Next to chunking, decolonizing the regular curriculum is a core practice to create input that sets students for deepening understanding. 

This input move is typically what educators think culturally responsive teaching is all about (outside of being about “relationships”).  We talk about it often as integrating social justice themes and topics.  But that is what decolonizing is actually.  Picking canned social justice lessons from website (even good ones) are generic and don’t help students 

But there are a variety of misconceptions about what it means to “decolonize” content.  Beware of them. Pay attention to how they saw up in your own efforts.  This has been a place where I have seen White educators new to culturally responsive education but familiar with social justice in education get a bit off track. There’s a misunderstanding that simply decolonizing the topics in the curriculum will shift student learning.  Decolonizing is a term that means “decentering” — you have to decenter individualistic ways of doing and being in both content and instruction. You have to decenter white ways of knowing as the only way.  In Module 2 you practiced “decolonizing” talk structures along with rituals and routines for creating an intellectually safe classroom by rebalancing cultural orientations in the classroom community.

Here we continue building our skill and capacity to decolonize or “decenter” the dominant cultural ways of teaching and learning in authentic ways, not performative (i.e., adding more diverse authors, talking about Black Lives Matter, but still perpetuating a pedagogy of compliance).