This session explores how educators and educational leaders can integrate tenets of informal learning to create safe, empowering, and inclusive environments that foster connectedness, balance, healing, and growth.

Speaker

Noah Romero, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Scholar of Educator Preparation

Dr. Noah Romero is a decolonial theorist and critical Indigenous studies scholar-educator. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Auckland in critical studies in education and Māori and Indigenous education. Bridging ethnic studies and education, his research examines how dispossessed and deterritorialized people redefine learning and identity in subcultural contexts, focusing on Indigenous and immigrant communities in the U.S., Aotearoa (New Zealand), the Philippines, and the Philippine diaspora.

His first book, Decolonial Underground Pedagogy: Unschooling and Subcultural Learning for Peace and Human Rights, draws from his experiences in minority-led punk, skateboarding, and unschooling subcultures. In it, he celebrates the nuanced ways diasporic Filipinx punks rise against the Philippines’ violent and perpetual encounter with western imperialism. He links their struggle to the social practice of Native American skaters, who defy hegemony and physics, to show how Indigenous lifeways adapt and thrive, despite efforts to eradicate them through miseducation and war. Finally, he examines how unschooling families reclaim subjugated knowledge by rejecting the colonial logic of compulsory education. These studies have profound implications for teaching and community-building, as they show that ideals like anti-racism, decolonization, and human rights are not simple matters of curriculum and instruction. Emancipatory learning also occurs in everyday acts of inquiry and communion.