Exposing structures invites us to design differently.

Bones

Pro gardeners and landscape architects say that in winter you get to see a garden’s bones, its underlying structure. As showy annuals die back, leaving perennials and evergreens, the edges and outlines of flowerbeds, walkways, fences—all the containers—become more apparent.

In my own garden, this means the past season’s wear and tear on the deer-proofed raised beds shows clearly. The netting is tearing away in places and will need to be refastened or replaced next year. I also notice the improved shape of small trees that were pruned last spring and the heavy outlines of the big maple that still needs a cutting back before bits start to crack off under their own weight.

In a similar way, the decolonization learning journey feels like a stripping away, revealing the overgrown, outgrown, dying, or now dead assumptions that have been upheld for too long. Through guided reflection, inquiry, and analysis in community with other researchers, evaluators, and consultants, I’m becoming more aware of how mindsets and practices we often bring to our work perpetuate colonial myths, structures, and abuses of power.

For example, I once described my role as a consultant as being like that of a translator: using research, writing, and editing to make the perspectives of staff members or program participants better understood to organizational leadership and/or funders. My intentions were good. (Aren’t they always?) But I can reflect now that in this mediating role, I polished the voices of those impacted to make them palatable to leaders and institutions more often than I honed their rough edges to critique those in power or hold them accountable.

While I identified with the struggles of unhappy staff and wanted to champion clients who felt unseen, I failed to recognize my own power and proximity to power as a paid agent of the ones holding the purse strings. Not to mention the privilege I held as a researcher to ask for participants’ trust—to mine their stories —without being able to guarantee them that their disclosures would lead to any real material change.

Looking with winter eyes at my own practice and the structures in which it is situated, I can begin to discern the outlines of worn-out mindsets. I’m eager to test the strength of those scaffolds and learn how much I can resist or reshape them before they give way. I’m excited to replace them with a design that may be altogether new. To do that, I’m preparing to change myself, also—how I show up and what I do—so that I can grow a different kind of garden in the spring.

Specifically, this means exploring how I can make be more accountable to communities, not just “clients,” and initiating a reflexive practice of journaling to observe and evolve my own work with fresh eyes and greater courage.