Abstracts Category : Other

An Emancipatory Pedagogy of Jesus Christ| Toward a Decolonizing Epistemology of Education and Theology

by Terrelle Billy Sales

This decolonizing interpretive analysis serves to provide bicultural researchers the opportunity to engage and challenge the dominant literature on pedagogy, curriculum, methodology, and schooling. Bicultural researchers have been forced to navigate the dialectical social terrain of dominant/subordinate tensions and contradictions, as part of their process of survival, as subaltern or subordinate cultural citizens and critical scholars. This study seeks to deconstruct Eurocentric epistemicides that compartmentalize knowledge, particularly within the fields of theology and education. Western Christianity tends to separate God from humanity. This is an epistemological problem. The nature of this study necessitates a process by which critical theory, critical pedagogy, and liberation theology serve to reconstruct traditional Westernized notions of the interrelatedness of theology and education. This study seeks to determine what can be learned from a critical pedagogy of Jesus Christ by examining His integration of theology and pedagogy as presented in His praxis detailed in the New Testament. Jesus is positioned as the literal embodiment of both theology and pedagogy, where both are procured through praxis for liberation, resulting in an emancipatory pedagogy that reconciles humanity back to God and God to humanity.