by Nina M. Kunimoto, Mikaela Simms

Abstract 

Teacher education programs in the U.S. are implicated in reproducing anti-Blackness, whiteness, and coloniality, by not confronting the role that imperialism plays in education. Anti-imperialist, decolonial, and revolutionary critical pedagogy build on and push past additive multicultural and culturally relevant/sustaining pedagogy by demanding that educators of all levels confront and oppose anti-Blackness, coloniality, and imperialism. This paper asks, “What significance does the writing of Walter Rodney have on teachers’ understanding and analysis of current events, history, and imperialism?  How does a clear political economic analysis of the world guide the actions of teachers?” Empirical data from an appreciative inquiry-informed critical ethnographic case study is used to highlight how Walter Rodney’s historical and dialectical political economic analysis from his book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is used in teacher education to teach about Palestine. The findings offer teacher educator tools to sharpen their analysis and incorporate anti-imperialist and revolutionary critical pedagogy into their curriculum.

 

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. 

  – Karl Marx 1845 Theses on Feuerbach

 

Teacher education programs in the United States are institutions that reproduce whiteness and supremacy (Daniel, 2022; Domínguez, 2020; Sleeter, 2017; Souto-Manning & Emdin, 2020). Since the Black Lives Matter uprisings in 2020 against state-sanctioned violence in Black communities and communities of color, there has been a shift in K-12 curriculum and practices to focus on justice and equity, but teacher education programs have at most added some diversity, equity, and inclusion to their curriculum (Sabati et al., 2022). Bettina Love (2019) argued that teacher education has taken a “Starbucks” approach to justice and equity by adding  “a few hours of training to address this country’s four-hundred-year history of anti-Blackness” (p. 130). The one-semester (or maybe two) of multicultural education courses also typically do not address U.S. imperialism and coloniality (Allweiss & Al-Adeimi, 2024; Chávez-Moreno, 2021; McLaren et al., 2004). In short, teacher education curricula evades addressing US imperialism and its consequences which perpetuates the dehumanizing master narratives about US superiority in classrooms that often have students who are from nations impacted by US imperialism (Allweiss & Al-Adeimi, 2024). Imperialism is the social, cultural, political, economic domination of parts of the world by Western Europe, the U.S., and Japan (Amin, 2004); imperialism is the highest stage of capitalist development (Lenin, 1916).  

Historically, teacher education programs also have not challenged dominant ideas of education that justify exploitation and imperialism. Instead, teacher education tends to hyper-focus on methods of teaching and behavior management (Bartolomé, 1994, 2010; Philip et al., 2019). While there is nothing wrong with these methods, if they are taught without a critical analysis that confronts exploitation, supremacy, and imperialism, then teacher education, despite anyone’s best intentions, will “spin endlessly around [Whiteness, exploitation, and imperialism], impotent to alter its gravity” (Domínguez, 2019, p. 49). In other words, without using a critical analysis to understand the purpose of methods and behavior management and who they serve, then teacher education will continue to chase its own tail, glorifying its own performativity in addressing “justice” while its actions perpetuate the oppression it claims to fight against. 

Many scholars call instead for a clear understanding of how educators are analyzing the world (Bartolomé, 2010; Gounari et al., 2022)—to have clarity about the ideology framing the analysis. In light of this, we propose that Walter Rodney’s (1983) How Europe Underdeveloped Africa offers an analytic blueprint: a political economic analysis of underdevelopment and the impact of imperialism. Walter Rodney was a Guyanese revolutionary scholar and activist who aligned his thinking and actions with the working people of the world. He emphasized building consciousness in working people through groundings, making connections between academia and the working class (Rodney, 1996). He suggested that the primary responsibility of the intellectual is “first that the intellectual, the academic, within his own discipline, has to attack those distortions which white imperialism, white cultural imperialism have produced in all branches of scholarship” (Rodney, 1996, p. 62). He calls on us to reject collusion with the imperialist system and forge a path in solidarity with the working people of the world.

Most educational institutions, steeped in dominant ideas of underdevelopment in the Global South, tend to analyze the building blocks of imperialism, underdevelopment and exploitation as global “problems.” This line of analysis is rife with deficit thinking and it evades acknowledgement and discussion of imperialism in education (Allweiss & Al-Adeimi, 2024). It erases the history and impact of imperialism and places the blame of “underachievement” on the countries in the Global South. For example, exploited countries are framed as responsible for their own exploitation because they lack education and their government is corrupt. When these explanations go unquestioned and unchallenged, supremacy and imperialism continue to be justified. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa offers a historical, political, and economic analysis of Africa’s underdevelopment; that underdevelopment of modern nations is part and parcel of the trinity of capitalism, imperialism, and exploitation. Knowledge of history with a political economic analysis helps educators to subvert the dominant supremacist anti-Black explanations (Rodney, 2019). So, what happens when a teacher education program commits to preparing teachers using Walter Rodney’s thesis? 

Rodney’s book and analysis is foundational to the Red Star Teacher Education Program (hereafter “Red Star”) which prepares K-12 educators. Red Star is an alternative, experiential teacher licensure program in the northeastern United States. One of the program’s main goals is to cultivate a practice of questioning the world and the self, and one of the ways that the program does this is by using critical texts that expose students to other ways of seeing and thinking. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is required reading early in the program. The reading grounds students in a historical explanation of why Africa has been underdeveloped. Rodney’s explanation of a dynamic historical process is an analysis that the faculty uses to guide students in examining their own thinking. The students then apply that analysis to their own classroom, poverty in their school district, privatization of schools, history of schooling in the U.S., and current events. Clear analysis “requires that teachers’ individual explanations be compared and contrasted with those propagated by the dominant society” (Bartolomé and Balderrama, 2001, p. 48). How Europe Underdeveloped Africa facilitates clear analysis by offering a critical counternarrative for the students to grapple with alongside their own dominant ideas and explanations of Africa’s underdevelopment, imperialism, and poverty.

The purpose of this article is to highlight how Red Star, a non-traditional, community-based teacher education program in the northeastern U.S. uses Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa as a foundational textbook in the program and the faculty’s principled commitment to anti-imperialist pedagogy. With these same principles, the faculty of this program integrates the teaching of Palestine into the Red Star programming, and since the escalation of Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza in October 2023, a Red Sar faculty has organized two “Teaching Palestine” workshops across the northeastern U.S. state. In this paper, we asked the following questions: What significance does the writing of Walter Rodney have on teachers’ understanding and analysis of current events, history, and imperialism?  How does a clear political economic analysis of the world guide the actions of teachers? 

This paper begins by situating our work in decolonial and anti-imperialist pedagogy and grounding ourselves in Walter Rodney’s political economic analysis. Next, we contextualize teaching about Palestine within the U.S. imperialist state. Then, we describe the year-long appreciative inquiry-informed critical ethnographic case study methodology. Following that, we present data from the ethnographic case study on the ways that the Red Star program integrated Palestine into their programming and the tactics and challenges of teaching about Palestine before and after October 2023. Subsequently, we discuss the implications of the findings for teacher education.

 

Decolonial, Anti-Imperialist and Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy

Teacher education in the U.S. has been a tool of conquest, coloniality, assimilation, whiteness, dispossession, and an ideological apparatus that justifies poverty and exploitation (Daniel, 2022; Domínguez, 2019; Love, 2019; Patel, 2021; Souto-Manning & Emdin, 2020).  Teacher education programs in higher education institutions tend to fetishize methods and the processes of teaching rather than aim for ideological clarity (Bartolomé, 1994) and are trained in behavioral management with “the most up-to-date techniques of social control and behaviorist pedagogy” (Malott, 2013, p. 114). The hyper focus on behavior management and teaching methods is not accompanied by an interrogation of theoretical framings of those practices, and assumes that those methods, theories, and models are benevolent and neutral.

Decolonial and anti-imperialist pedagogy formally emerged somewhat recently in the literature and they aim to contest additive multicultural and culturally relevant/sustaining pedagogy by demanding that educators of all levels confront and oppose anti-Blackness, coloniality, and imperialism (Allweis & Al-Adeimi, 2024; Chávez-Moreno, 2021; Daniel, 2022; Domínguez, 2019, 2020; McLaren et al., 2004). These pedagogies move past adding a multicultural poster or a singular marginalized perspective from a book by an author of color. Instead, decolonial and anti-imperialist pedagogies center a dialogic process, counternarratives, and knowledges from the periphery that challenge U.S. imperialism (Allweis & Al-Adeimi, 2024; Anti-colonial Education Working Group, 2024; Chávez-Moreno, 2021).

Revolutionary critical pedagogy takes a step further and more explicitly links imperialism with the internal workings of capitalism. The liberal educational agenda, although progressive, has focused on identity-based multicultural education which has a limit in terms of the framing’s effectiveness in confronting and opposing whiteness, imperialism, coloniality, and its ideological rationale (McLaren et al., 2004). Peter McLaren (2021) has yet to document a teacher education program within a traditional higher education institution that teaches the ongoing developments of capitalism and imperialism. He argued that teacher education programs “too often train teachers to become spineless clerks of the empire by ignoring these developments following in the wake of neoliberal capitalism” (p. 151). Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy integrates knowledges and texts that reveals the inner workings (logics) of capitalism and puts them in context with the dominant narratives and explanations of society and education, “but it does so with a particular political project in mind—an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-sexist and pro-democratic and emancipatory struggle” (McLaren, 2016, p. 26). In other words, teacher educators are not presenting data and knowledge as a neutral entity or just another perspective, but are choosing to be on the side of justice. 

 At the root of educational problems is capitalism (Dunn et al., 2021), yet there is limited empirical research on how teacher educators are guiding students to understand the inner workings of capitalism, our current political economy, so as to have a better analysis and explanation of imperialism, poverty, exploitation, and oppression. In this paper, we turn to scholar-activist Walter Rodney who struggled against the forces of imperialism. Walter Rodney’s (1983) How Europe Underdeveloped Africa serves as a grounding text in the Red Star Teacher Education Program because it offers a historical and dialectical explanation of development and underdevelopment that offers students a sharp political economic analysis that can be applied to education and teaching.

 

A Grounding Text: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Walter Rodney’s (1983) How Europe Underdeveloped Africa posits that underdevelopment and exploitation are key attributes of the capitalist economic system. He explains that countries described as underdeveloped are a “product of the capitalist, imperialist and colonialist exploitation” (p. 14); these countries are exploited especially by export of surplus, labor, and natural resources. Imperialism is a phase of capitalist development in which capitalist countries, in particular, Western Europe, U.S., and Japan established political, economic, military, and cultural hegemony over other parts of the world which were initially at a lower level of development and therefore could not resist their domination (Amin, 2004). Imperialism was in effect, the extended capitalist system, which for many years embraced the whole world–one part being the exploiters and overlords (center) and the other the exploited and dominated (periphery)—one part making policy and the other being dependent (Rodney, 1983). Rodney’s analysis, while focused on the colonial project, allows us to question hierarchy in all of its forms, wherever we may encounter it: in the board room or the classroom. It allows us to ask the questions: Whose labor is being exploited? Who is benefiting from exploitation?  

Rodney’s text has been foundational in Red Star since its founding in the late 1990’s in the northeastern region of the United States. Since its inception it has been cooperatively run by faculty, who in addition to their work in Red Star, are employed full-time as K-12 educators or professors in other institutions. The program has had cohorts between 5 and 20 students per academic year. Over the years, Red Star has collaborated with a few higher education institutions to grant master’s degrees.  At this time Red Star is operating without a partnership with a graduate institution and is only conferring teacher licensure. Graduates of Red Star go on to work in non-profit organizations and rural and urban schools. The program is in a unique position in that it is a small, community-based, experiential social justice program, accredited by the state’s Department of Education. Experiential means learning through practice; the teacher candidates are in a K-12 classroom with a mentor teacher of record full time Monday through Friday, September through June. Experience is a vital component of Red Star’s pedagogy but it is only one half of it. The other part is reflection and theory (Freire, 1996). As students do the work in the schools, they begin to see the race and class contradictions. In the weekly seminars, Red Star faculty draws out those contradictions derived from the students’ experiences and uses theory as an analytic scalpel, meaning the analytical tool, such as that of Walter Rodney’s thesis, is used to pull apart experiences and thoughts. The faculty stay grounded in one of the program’s main principles, “to centralize the experiences of working people, women, and people of color to teach against exploitation and build an equitable world for all” (Kunimoto, 2024, p. 67). These principles are, in part, derived from Walter Rodney’s political economic analysis. 

Students in Red Star read Rodney’s text in the summer and reflect on it throughout the one-year program while making connections to education, society, and the teacher candidates’ own classrooms. Rodney’s primary thesis is central to building educators’ capacity to analyze the world. Underdevelopment as a key feature of imperialist and capitalist exploitation, is not a common understanding. In Red Star, teacher candidates are asked to use Rodney’s thesis to question and analyze what they think and have been taught about underdevelopment, and to challenge the common understanding. Although Rodney presents the historical and economic analysis of the African continent, it serves as an example to answer broader questions about our world and our education system: Why are people poor? Is education a primary tool of oppression or liberation?  In How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney offers a historical explanation of the impact of  imperialism and exploitation on the people of the continent. His analytical tools can also be applied to our current lived reality in the United States.

Educators are constantly and unknowingly transmitting their ideological understanding of the world to their students. So, in Red Star the faculty use analytical questioning as a tool to unearth the origins of our thinking to help educators gain ideological clarity (Bartolomé, 1994). Red Star leans into political analysis in order to ask students to explicitly make an ideological choice rather than implicitly follow the dominant narratives of society. This allows the teacher and the student to know whether they are adhering to the dominant narrative or centering a critical pedagogy. The focus on imperialism and capitalism is not simply to analyze and understand the world but to humanize it.

Palestinian struggles have been central in the Red Star curricula since the program’s inception, along with those of other Indigenous peoples around the world. Red Star holds solidarity as a central message of teaching and learning, and teacher candidates are taught the historical and political realities of our world through a variety of texts. For example, the goal of the Organizations and Structures module (unit) is for the students to make connections between schools, capitalism, and current wars and liberation struggles in the world (Ukraine, Palestine, Sudan). The faculty teaching this unit chose a variety of texts including Education as Enforcement (Saltman & Gabbard, 2010) to expose students to the political realities of schooling (militarism, corporate control, ideological control), Man’s Worldly Goods by Leo Huberman (1937), to ground students in the historical formations of capitalism, and “Literacy and Revolution” by Megan Behrent (2012) in Education and Capitalism about the Cuban literacy campaign. These texts support the faculty’s goal to help students understand how the system of education works under capitalism while at the same time exposing students to more humanized and humanizing possibilities for education. Rodney (1983) explained that the responsibility of the exploited is “to understand the system and work for its overthrow” (p. 28). Similarly, those living in imperialist centers must understand the workings and the logic of the system and act in solidarity with those who are being exploited. In this process, humanization of the peoples of the world is essential. Grounded in these principles, Red Star has integrated teaching about the occupation of Palestine and humanizing the people of Palestine since the start of the program.

 

Teaching Palestine Under U.S. Settler Occupation

In the U.S., teaching about Palestine has been met with harsh punishments from educational institutions. Palestinians have been under Israeli occupation since 1948, and Palestinians have endured consistent violence and dehumanization under Israel’s apartheid system (Farsoun & Aruri, 2006). Since October 2023 however, the naked brutality and savagery by the Israeli government to murder and starve Palestinians has become impossible to ignore. Even before October 2023, openly talking about a Free Palestine in educational institutions had negative consequences. For example, Harvard University denied tenure to Cornel West (Essa, 2021) and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute rescinded a human rights award to Angela Davis (Democracy Now, 2019) for strongly speaking out against Israeli occupation of Palestine. In the current genocide, higher education institutions have either been silent and complicit or actively assaulting students and professors who have taken a stand in solidarity with Palestine (Arria, 2025; The Intercept, 2024). The institutional disciplining of professors since October 2023 has become even more heightened. Devin Atallah, whose work in psychology has focused on Palestine, was denied tenure in 2025 by the University of Massachusetts Boston (Brown, 2025), Katherine Frank was pushed out of Columbia University for standing in solidarity with student protests for Palestine (Betts, 2025), and renowned Edward Said professor emeritus of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, Rashid Khalidi, withdrew from teaching due to the university’s capitulation to Zionist censorship and punishment (Khalidi, 2025).

While K-12 teachers also face intimidation and threats, many across the country still  teach about Palestine (Martinez, 2024). Most notably, a large group of teachers in the Oakland Unified School District “organized a teach-in to apply [their] labor towards encouraging critical consciousness and global political consciousness” (Oakland Education Association for Palestine, 2024, para 3). On the other hand, teacher education programs have largely remained silent in regard to Palestine. Curry Malott, a teacher educator, said that collegiate administrators have the strongest reaction to political activism outside the classroom but within the classroom there is some maneuverability to use your voice with certain precautions (personal communication, August 5, 2025). In his experience, teacher educators should make certain that if they bring Palestine into the classroom, it should align with their curriculum, and he constantly disrupts the connection between Judaism and the racist ideology of Zionism by stating that “Zionism is not religion” (C. Malott, personal communication, August 5, 2025). Students are bombarded with Zionist propaganda that anti-Zionism and teaching Palestine is “antisemitic,” so it is important to “teach against the myth” (Faculty D1, interview, August 15, 2025). 

Due to the program’s relative autonomy from business and profit-oriented administrative overseers, the faculty have been able to center their principles to teach on the side of Palestinian, Indigenous, and working peoples of the world in their pedagogy and curricular content. The findings offer various examples of K-12 teachers and teacher educators that teach Palestine in their classrooms. The findings also highlight Red Star’s pedagogy, grounded in Rodney’s historical and dialectical political economic analysis, in lessons focused on Palestine.

 

Method 

This article attempts to answer the following questions: What significance does the writing of Walter Rodney have on teachers’ understanding and analysis of current events, history, and imperialism? How does a clear political economic analysis of the world guide the actions of teachers? To that end, we used data from various sources: (1) an appreciative inquiry-informed critical ethnographic case study of Red Star Teacher Education Program from 2021-2022, (2) interviews with participants of the Teaching Palestine workshop who incorporate Palestine in K-12 classrooms, and (3) an interview with Red Star Teacher Education Program faculty member who organized the Teaching Palestine workshop in December 2023. Finally, Curry Malott graciously had a conversation with us and shared his challenges and recommendations on teaching Palestine in the teacher education classroom. He gave us permission to use his name. The ethnographic case study offers insights into how Red Star faculty uses Rodney’s analysis to teach about Palestine. Faculty D of Red Star organized Teaching Palestine in December 2023 and we interviewed them1 about it in August 2025. Faculty D was also part of the ethnographic study in 2021-2022. Finally, we interviewed one workshop participant who is a secondary social studies teacher and incorporates the teaching of Palestine into their classroom. 

The participants for the critical ethnographic case study were selected based on their affiliation with the Red Star Teacher Education Program. Faculty D was selected for the interview because she was the main organizer of Teaching Palestine and she is a faculty member in Red Star who can also offer her understanding of the analytic connection between Walter Rodney’s political economic analysis, current events, and Palestine and how that is linked to teaching teachers. The Teach Palestine workshop participant was selected because of their ideological and political decision to teach about Palestine in their classroom.

 

Data Collection and Analysis

In order to oppose the colonial and imperialist approach of western research methods (Bejarano et al., 2019; Tuhiwai Smith, 1999), the appreciative inquiry-informed critical ethnographic case study used the four Rs framework to gather data (Chilisa, 2020). The four Rs (relational accountability, respectful representation, reciprocal appropriation, and rights and responsibilities) is an approach to research ethics that pushes beyond individual consent by not centering damage or problems but centering an appreciative or desire-centered inquiry, (Tuck, 2009) revealing the community’s resilience and capacity to solve problems (Chilisa, 2020). Furthermore, critical ethnography situates the study within a justice framework, meaning that data is collected for the purpose of equity, justice, and decolonizing (Bejarano et al., 2019; Carspecken, 1996).

The ethnographic case study used grounded theory to analyze the qualitative data from participant observations: Red Star seminar recordings, field notes, interviews, and artifacts. Grounded theory provided a structure and strategies for inductively analyzing a large amount of qualitative data (Charmaz, 2004). The iterative analysis started with the first transcript through line-by-line coding which provided emerging themes that evolved over the study and provided a reflexive tool for analysis. We used MAXQDA, a CAQDAS software, to isolate Red Star seminars that focused on discussions, interviews, and artifacts about Palestine using Walter Rodney’s political economic analysis. 

 

Humanize and “Teach Against the Myth”

The founder of the Red Star Teacher Education Program often said, “We must humanize the world so that it becomes impossible to pull the trigger.” How do educators humanize peoples around the world, so it becomes impossible for people to commit or willfully ignore violence, exploitation, and genocide? Humanization along with historicization are important tools in Red Star because as Faculty D said, “how do we humanize Palestinians when we don’t know their history?” After October 2023, Faculty D played a large role in organizing a state-wide Teach Palestine workshop for K-12 teachers. As Faculty D prepared to teach a “Foundations of Education” module in Red Star, they were reading Walter Rodney’s (2019) Groundings with my Brothers in which “he talks about the importance of teaching against the myth and the political implications of it. He’s talking about Africa, but I think he’s talking to all people who are oppressed and exploited across the world” (Interview, August 15, 2025). The main goal of the Teaching Palestine workshop was to teach “against the myth” through teaching the history of the Israeli occupation of Palestine in order to humanize. Faculty D shared a document titled, “How to plan for teaching Palestine in your classroom, in the current political moment” that was distributed at the Teach Palestine workshop in December 2023, and the document defined humanize as “to depict, share, and understand our connection to all human beings, everywhere on this Earth, in a way that counters the divisive, violent, dominant narrative.” One way that Red Star encouraged teacher candidates to humanize the peoples of the world was through creating opportunities for students to role play and to interact with people they normally would not. 

In October 2021, Faculty D and Faculty K led a social studies methods class with a focus on role plays. Faculty D, a secondary educator and Alumni TL, an early childhood educator, developed a role play about water resources in the West Bank and the interactions between Israeli settlers and Palestinian people. In Faculty D’s secondary social studies classroom, they started with the role play, instead of first teaching students the timeline of Palestine or going straight to discussing the 1967 Israeli attack on various nearby countries such as Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt. Students were then interested in learning more about Palestine because of the experiences and discussions they had through the role play. Teachers were also encouraged to put  posters with ideas on the wall to refer back to them and to put together a bigger picture of the historical trajectory and illustrate broader connections to the region and to imperialism.

In the same academic year, 2021-2022, Teacher Candidate MJ taught their own unit on the Middle East in a secondary social studies class in their internship (clinical) site and invited a Palestinian refugee to their classroom via Zoom. The following is an excerpt from the social studies methods class on October 7, 2021 where MJ described the students’ experiences with the guest speaker:

They just finished their projects on either Syrian or the Palestinian refugee crises. And the guest speaker’s grandfather left [Palestine] in 1948 from Northern Palestine, after the Nakba and fled to Southern Syria. So he grew up in a camp that’s like a city and then they left from there unfortunately to Lebanon and to Canada in 2019. So I just had him talk about his experience. The kids had to get quotes from refugees for their project, from people who had experienced it and a lot of them waited until he was presenting to get their quotes; they wanted it from him which was really cool. One of the students asked the guest speaker if he and his family still have their key because we had talked about the key and what it symbolizes and the right to return. He talked about what the right to return symbolizes and what it meant to be Palestinian. And we talked about what a state was and what stateless meant and it was really cool and invaluable. 

MJ created a learning experience for their 9th grade students that both humanized Palestinian people and taught against the myth. Behind the thinking of MJ and Faculty D was a political economic analysis (Rodney, 1983) of current events and history, and their activities in the classroom reflected this through an anti-imperialist  (Allweis & Al-Adeimi, 2024; Anti-colonial Education Working Group, 2024; Chávez-Moreno, 2021) and revolutionary critical pedagogy (McLaren et al., 2004) that built solidarity with the peoples of the world.

 

“There Are So Many Ways To Connect Palestine To What You Are Currently Teaching!”

Teaching about Palestine in the classroom can draw opposition from Zionist parents, administrators, and organizations. So, teachers should be prepared for backlash but they should not center fear or defensiveness. Rather, teacher education programs should equip teacher candidates with practical and analytic tools to navigate the challenges. Curry Malott, Participant P, and Red Star Teacher Education Program have incorporated teaching Palestine in various ways to keep teachers safe, that is, to make sure teachers are not fired or come under fire. Red Star learned from their experience in 2018 when they invited a Palestinian refugee and activist to speak at local K-12 schools about their experiences, and to give students the opportunity to ask questions. The backlash from Zionist organizations was swift and there were serious repercussions, including the firing of Faculty G of Red Star who was an elementary teacher in the local district because she invited the speaker. Faculty D explained that they learned a lot from these experiences and they used those lessons when organizing the Teaching Palestine workshops after October 2023. 

Across all the data for this study, the main tactic was to align lessons about Palestine with the standards, curriculum, or broad themes. For example, Curry Malott taught Educational Psychology in a teacher education program housed in a four-year university using Alexander Luria and Lev Vygotsky’s theories of education which puts emphasis on the historical and social context of child development (Luria, 1976; Vygotsky, 1978). Malott connected the conditions of children growing up in Gaza to trauma-informed education that addressed systemic root causes. Since October 2023, Malott’s classes have been 

pretty heavily focused on Palestine…it’s easy to make the case because we’re looking at the cultural and historical context in which cognitive development [happens]…we’re already talking about the context of colonialism in North America shaping policy, practice, cognitive development, and so it’s very easy for me then to make a connection to the genocide in Gaza. What does it mean cognitively to grow up under occupation, to grow up being in the midst of being genocided? (Personal Communication, August 5, 2025). 

In Curry’s teaching experience, he found the contextual alignment where teaching about Palestine fit with the overarching curriculum and the essential questions brought together the various examples of genocide. 

Participant P who was in the Teaching Palestine workshop organized by Faculty D, taught 9-12th grade social studies in a public school. In their senior seminar course, students focused on current issues or movements and “that group chose Palestine which was interesting because a quarter of the class is Jewish. And they were all about it. After the semester was over, they organized a walkout with students across the state around that.” (Interview Participant P, August 29, 2025) In a 9th grade class, P introduced Palestine in the context of colonialism. They asked students “what is the power that the French and the British are trying to hold onto in the Middle East? Who were the Zionists, and how does that enter the picture, and what is happening?” A parent and Zionist organization accused P of teaching antisemitism which is why P used “primary source stuff, like, what is the Balfour Declaration? Reading documents written by colonialists [and asking], What do we notice? What are the themes in here? We look at Herzl’s quotes [and ask] what is Zionism in their words?” (Interview Participant P). By doing this, P allowed students to come to their own conclusions.

Red Star also incorporated Palestine in a “Self and Society” module, a component of “Foundations of Education” unit. The goal of the unit was to think about the role of teachers and how teachers can connect their classrooms to the world. In the March 5, 2022 seminar, Faculty H and Faculty Z showed “Secret of Hebron: The School Run” (Baillie, 2003), a short documentary about Palestinian children trying to get to school as they avoided the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) who were enforcing a 24-hour curfew. The subsequent discussion illuminated Walter Rodney’s historical political analysis through “a really deep conversation” (Faculty Z). Red Star seminars were discussion-based and the faculty were equally engaged in investigating connections using Rodney’s political economic analysis and generalized questions to guide the teacher candidates to think about the forces that impacted the world and their schools. It was a dialogic process of figuring out what we have been taught about the world and grappling with the counternarratives (Bartolomé and Balderrama, 2001).

After watching the documentary, the faculty facilitated an investigative discussion.  Faculty Z posed the following questions: 

What are the connections you see between schools in the US and globally and conflicts like Palestine and Ukraine and capitalism? Who benefits from telling Palestinian students that they can’t access schools? Who benefits from our students here who are going hungry?

Faculty Z guided students to think about themselves in US schools and how it connected to global conflicts such as Palestine. And the questions about “who benefits” guided students to think about power. Faculty H added, 

We should also think about what is the essence of education? And bring it back to Palestine and the US and any other country. The Israeli soldier in the film was saying to the filmmaker: Why do Palestinian children need to go to school? What are they learning? Antisemitism? What questions do we ask in relation to schools here [in the U.S.]? What are they teaching here? How do we connect this to struggles against critical race theory, for instance? So if you think about education as a tool to teach kids about understanding the world as it is, both historically and currently, and their place in it, then we have to analyze why certain things are working the way they are, and who benefits from that? Why are there class systems everywhere? Caste systems, race division, gender division. [Those] who benefit from kids not going to school are those who don’t want them to think critically, and don’t want them to understand that there can be no wealth without people being poor.

Faculty H’s question encouraged students to further explore how the political economic system under which they live function, and H implied that the logic of the system is constructed on exploitation (Rodney, 1983). 

The generalized questions that faculty posed about schools in Hebron were used to make connections with the conditions in the teacher candidates’ schools. These questions poked at the dominant narratives about Palestine and schools in the US. Broadly, this kind of questioning was building the capacity in the teacher candidates to question the world, hierarchy, and the dominant narrative. 

To question the world using a critical, historical, and economic analysis often was uncomfortable and tense but the rigor prepared teachers to confront the dominant narratives about US imperialism, exploitation, and injustice. Red Star faculty’s questioning was not neutral; the faculty made clear that they were on the side of oppressed peoples even if teacher candidates disagreed (McLaren, 2016). A Red Star alumnus said that the program’s pedagogy “made me really face my own supremacist thinking. It was jarring. It encouraged me to break down large ideas… So, it was worth the challenge.” (Kunimoto, 2024, p. 180). Critically questioning with a political economic analysis lends itself to one, trace where their ideas come from (When did the idea appear historically? What were the social forces under which those ideas emerged? Where did the idea emerge?), and two, positions the teacher candidate to question their own thinking and explicitly choose if they want to continue reproducing the dominant narrative. Another Red Star alumnus stated in a survey: 

[Red Star] made me realize that there are questions that I can ask when I am analyzing a topic that help me understand what I think about it based on how it aligns with my principles. For example, I can look at an issue like Israel and Palestine and ask, who profits? This question helps me clarify what I think about the issue in a way that asking about the multiple perspectives of an issue (a question that prevails in mainstream discourse) would not. When I am able to find these clarifying questions for myself to understand a topic, I am able to help my students do the same.   

In Red Star, “principles” is a word often used in discussions, but in the dominant discourse it would be called, “values.” An example of a principle is opposing exploitation and wealth accumulation–principles are the pillars on which we stand and act. This alumnus explained that the kinds of questions that Red Star encouraged them to ask were fundamentally different from mainstream questions which often centered a “neutral” multiple perspectives frame that lacked the historical and economic analysis that Rodney’s offered. Neutrality is highly prized in education. But teaching, like life, is not a neutral act; we are always immersed in an ideological frame (Bartolomé & Balderrama, 2001). Educators must decide if they will embrace the dominant narrative or be on the side of the working and exploited peoples of the world. Teacher education programs are important spaces for teachers to develop these critical skills, because as conveyors of “knowledge” and “ideas,” teachers are in a position to perpetuate dominant ideas or to disrupt them.

 

Teachers Need to Look The Multi-Headed Hydra in the Eye

The multi-headed hydra is a Greek mythological creature with many heads; in social history the multi-headed hydra signifies resistance, revolution, rebellion, and “a powerful threat to the building of state, empire, and capitalism” (Linebaugh & Rediker, 2013, p. 2). Mainstream teacher preparation and curriculum tend not to point teachers to see the connections between themselves and all the peoples of the world. Looking the hydra in the eye means making the invisible visible; when the veil is lifted and we see the interlinkages in history and between peoples, it is our duty to teach what we understand the world to be. 

This paper asks, What significance does the writing of Walter Rodney have on teachers’ understanding and analysis of current events, history, and imperialism? How does a clear political economic analysis of the world guide the actions of teachers? Red Star Teacher Education Program uses Rodney’s text to help unveil the forces that obscure historical connections. In doing so, the faculty in Red Star hope that teacher candidates are compelled to teach the clear analysis of history and of peoples of the world in their classrooms. 

Rodney (1983) teaches us the historical process and framing of Europe’s underdevelopment of Africa; this framing is useful to analyze any social and educational phenomenon. The analysis will shape how educators will act (or fail to act) for justice and on the side of the exploited peoples of the world. Faculty D, in their interview about what to do after October 2023 said: “the tension [and urgency] that existed in that moment pushed us all to take a side and to do something, anything, about Palestine even if we were scared” (Interview, 8/15/25). Red Star assigns various readings by Howard Zinn, professor and activist. Zinn (2003) was the author of People’s History of the United States and he urged teachers to not be neutral in the classroom. He said, “I never simply present both sides and leave it at that. I take a stand” (Zinn, 1994,). Like Rodney, Zinn emphasized that history is ever changing and moving, and politically poignant events, acute violence and societal shifts can create an urgency that may shift people’s consciousness into action. Teacher educators can be the midwife to bring about that shift in teachers.

Teacher candidates are rarely exposed to a counternarrative or a pedagogy that questions the imperialist state (Allweis & Al-Adeimi, 2024; Chávez-Moreno, 2021; McLaren et al., 2004). While schools largely reproduce the dominant ideology (Bartolomé, 2010),Red Star’s mission is to create the conditions for teachers and students to question their own ideas. Rodney’s (1983) historical and dialectical political analysis helps us question our assumptions and force us to look at the multi-headed hydra in the eye: to make the invisibilized contradictions visible. While the dominant narrative points the finger at the underdeveloped as deficient, Rodney illuminates contradictory ideology within us by explaining that the oppressed and underdeveloped are not responsible for their condition. He teaches us to  analyze the ways in which exploited peoples are robbed of resources and have been ideologically convinced by the oppressor that the imperialists deserve the spoils.

Red Star invites teacher candidates to be change makers, and people who want to work for a more just and egalitarian world need a clear analysis. Without a clear historical and political economic analysis, the tendency is to lean into victim blaming or conjecture about the less fortunate. Liberal ideology creates a paradigm where the answer to exploitation is charity, that is, foundations, aid, and donors are the path to deliver the exploited from their fate (Amin, 2004). A liberatory and just solution demands that teachers understand the root causes and not fall into the liberal trap of assessing and diagnosing  individual “problems.” To humanize Palestinians, Indigenous peoples, and exploited peoples by teaching against myths also requires an analysis on the side of the people. Teachers need to have this analysis to better equip youth with the tools they need to change the world. We must look at the roots of this multifaceted, multi-headed reality in the eye because Palestinians can not afford for the world to continue to blindly speak empty words. 

Rodney’s analysis helps us to see that the current reality in Palestine is rooted in imperialist exploitation of the land and people. Liberal and dominant narratives often describe what is happening in Palestine as a religious conflict, an interminable dispute over land, or a case of “might makes right”, claiming that superior fire power and weaponry are a justification for dominance. Rodney (1983) does not paint broad brush strokes of history. Instead he takes snapshots of reality on the continent to explain how Africa has been looted and exploited over the centuries. He is constantly answering the question, “How did we get here?”  This question helps teachers and learners conceptualize where we need to go to build the world we wish to see brick by brick, as we learn to analyze the root causes of our current political economy (Amin, 2008). All humans have a contribution, if they wish, to be on the right side of history. Red Star’s endeavor is to illuminate how analyzing and understanding the world builds the possibility to change ourselves and build the world we wish to see. Shining a light on injustice is not enough. We have to lean into the possibility of change and to build a more equitable world. As Marx (1845) suggested, the point is to change the world.

On June 13, 1980, Walter Rodney was assassinated because of his work of organizing his people in order to fight oppression.  When we turn on Democracy Now, we often see the faces of parents searching for their children under rubble in Palestine.  These events happen while we prepare for work or school, while we are riding our bikes or playing with friends.  Walter Rodney teaches us that we must seek to understand how we have arrived at this moment in history.

Rodney mandates us to teach history and current events of the intentionally erased. In many classrooms, Palestine is literally not on the map. Teaching and learning about Palestine and offering a clear historical analysis is a small way to be in solidarity with the people of the world.

 

Notes

1. “They” is used to de-identify

 

References

Allweiss, A., & Al-Adeimi, S. (2024). Addressing imperial evasion: toward an anti-imperialist pedagogy in teacher education. Teaching in Higher Education. 

Amin, S. (2004). The liberal virus: Permanent war and the Americanization of the world. Monthly Review Press.

Amin, S. (2008). The world we wish to see: Revolutionary objectives in the twenty-first century. Monthly Review Press.

Anti-colonial Education Working Group. (2024). An appeal to Anti-colonial education at the University of Liverpool. https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/humanities-and-social-sciences/research/projects/anticolonial-policy-paper/

Arria, M. (2025, March 18). Power & Pushback: ‘Nobody can protect you’. Mondoweiss. https://mondoweiss.net/2025/03/power-pushback-nobody-can-protect-you/ 

Baillie, D. (Director). (2003). Secret Hebron: The school run [Film]. Cinema Guild. 

Bartolomé, L. I. (1994). Beyond the methods fetish: Toward a humanizing pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review, 64(2), 173–194.

Bartolomé, L. I. (2010). Daring to infuse ideology into language-teacher education. In S. May & Sleeter (Eds.), Critical multiculturalism: From theory to practice (pp. 45–57). Routledge.

Bartolomé, L., & Balderrama, M. (2001). The need for educators with political and ideological clarity. In M. de la Luz. Reyes & J. J. Halcón (Eds.), The best for our children : critical perspectives on literacy for Latino students (pp. 48–64). Teachers College Press.

Bejarano, C. A., Juarez, L. L., Garcia, M. A. M., & Goldstein, D. M. (2019). Decolonizing ethnography: Undocumented immigrants and new directions in social science. Duke University Press.

Betts, A. (2025, January 13). Pro-Palestinian professor says she was forced out of Columbia University. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/13/pro-palestine-columbia-professor-katherine-franke

Brown, A. M. (2025, June 14). A Palestinian Love Story with Devin Atallah and Sarah Ihmoud. https://endoftheworldshow.org/episodes/a-palestinian-love-story-with-devin-atallah-and-sarah-ihmoud

Carspecken, P. F. (1996). Critical ethnography in educational research: A theoretical and practical guide. Routledge.

Charmaz, K. (2004). Grounded theory. In S. N. Hesse-Biber & P. Leavy (Eds.), Approaches to qualitative research (pp. 496–521). Oxford University Press.

Chávez-Moreno, L. C. (2021). U.S. Empire and an Immigrant’s Counternarrative: Conceptualizing Imperial Privilege. Journal of Teacher Education, 72(2), 209–222. 

Chilisa, B. (2020). Indigenous research methodologies. SAGE Publications Inc.

Daniel, C. A. (2022). Wrestling with racism and anti-blackness: confronting legacies of coloniality in teacher education programs. Journal for Multicultural Education, 16(3), 214–224.

Democracy Now. (2019, January 11). Exclusive: Angela Davis Speaks Out on Palestine, BDS & More After Civil Rights Award Is Revoked. https://www.democracynow.org/2019/1/11/exclusive_angela_davis_speaks_out_on

Domínguez, M. (2019). Decolonial innovation in teacher development: praxis beyond the colonial zero-point. Journal of Education for Teaching, 45(1), 47–62. 

Domínguez, M. (2020). Cultivating epistemic disobedience: Exploring the possibilities of a decolonial practice-based teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 72(5), 1–13. 

Dunn, D. C., Chisholm, A., Spaulding, E., & Love, B. L. (2021). A Radical Doctrine: Abolitionist Education in Hard Times. Educational Studies – AESA, 57(3), 211–223.

Essa, A. (2021, February 24). Cornel West: Palestine is a “taboo issue among certain circles in high places.” https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/cornel-west-palestine-israel-harvard-tenure-denied 

Farsoun, S. K., & Aruri, N. (2006). Palestine and the Palestinians: A social and political history, 2nd Edition. Routledge. 

Gounari, P., Morelock, J., & Narita, F. Z. (2022). Critical pedagogy and beyond: An interview with Panayota Gounari. Cadernos CIMEAC, 12(3), 8–20. 

Khalidi, R. (2025, August 1). I spent decades at Columbia. I’m withdrawing my fall course due to its deal with Trump. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/01/columbia-historian-rashid-khalidi-open-letter 

Kunimoto, N. M. (2024). Unsettling Teacher Education: Cultivating Teaching as Resistance, Epistemic Disobedience, and Counterhegemonic Practices [Doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts Boston]. Graduate Doctoral Dissertations https://scholarworks.umb.edu/doctoral_dissertations/908 

Lenin, V. I. (1916). Imperialism: The highest stage of capitalism. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ 

Linebaugh, P., & Rediker, M. (2013). The many-headed hydra: Sailors, slaves, commoners, and the hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic. Beacon Press. 

Love, B. L. (2019). We want to do more than survive: Abolitionist teaching and the pursuit of educational freedom. Beacon Press.

Luria, A. (1976). Cognitive development: Its cultural and social foundations. Harvard University Press. 

Malott, C. S. (2013). Class consciousness and teacher education: The socialist challenge and the historical context. Cultural Logic: Marxist Theory and Practice, 20, 108–136. 

Martinez, A. (2024, October 7). Teaching Palestine: Educators bring history of Palestine to class. https://prismreports.org/2024/10/07/teaching-history-of-palestine-in-class/

McLaren, P. (2016). Revolutionary critical pedagogy: Staking a claim against the macrostructural unconscious. Critical Education, 7(8), 1–41. 

McLaren, P. (2021). The Perilous Road to Justice: An Interview with Prof. Peter McLaren. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Leadership Studies, 2(1), 145–156. 

McLaren, P., Martin, G., Farahmandpur, R., & Jaramillo, N. (2004). Teaching in and against the Empire: Critical Pedagogy as Revolutionary Praxis. In Teacher Education Quarterly.

Oakland Education Association for Palestine. (2024). What we learned from our “Oakland to Gaza” K-12 teach-in. Rethinking Schools. https://rethinkingschools.org/articles/what-we-learned-from-our-oakland-to-gaza-k-12-teach-in/

Patel, L. (2021). No study without struggle: Confronting settler colonialism in higher education. Beacon Press.

Philip, T. M., Souto-Manning, M., Anderson, L., Horn, I., J. Carter Andrews, D., Stillman, J., & Varghese, M. (2019). Making justice peripheral by constructing practice as “core”: How the increasing prominence of core practices challenges teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 70(3), 251–264. 

Rodney, W. (1983). How Europe underdeveloped Africa. Howard University Press.

Rodney, W. (1996). The groundings with my brothers. School Times Publication.

Sabati, S., Pour-Khorshid, F., Meiners, E. R., & Hernandez, C. A. Z. (2022). Dismantle, Change, 

Build: Lessons for Growing Abolition in Teacher Education. Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education, 124(3), 177–206.

Sleeter, C. E. (2017). Critical Race Theory and the whiteness of teacher education. Urban Education, 52(2), 155–169.

Souto-Manning, M., & Emdin, C. (2020). On the harm inflicted by urban teacher education programs: Learning from the historical trauma experienced by teachers of color. Urban Education, 1–33.

The Intercept. (2024, April 10). Amid Gaza war, college campuses become free speech “testing ground.” The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2024/04/10/intercepted-gaza-free-speech-campus-protests/ 

Tuck, E. (2009). Suspending damage: A letter to communities. Harvard Educational Review, 79(3), 409–540.

Tuhiwai Smith, L. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples. Zed Books.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press. 

Zinn, H. (2003). A people’s history of the United States. Harper Perennial Modern Classics.

Zinn, H. (1994). Why students should study history. Zinn Education Project. https://www.zinnedproject.org/why/why-students-should-study-history/