-service teachers and supporting in-service teachers in recognizing and cultivating the genius of Black and Brown students (Muhammad, 2020). Researchers and professional learning facilitators must, instead, become students or learners first within schools and systems committed to the transformation and liberation of students of color. We posit that there is a great deal for professional development facilitators to learn from schools that have reignited students' desire to learn, especially students who have been failed by traditional schools. Our work in the 17 schools in the charter network reinforced for us to essentially be learners first to fully serve and meet the professional development needs of the teachers, students, administrators and support staff. As such, the framework of decoloniality provided us with a mechanism to combat master narratives that position university partners as the sole knowledge producers within the partnership.