Rescue from Coloniality? The Power of Dreaming

In this essay, the authors reflect on the context and promise of Codesign and Theories of Change (TOC). Throughout my (MK) academic career, the Codesign work undertaken by the Family Leadership Design Collaborative (FLDC) has been one of the most inspirational, humanizing, and anti-colonial academic projects in which they have engaged or witnessed. The conveners, two women of Indigenous/Italian and Asian American descent, honored and humanized the knowledges and voices of all those who contributed to the Codesign – parents, community leaders and advocates, researchers, school leaders, and students. This is unusual in Western educational spaces that sit on colonial histories. The activities in the Codesign were designed to foster thinking and research outside of traditional educational structures and histories. This type of Codesign is also unusual in that it represents a break from the school-centric past in which people in the US typically confine themselves to dreaming within the educational histories and technologies.


Introduction
In this essay, we reflect on the context and promise of Codesign and Theories of Change (TOC). Throughout my (MK) academic career, the Codesign work undertaken by the Family Leadership Design Collaborative (FLDC) has been one of the most inspirational, humanizing, and anti-colonial academic projects in which I have engaged or witnessed. Our conveners, two women of Indigenous/Italian and Asian American descent, honored and humanized the knowledges and voices of all those who contributed to the Codesign -parents, community leaders and advocates, researchers, school leaders, and students. This is unusual in Western educational spaces that sit on colonial histories. The activities in the Codesign were designed to foster thinking and research outside of traditional educational structures and histories. This type of Codesign is also unusual in that it represents a break from the school-centric past in which people in the US typically confine themselves to dreaming within the educational histories and technologies. The papers in this two-part special issue all speak to how the Indigenous/ancestral knowledges can be centered in the relationships that communities have with schools.
Dr. Nimo Abdi graciously serves as co-writer, co-thinker, and co-theorizer for this piece. Her background as a non-Westerner, as a Somali (African) refugee to colonized Western space, and as an educator, as a mother, and as a scholar interested in Indigenous (non-White/non-western) forms of motherhood will push us into a dreaming space that we, as Westerners, may not have found ourselves. From this point forward, the writing is our combined voice. We have decided to focus on three elements of this work: one, we explore ways to visiblize coloniality within and throughout schooling; two, we theorize into the most common and, in our view the most promising, TOC that emerged from Drs. Ishimaru's and Bang's research with the FLDC Codesign project-Solidarity Dreaming 1 (Ishimaru & Bang, 2022); here we think through what the "solidarity" as well as the "dreaming" might from neoliberal and to even social justice practices. While this list is not exhaustive, here are few of the more prevalent forms of colonial representation in and around schools.
1. Colonized "Acceptable" Resistance. Social justice and community liberation practices that are not aligned with, or emanate from, Western epistemologies and ontologies are either overlooked or not recognized by those engaged in social justice and anti-racist work in schools. This speaks to the complex ways that Westernization and colonization have permeated into the discursive realities of even those from minoritized communities and critically-inclined White allies. One example is the tendency to affirm only knowledge systems and practices that are secular oriented by many anti-racist workers. This negation or downplaying of religious and spiritual oriented practices that inform ethics of kinship and relationality within families and communities is not valued as legitimate knowledge systems that offer possibilities for dreaming and community building. This is so because these ethics are not considered useful in the material and secular world of Western capitalism. Similarly, it entails only affirming as knowledge that which is "observable" and not known through what is felt or communally intuited. We find the Codesign emphasis on respect for elders, and the prioritization of ancestral and intergenerational knowledge helpful as it opens up opportunities for theorizing and engaging the epistemic and ontological realities of non-dominant communities in a much deeper way than a mere lip-serving for the relevance of non-Western knowledge. This type of analysis provides an inquiry that goes beyond critique and mere response to colonization and domination, and instead takes community knowledge both as a starting and ending point for theory and practice (Ishimaru & Bang, 2022).
2. Capitalism or Collectivism? Western capitalism has required an individualized freedom and competition that has negated the lived collectivism that Black and Indigenous peoples have always embodied. Capitalism and resulting governmentality require the State as the arbiter of all affairs of people, not people themselves (community). Notions of freedom that fail to take into account the wellbeing of the collective over that of individual choices/practices are widespread. This is why it is so easy for educators to take school policy as a starting point for school-community engagement practices, and not community histories. Efforts to codesign need to highlight the need for engaging individualism not only as Western and colonial orientation but as a complex phenomenon that requires a reimagining of educational provisions and services. For instance, many families from non-dominant communities are ontologically inclined to collectivist existence, and teach their children communal practices of collaboration, where the "We" takes precedence over "I." Yet, they also understand that colonial institutions require one to compete for resources and power. Hence, the work of Codesign and solidarity building takes into account the worries of families and communities over an ever-shrinking labor market and environmental challenges that often leave their offspring underemployed, and disproportionately exposed to poverty and incarceration. It seems that in theory, collectivism is often evoked as a lofty ideal regarding the educational needs of Indigenous and non-dominant communities, while those with power continue to benefit in a capitalist society. Hence, a collectivist orientation to anti-colonial educational reimagining requires a much deeper commitment that puts in place policies that ensure equitable access to resources and provisions in education, labor market, health care, and the legal system, etc. We find Maisie Chin's (2023, this issue) work helpful because she organizes parents to work collectively against anti-Black school policies that are often designed to pit parents against one another for resources; the organization she leads, CADRE, fights against schools' habit of using working class Black children and families as the measure of undesirability. Chin's work demonstrates the emotional labor required in delinking from the coloniality of schooling as parents reorient themselves into Indigenous and ancestral practices of collectivism that prioritize the collective over the individual across racial and ethnic diversity. By seeing, loving, and advocating all children as their own, parents in Chin's work are engaged in decolonial dreaming (see also Abdi, 2022).
3. Top-Down, School-Centric Knowledge. Colonial models of schools understood subaltern peoples to be on a spectrum between savage human and non-human. So, depending on how they were defined as beings, they were either to be controlled or desavagized and schools played a central role in this. In modern Coloniality logics of schooling, this belief is represented in the many deficit discourses that portray community knowledge as either harmful or nonexistent. Thus, many beginning teachers see students (and community peoples, parents, etc.) as empty vessels to be filled with knowledge (intended to civilize them). Aggressive State policies to assimilate non-Western, non-white, and working-class children have evolved over time from forced removal of Native American and enslaved African children either into boarding schools or onto the slave auction, to contemporary welfare policies that meant to punish poor and immigrant families of color. School-community engagement work is influenced by neoliberal policies that often blame communities of color and working people's parenting style for the high poverty and unemployment rates in society (Raey, 1989). Contrary to its raced and gendered nature, parent-school relations are often talked about as a race and gender neutral initiative. Both research and experience teach us that it is mostly mothers who are involved in overseeing children's learning in schools. In particular, we learned a great deal from the works of BIPOC women, and mother scholars that schools often marginalize them regardless of class and educational status.
The frustrations, erasure and hostility reported by many BIPOC mothers indicate the impossibility of reconciling the quest for humanizing learning experiences for their children and the state's assimilation agenda. So, when BIPOC mothers resist the state's assimilationist agenda by seeking power to advocate for their children, they are framed as combative, hostile and/or indifferent to their children's educational success by schools (Abdi, 2022).
Codesign efforts are pertinent and urgently needed in school-parent relations because they offer a counternarrative of how Black, Indigenous and other marginalized mothers support children's education. For example, instead of focusing on how mothers are positioned within school, a more helpful way is to think about how gender (and its intersection with race) itself is a colonial construct that is used to erase women's contribution to family and social life (Abdi, 2022). This is so because Western conceptions of gender are not universal. Therefore, concepts like mother and motherhood look different and attend to different sets of ethos, and ethical concerns within Indigenous and non-dominant families and communities. For instance, motherhood in Indigenous African tradition encompasses both the material and the spiritual sphere. In this view, motherhood as an institution has social, and political implications. So, when teachers and administrators in US schools infantilize, and disrespect an immigrant Somali mother, they are in a sense engaging both discursive and material violence on that family and community (Abdi, 2022).

Coloniality as Organizational and Material
The colonial hierarchy is also reinforced through the actual structures and resources of organizations. The physical and organizational structures of schooling, including the relationship with parents and youth, the school design and location all represent colonial understandings of parents and youth and hierarchies of school authority. In fact, the very notion that schools should be the primary method of educating children is indeed a colonial logic. Below are descriptions of organizational and material instances of Coloniality.

Purpose of schooling vs. education. For Black and Indigenous, it is not only a matter of
what school should be, but why school should be. Schools have been used to destroy Indigenous communities, to exclude African enslaved from "official" learning, and used by former slaves to liberate their communities! Given such extreme variance in the uses of schools, it is important that the conversation focus on education and learning for the wellbeing (liberation) of community, and not only on the notion of "school." In other words, it is not merely about school, but about how schools are situated in the long histories of communities they serve. In his essay on what Black community responses might be to schooling during Covid and the murder of George Floyd, Brian Lozenski (2021) posited the following: "Risk is always unequally distributed to those on the margins. For Black communities, physical and/or psychological risk was always a calculation in the pursuit of education. What remained variable was the reward, or the transmutation of that risk into a dramatically improved lived experience, or what some have articulated as 'liberation'" (Lozenski, 2021, p. 2). We understand this to mean that education and the transmission of knowledge has meant a completely different meaning for Black and Indigenous peoples. It was not about the accumulation of wealth or self-interest. Rather, the purpose of education has always been to preserve and to improve the collective. And so should be schools. Codesign unearthed Collective Dreaming that has occurred among BIPOC community folk, despite the Colonization and Coloniality having such a prominent role in schools.

Knowledge definitions and measurement.
That knowledge and literacy must be printed, and that it must be measured, and that students must be compared to each other (or the whole) are all western inventions of knowledge transmission. It is not for us here, to assess value to Western ways of knowing as much as it is to visibilize it as Western. It is also useful to know that Western knowledge associated with schooling has often been utilized, promoted and practiced to dominate people, lands, and resources.
3. In Power we Trust? Colonialists, and those that initiated schools in the West, believed that they had the power to judge, but to never be judged; that they could describe Indigenous students, but never had to subject themselves to being described; and that they could classify, but never be classified by subjects. Thus, the power to decide who is intelligent, learning, or well-behaved all emanate from a history of domination and control. This power has been invisibilized and embedded into the very job description and scopes of work of modern-day school leaders and educators. This type of power allowed educators in Indian schools to justify the destruction of Indigenous culture and language, and Indigenous lives. Similar expressions of power exist in schools today, such as tracking and standardized testing.

Disentanglement of Schools from Students' Political Lives.
While we do not suggest that educators and leaders in schools politically indoctrinate students with governmental politics, we do suggest that schools should neither direct students to be exclusively individualistic, nor to define success in terms of grades and wealth. In fact, there are many issues that will directly impact students who are in school now for the next 50 years, and most schools are "apolitical" around those issues, especially if they are critical of U.S. government behaviors; issues like continuous preemptive war and the toppling of governments around the world, an extreme concentration of wealth for the ultra-rich, America's sustained war of anti-Blackness, global recessions that are driven by textbook US economic policies, diminishing health care opportunities for the Nation's most underserved, and the climatebased, slow-motion killing of planet Earth are all issues rarely even discussed in schools, not to mention taken up. There are notable exceptions to this. 5. Parent "Training" Programs. Most large school districts, and many well-funded non-profit organizations, have highlighted and promoted the practice of "training" parents to be good stewards of their children that are enrolled as students in schools. The corollary and subtext is often that whatever knowledge and parenting skills that the parents arrived in schools already possessing, is useless if not damaging. This colonial logic was also seen in earlier periods of North American history, as Indigenous children were prevented from even seeing their parents. And if they imitated their parents, their lives could be, and were often, taken. Parent training programs often pushed parents to help their children comply with statesanctioned policies that surveilled and punished parents from non-dominant and workingclass backgrounds. And because they couldn't see the cultural assets and agency of parents, they were deemed deficient and in need of training.
6. Monitoring and Surveillance. Terms like, 'hall monitors' and 'surveillance cameras' seem normal and are as commonplace as the 'school bell' or 'classroom management.' But educators must be aware that the physical structures and those that maintain those structures mirror understandings of earlier practices in colonial history. Practices of surveillance are met with caution or suspicion for many BIPOC students and their families. For students to accept they are constantly being watched also means that they accept that they need to be watched.
And what is the supporting narrative of people that always need to be watched? Monitoring and surveillance are also often connected to behavior modification of BIPOC students, most of which has nothing at all to do with learning.
7. Tokenizing Voice for Imperial Goals. This is perhaps one of the biggest disappointments for us, because a tokenization of voice is often used by organizations to co-opt agency and liberation. Peaceful or compliant resistance voices are sought out and lifted up, so that colonizing agents can use the good voice to mute voices that demand revolutionary change.
That is not to say that some BIPOC voices lack agency or are inauthentic. Rather we problematize educators that use BIPOC voices in exoticizing and tokenizing ways, and not for community self-determination or liberation. In other words, schools must not use 'comfortable' or 'peaceful' community voices to mute other community voices that might countervail, resist, or challenge the status quo in schools.

Why CoDesign? Solidarity Dreaming: What Codesigned education could look like for Communities and School
"This group of 'Theories of Change' decentered the system entirely and focused on community and culturally-based forms of learning and education as a central resource or starting point for reimagining or making education anew. Codesigners talked about creating or maintaining space and time for reimagining education, humanizing each other, revitalizing and evolving cultural and community practices of education, growing kinship relations across roles and communities, and healing in communities" (Ishimaru & Bang, 2022, p. 23-24).
It is not surprising that Solidarity Dreaming was the most often imagined TOC across the FLDC Codesign activities because we know that humans will constantly seek the power to define their own existences and humanity. We spent the first part of this paper visibilizing aspects of Coloniality in/around schools and communities because the removal of perpetual colonial practices is the first step that frees us to Dream. Muhammad went to culturally-affirming schools that were set up to critique White supremacy and protect Black humanity. In her formative education, Nimo went to public schools in Somalia that emphasized decolonization. In the 1970s and 1980s, Somalia was one of few Sub-Saharan African countries that replaced all colonial languages in the K-12 curriculum and implemented Indigenous language as the medium for instruction. She studied all subjects in Somali and from a Somali stand point, with strong emphasis on both oral and print literacy. Schooling was affirming for her, because teaching and learning were based on a relational ethics that drew on Somali epistemologies of respect for elders and knowledge bearers (teachers), as well as knowledge seekers (students), where teachers were said to be "second parents". This type of reciprocal relationality facilitates the creation of learning spaces that lean on ethical and spiritual relationality.
Though Black and Indigenous children attend schools with practices built on Coloniality, BIPOC parents still have agency to push and mold these same schools. We are not oblivious to the fact that Dreaming and then Changing will take time. But as we highlight the importance of Dreaming, we remember that educators in schools do not know better than parents what is best for their children's diet, nor their health, spirituality, and nor their education. This commentary takes up the prospect and potential, indeed the Dreaming, made possible through Codesign and Solidarity Dreaming. Robin D. Kelley suggests that we are capable of embracing but moving beyond protest, and into molding new human beings. And we must collectively make space for all those Dreaming, without colonial interruptions or boundaries. Though there are no limits in Dreaming, we focus our conversation around dreaming in communities, and in regards to learning and education.
The first part of this paper briefly touched on ways colonial practices continue to show up and dictate teaching, structures, contexts, and relationships in and around schools. BIPOC peoples who resist colonial domination in the West do not put their effort into building military prowess to rival that of Western powers. However, they can absolutely outmatch and overcome Western powers in their ability to constantly envision and work for a world that holds up all of our humanities-Solidarity Dreaming. We wonder: what about our histories can inform Solidarity Dreaming?

Resisting Modernity and what it means to "not change"
Being modern and progressive has been a primary discourse and impetus to attack the Global South, and Black and Indigenous communities in the U.S. Western logics which tend to define progress as change. While this is sometimes true, it must also be noted that some change has not been good for Black and Indigenous folk or their communities. Perhaps one of the most striking examples is what Black and Indigenous peoples lost with the advent of colonization and imperialism. We make clear that it is not for us to determine what change is good for communities and students, but it is for them to make that decision for themselves.
When asking the question of: what is lost with modernity and change, we reflect on Black schools and the impact of Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka. Indeed, Black civil rights leaders who fought for the passage of Brown hoped to get better educational opportunities, and functional educational facilities. It is important to remember that the desire of Black leaders was ultimately a path to Black humanity-dignity, the ability to receive an education that led to decent jobs with a livable wage. But when they Dreamed, they likely did not foresee the myriad forms of violence that Black children would face until the current day. They perhaps could not predict that even within desegregated schools, circumstances around Black education would not get much better, but that it would become much more violent. They likely would not have known that the landmark case would have all but eliminated arguably the strongest Black institution at that time-Black education. All of those things that we would do anything for now-dignity and love for students, an abundance of highly-skilled and professional Black teachers, community-led schools, high academic output, and an ability to deeply connect schools to the very plight of the community-were at the core of pre-Brown schools. Our question is this: what about the past should inform our Dreaming, and what about the promises of 'change' can limit our Dreaming. This is not a critique of the Theories of Change outlined in this special issue (Ishimaru & Bang, 2022) as much as it is a "Dreaming" of what TOC what it might include.

What of the "Solidarity" in Solidarity Dreaming
What actually are the limits of decolonial, anti-racism, and social justice reforms? As Ramon Grosfoguel notes in his works, Eurocentric, and white liberal historical sensibilities tend to steer most of the critical thought and voice found in contemporary "social justice" work, despite the fact that non-Western peoples have engaged in this work differently and for much longer. For us, solidarity means to understand across differences and explore the different ways that the entanglement of race and capitalism organize systems of oppressions across the globe, and by extension in the U.S. Solidarity building finds ways to acknowledge and work through tensions that exist both within the localized and transnational spaces, and to do so in ways that bring together various communities with these different historical consciousness and sensibilities as they have uniquely contested colonialism and coloniality. Solidarity building also means making space for colonized communities to make sense of their complex relationship with whiteness and colonialism before engaging across multiple voices and experiences. Maisie Chin's experiences with CADRE is a powerful example of how to resist such colonial structures in school. Maisie, as an Asian American woman, stood on principle when she was enlisted to support the colonial anti-Blackness: "And so when teachers, white teachers, in particular, talk all kinds of dehumanizing things about Black and Brown children, and then approach me as if I was going to be some co-conspirator, that's when I started to totally dismantle that." It did not matter that Maisie was not Black; it did not matter that the white educators that Maisie spoke of expected Asian Americans to elevate themselves through the practice of enacting anti-Blackness; and it did not matter that she was not from a community on which the cultural behaviors were criminalized. Dreaming solidarity can be based on the full humanity of all, especially Black and Indigenous students. Indeed, CADRE grew solidarities based on principles of anti-Coloniality and Black liberation. But still we wonder, how can we Dream together across boundaries and in solidarity toward a new/old, pre-colonial and anti-colonial, humanity? Ancestral and community knowledges are found in the everyday living practices of grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts, neighbors and community members as they engage in essential labor of care, love, dignity, and beauty. Community knowledges can be gleaned from knowledge embedded in the rituals of care that families undertake as they cultivate joy in cooking, cleaning, attending to children, the elderly, the ill, gardening, grooming; in serving, in worship, in play, in sharing and passing of stories (Lugones, 2010) that sustain our most fundamental need as humans, i.e., acceptance, compassion, and love. While these knowledge systems and practices may look different across communities, and contexts, nevertheless they provide a specific historical consciousness, which makes it possible not only for resistance but also for thriving and building despite domination and humiliation.

What of the "Dreaming" in solidarity
Dreaming happens when community members collectively imagine and work for a future within which self-determination, economic viability, culturally, spiritually, and linguistically responsive education, wholesome nourishment, affirming environments, and other aspects-that they deem necessary for their humanity-can be realized. Indeed, we believe that dreaming happens within all facets of life, but here, we limit our reflection on how they connect to education. All communities have the ability to recognize colonization, settler colonialism and coloniality, including those that benefit from it. But communities on the margin have historically had to dream more because they were most negatively impacted by the colonial presence and its enduring imprints. We think of Solidarity Dreaming in phases: relational, cultural, structural, and economic, and primarily in the order listed.
1. Relational (reciprocal) Dreaming. Relational Solidarity Dreaming is the ability to envision a future around people who, together, will enrich the humanity and spirits of students as they learn. It is also the ability to choose whom you can learn with, and from. And relational exists in communities of people who are collectively committed to the preservation of all living beings, including humans, animals, and the Earth. Relational Dreaming requires an embeddedness in and commitment to communities, to understand their ontologies why they exist, and thus what the purposes of schooling are in their existence. Only after that can educational projects, like schools or CBOs, begin to truly support communities. Education must start from and be led by peoples in non-education spaces. This is essential because even while structural oppression may be afflicting some students, Relational Dreaming spaces in school will still always work to humanize schools.
2. Cultural Dreaming. This dreaming represents how the cultural, spiritual, and linguistic aspects of communities are indistinguishable from their learning. It is a moment when 'culture' means 'learning,' and learning is culture; culture is not learned in educational spaces (such as schools) but it is embodied within all aspects of knowledge transmissions and relationships. It is a moment in which spiritual aspects of humanity are embraced. Cultural Dreaming is what makes ancestral knowledge intergenerational, and what carries that knowledge across multiple spaces and times. Cultural Dreaming also is the primary process that makes and remakes meaning for peoples, and those that hope to serve them. to support the community in their pursuit of humanity, dignity, wholeness, and preservation of life and spirit, then we enter structures into the solidarity dreaming of communities. Thus, as we think through Structural Solidarity Dreaming, for us organizations and systems are mere tools that should be made to beautify community, in much the same way that a paintbrush, lawnmower, or a row of planted trees would. Structural inequities in schools and communities would become nonexistent. And if any organizations did emerge within communities, they would complement rather than extract from communities.
4. Economic Dreaming. We have mentioned dignity at several moments throughout this paper, and for communities and individuals to obtain decolonization and solidarity dreaming, they must have viable (self-sustained and self-contained) economic existences that are not reliant on, if not even entangled with, Western capitalist structures and colonizing financial enterprises. This dreaming represents the self-sufficiency needed for Black, Indigenous and other minoritized communities. This is a push against dehumanized understandings of Western economic greed that have reduced human worth to material wealth. Rather, here, we argue that the Economic Dreaming does not problematize merely the presence of resources, but rather it establishes the extent to which those resources are used to preserve and sustain humanity, the Earth and all it contains. So, issues like a sustainable living wage, collective antipoverty existences, circulation of capital in minoritized communities, and a cessation of Western/White monetization of BIPOC physical, cultural, and geographic capital are all issues that would be taken up.

Concluding Thoughts
Decolonization requires Dreaming, and, though it came millennia earlier, Dreaming also requires Decolonization. In this essay, we have shared thoughts about the meaning of Solidarity Dreaming and the promise of CoDesign. For educators, this essay has implications for how they resist oppression and fight for the humanity of our youth and their communities. Solidarity Dreaming requires community-led educational leadership; it requires centering Ancestral knowledge; it requires a removal of school histories as a starting place of dreaming; it requires a constant renewal and creativity around decolonization; and it requires a collaboration of people with varied backgrounds, roles, education and wealth backgrounds, but who are all committed restoring/preserving the humanity of communities and places in which they are located.