Education System: The scyborg and complicit triad
Ed.D. Educational Leadership EDS 280 Rethinking Leadership: Reflective Journal #3
I had an awesome group in today’s session facilitated by Cohort 16 on February 19, 2021. It was a pleasure for our Cohort 17 to be led by knowledgeable educators who are 1-year our senior. Breakout room #4 was on Systemic inequities: race, capitalism and colonialism. In our very short 30 minutes, there was a lot of discussion on racism, the identity of America, and dismantling the education system.
We continued to talk about the oppressive system in place, but it started to sound like we were attacking a group of people. It was a group of people who were not in the breakout room to defend themselves. Also, those with a similar identity and power dynamic were not present. In my attempt to be more solution-focused, the first question I posed is “How can we support those of us who are in this program and in the greater higher education system?”
A student in Cohort 16 shared a reading from A Third University Is Possible by la paperson. We then went to discuss how all of us are partly complicit in the current educational system. We began to discuss the settler–native–slave triad.
Even though white supremacy might be a prime architect in the triad… a triadic analysis shows our skewed participation in the colonization of other peoples and places.
la paperson
Then, I put more emphasis back on the subject we discussed to dismantle the education system and asked “Should the education system be dismantled before we graduate or after graduation?” Whether we like it or not, we are members and active participants in the current education system. We are financially paying into it and proponents of it. If it is dismantled before graduation, we would never get the degree or recognition of the title Doctor. If it is dismantled after graduation, the hard work that we have put into it would be erased. It will be like having a currency that is no longer in circulation.
The bits of machinery that make up a decolonizing university are driven by decolonial desires, with decolonizing dreamers who are subversively part of the machinery and part machine themselves.
la paperson
Since class, I have purchased the small book and enjoy the way it parallels engineering concepts with the introduction of the term “scyborg”. Scyborg is offered to the reader to “name the structural agency of persons who have picked up colonial technologies and reassembled them to decolonizing purposes”. At this point, I am enjoying what the term scyborg represents because it recognizes that we understand the game and now we can play according to the rules to restructure the current education system and use it to our advantage. Plus, I love a good nerdy, Comic-con, Afrofuturism reference!
