Ph. D
Critical Studies in Education | Māori and Indigenous Education
Noah Romero (Filipinx – Ilocano/Visaya) is an Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. He holds a Ph. D. from the University of Auckland in the fields of Critical Studies in Education and Māori and Indigenous Education.
Bridging Ethnic Studies and Education, Romero’s research examines how dispossessed and deterritorialized people redefine learning and identity in subcultural contexts, with a focus on Indigenous and immigrant communities in the U.S., Aotearoa (New Zealand), the Philippines, and the Philippine diaspora. His first book, Decolonial Underground Pedagogy: Subcultural Learning for Peace and Human Rights will be released in January 2024.
Romero’s work in subculture analyzes the anti-oppressive pedagogies found in minority-led punk, skateboarding, and unschooling subcultures. Instead of reifying colonial logics like individualism and consumerism, minority-led subcultures often cultivate community engagement, an understanding of one’s responsibilities, and a shared sense of identity. These findings correlate with experiences of healing and liberation among subcultural insiders with racialized, queer, and nondominant identities, which has significant implications for the development of anti-racist and decolonial education.
Dr. Romero often consults schools and organizations on decolonizing education. Services include:
- Justice, Equity, and Antiracism (JEA) consulting
- Decolonial and Antiracist curriculum design
Critical, Queer, and Comprehensive Sexuality Education
If you are interested in collaborating, please contact me by clicking here.
2023
PhD, University of Auckland | Waipapa Taumata Rau
Critical Studies in Education/ Māori and Indigenous Education
2016
MA, University of San Francisco
International and Multicultural Education
Decolonial Underground Pedagogy (Bloomsbury, Summer 2024)
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This book explores how minority-led skateboarding, punk rock, and unschooling communities engage in collective efforts to humanize education and construct kinder social frameworks. Noah Romero examines the roles of informal and community-embedded learning in actualizing transformative education and shows how decolonizing education can take place outside of school settings.
Grounded in the author’s own experience in minority-led Filipino subcultures, the book introduces a conceptual framework of subcultural learning and decolonizing education centred on the Philippines and its diaspora in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. Romero argues that educational paradigms with peace, human rights, multiculturalism, social justice, and decolonization at the centre can extend beyond the classroom, curriculum, and teaching and into communities. By showing how minoritized people are redefining identity and knowledge through embodied community-responsive pedagogies, the book contributes to wider debates on Indigeneity, gender justice, human rights, peace studies, and decolonizing education.
Oxford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy of Education
Postcolonial Philosophy of Education in the Philippines
Postcolonial philosophies of education in the Philippines emerged from a newly independent government’s desire to unite disparate populations under a common national identity, which was heavily influenced by Western conceptions of personhood and patriotism. The islands collectively known as the Philippines, however, are home to nearly 200 distinct ethnolinguistic groups. The imposition of a universal national identity upon such a diverse populace entails the erasure of identities, knowledge systems, practices, and ways of life that differ from state-imposed norms.
Education is a critical site for this subjugation of difference, as evidenced by the state’s imposition of a national curriculum. Yet the national curriculum does not only serve to submerge difference, as decolonising pedagogies and philosophies of education in the Philippines often rise out of collective resistance to the marginalising aspects of schooling in the Philippines. Postcolonial philosophies of education in the Philippines are, as such, situated within the historical tensions between the national curriculum, the central government’s economic and political agendas, collective calls for human rights, and the philosophies, practises, and knowledge systems of indigenous peoples.
Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry
You’re Skating on Native Land: Queering and Decolonizing Skate Pedagogy
This paper draws from a new materialist interpretation of Maya Angelou’s Caged Bird to analyze how Queer and Indigenous skateboarders develop critical and community-responsive ways of knowing and being. This analysis is contrasted with the implications of skateboarding’s Olympic debut to theorize how nondominant groups build self-supporting enclaves in spite of concerted efforts to regulate and exclude them from public life.
Skateboarding is herein conceptualized as a critical pedagogy which enables participants to reclaim space, achieve self-defined learning goals, and challenge the authority of oppressive institutions built upon what Angelou calls “the grave of dreams.”
Global Perspectives on Home Education in the 21st Century
Toward a Critical Unschooling Praxis
This chapter theorises a critical unschooling praxis, or a process of reflection and action in self-directed education (SDE) that is directed toward the transformation of oppressive social structures.
This work extends my previous writings on the pedagogy of critical unschooling, which proffer explicitly decolonising approaches to SDE. Critical unschooling research recognises that home-based and self-directed learning environments can be community-responsive and antiracist, but only if the prejudices of the unschooling family are themselves reflected upon and addressed. Informed by the notion that SDE can complement social justice activism, critical unschooling aims to turn the world into a classroom and divorce education from the coloniality of its underlying power structures.
Educational Philosophy and Theory
Punx Up, Bros Down: Defending Free Speech through Punk Rock Pedagogy
This article positions punk rock pedagogy, or the educative dimensions of punk rock subculture, as an exemplar for combatting hate speech. This analysis contrasts institutional efforts to protect free speech (which are rooted in free speech absolutism) with the ways by which punks protect one another from bigotry. This paper argues that the punk approach more closely reflects how free speech protections are framed in international human rights law.
International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives
Pilipinx Becoming, Punk Rock Pedagogy, and the New Materialism
This paper employs the new materialist methodology of diffraction to probe the entanglements of matter and discourse that comprise the assemblage of Pilipinx becoming, or the ways by which people are racialized as Pilipinx. By methodologically diffracting Pilipinx becoming through the public pedagogy of punk rock, this research complicates standard stories of Pilipinx identity to provoke more generative encounters with the Pilipinx diaspora in Oceania.
Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning
Toward a Critical Unschooling Pedagogy
This paper outlines the theoretical, pedagogical, and philosophical framework for critical unschooling. Critical unschooling draws upon literature rooted in ethnic studies, postcolonial feminism, and human rights education, to propose conceptions of self- directed and community-based learning that develops students’ radical agency and critical consciousness.
The New Culture Wars in Ethnic Studies
Rise Above: Filipina/o-American Studies and Punk Rock Pedagogy
In light of the demonstrated importance of Ethnic Studies, I propose a pedagogy that highlights the history of person of color participation in the counterculture of punk rock and broadcasts a refusal to retreat from the threats of systemic racism, white supremacy, and capitalist-reproductive educational models. By studying the lives and works of artists who dared to challenge the operating hegemony of capitalism and white supremacy, punk rock pedagogy (PRP) allows educators to channel the sound and fury of punk.
Education HQ News Home education and ‘unschooling’ could very well be the way forward.
Education HQ News Potential game-changing digital learning platform focuses on kids self-directing.
University of Auckland News Innovation meets education.
CIE Newsroom University community rises to the challenge of creating solutions for New Zealand’s problems.
University of Auckland
Doctoral Scholarship
Velocity Innovation Challenge COVID-19 Social Enterprise Award
Academic Career Exploration Scholarship
Australian Association for Research in Education
Poststructural Theory SIG Competitive Grant
Oceania Comparative and International Education Society
New and Emerging Researcher Scholarship
University of San Francisco
Social Justice Scholarship
2023
Romero, N. (2023, proposal accepted). Decolonial underground pedagogy: Decolonizing education through subcultural teaching and learning (paper session). American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting. Chicago, IL.
Romero, N. (2023, proposal accepted). Theorizing Māori-Philippine solidarities through punk rock Pedagogy (paper session). American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting. Chicago, IL.
2022
Romero, N. (2022). Decolonizing pedagogies: Unschooling and Indigenous education. Center for Humanistic Inquiry Salons. Amherst College, Amherst, MA.
Romero, N. (2022). Keynote address: Queering gender, race, and Indigeneity toward a decolonial unschooling. Northeast Unschooling Conference. Hampshire College, Amherst, MA.
Romero, N. (2022). Decolonial underground pedagogy. Te Tiriti-based Futures and Anti-Racism. Wellington, NZ.
2021
Romero, N. (2021). The remembered children of Maui: Theorizing public pedagogies in Aotearoa through Indigenous Philippine philosophy. New Zealand Association for Research in Education (NZARE). Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, NZ.
Romero, N. (2021). Disabled BIPOC in SDE: Unschooling autonomy and cripping postcolonialism. Disability Studies Conference. University of Auckland, Auckland, NZ.
Romero, N. (2021). Kapwa: Being for the other in Indigenous Philippine Psychology. Educational Psychology Forum. University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ.
2020
Decolonizing self-directed education. Summit on Education for Democracy: Research, Policy, Practice and Activism. University of Southern Queensland, Ipswich, QLD, AUS.
Free speech, human rights, and punk rock pedagogy. Summit on Education for Democracy: Research, Policy, Practice and Activism. University of Southern Queensland, Ipswich, QLD, AUS.
Critical Unschooling: Critiques and futures [Paper Session]. AERA Annual Meeting. San Francisco, CA
Dominate, undermine, dismiss: A material-discursive model of oppression and its relational becoming. Educational Psychology Forum. Massey University, Palmerston North, NZ.
2019
A new world blossoming: Punk rock, agential realism, and the Pilipinx diaspora. Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE). Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, AUS.
Awakening from the deepest sleep: Diffracting Pilipinx becoming through punk rock pedagogy. Oceania Comparative and International Education Society (OCIES). National University of Samoa, Apia, Samoa.
Critical unschooling messages for the mainstream. New Zealand Association of Research in Education (NZARE). University of Canterbury, Christchurch, NZ.
Critical allyship and the countercultural counternarrative. The Inclusive Education Summit (TIES). University of Auckland. Auckland, NZ.
Critical unschooling, decolonization, and agential realism. Faculty of Education and Social Welfare Doctoral and Postgraduate Symposium. University of Auckland, Auckland, NZ.
Schooling and the modern/colonial gender system. Rainbow Research Symposium. University of Auckland, Auckland, NZ.
2018
Critical unschooling: Decolonizing (through) self-directed education. Oceania Comparative and International Education Society (OCIES). Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, NZ.
2017
Screams from the underground: Punk rock, pedagogy, and decolonization. Asian Pacific Americans in Higher Education (APAHE). Oakland, CA, USA.
2015
Critical pedagogy, decolonization, and the model minority myth. Asian Pacific Americans in Higher Education (APAHE). San Francisco, CA, USA.