About

Rachel Talbert is a Research Assistant Professor for the LCI project at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her faculty expertise includes curriculum, decoloniality in education, indigenous education, teacher education, and urban schools. She is affiliated with the Curriculum & Teaching faculty at Teachers College, located in New York City. Her work focuses on issues related to curriculum development and educational practices within diverse and urban settings, emphasizing decolonial approaches and indigenous perspectives.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Pedagogy
• Art
• Geography
• Law
• Mathematics education
• Public administration
• Psychology
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• Wrong Rocks Counterstorying a Curriculum of Erasure in Manahatta/n

  Journal of Curriculum Theorizing · 2026-03-13

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This study examines the public curriculum of settler colonial mythology told by monuments and memorials in New York City. We discuss the role these monuments play in the normalization of settler ignorance (Pewewardy et. al., 2018), of particular relevance now as teachers prepare to teach students in 2024 about what happened in 1624, celebrating Dutch settlement of New York City. Curriculum is not limited to schools and other sites of formal education, it exists in narratives that perpetrate Lenape erasure through public place based miseducation including ways in which a settler colonial curriculum of place is immortalized in the digital fabric of the internet that supports learning about these memorials by way of non-profit, and government-funded educational resources, and even video games. We center our work in these spaces, the public pedagogy that exists outside of formal school contexts. We curated these inherently pedagogical spaces (Simon, 2014) and through this curation, we aim to unsettle a dysconscious, settler colonial, public curriculum (Sandlin, 2010) which permeates many spaces in and near Manahatta/n.

  PublisherDOI

• Civics as Survivance: Unsettling Curriculum in Lenapehoking

  2025-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Review: <i>False Starts: The Segregated Lives of Preschoolers</i>, by Casey Stockstill

  Ethnic studies review · 2024-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Unsettling a Curriculum of Lenape Erasure in Manahatta

  2024-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Accountable to whom? Relational accountability in social research

  Anthropology & Education Quarterly · 2024-01-25 · 3 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  Abstract This paper explores research in the always already colonized spaces of academia with people in what is now the United States. In research projects, Wilson (2008) reminds us to begin with community relationships. Through ethnographic work, we trouble the idea of beginning research via local powerbrokers, who may privilege particular narratives and individuals. We offer reflections reconsidering power dynamics in community‐based ethnographic studies suggesting ways to think about who research relationships are built with.

  PublisherDOI

• Engaging Relational Scholarship to Desettle

  2024-08-09

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Civic Sovereignty: Indigenous Civic Constructs in Public School Spaces

  Teachers College Record The Voice of Scholarship in Education · 2023 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Social Science

  Context: This study examines how urban American Indian high school students negotiate their civic identities within the settler colonial structures of urban American public schools. Research Question: How do urban American Indian students negotiate civic identities in spaces where civic concepts are taught, such as American history classes in an urban public high school and a Native Youth Council (Native YC)? Research Design: This critical participatory ethnographic study examines the negotiation of civic identity by 11 urban Indigenous students in social studies classes, a Native YC, and a school in Washington State, where the STI curriculum is taught. Safety zone theory and tribal critical race theory were used to understand students’ experiences and their stories from observations, participant interviews, and focus groups, which were employed as data. Conclusions/Recommendations: The study found that the social studies classes and Native YC were zones of sovereignty (ZoS), forwarding survivance and self-determination for Native students. Students learned about the Indigenous civic constructs of sovereignty, self-determination, dual citizenship, tribal self-government, and federal Indian policy inside and outside of school, all of which supported Native students in civic identity development. Recommendations on teaching Indigenous civic constructs to all students as part of teaching for critical democracy in public schools as a component of social studies classes and extracurricular activities are discussed.

  PublisherDOI

• “To Know There's Other Indigenous People in Your School is Nice”: Urban Indigenous Civic Identity

  Urban Education · 2023-04-09

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This critical participatory ethnographic study examines the negotiation of civic identity by eight Indigenous students in an urban public high school. Using Tribal Critical Race Theory to understand the experiences of students, stories from observations, participant interviews, and focus groups were employed as data. This study, examines data from a larger study and finds the studied school was vital as a civic site for these negotiations and a Zone of Sovereignty forwarding survivance and self-determination for Indigenous students.

  PublisherDOI

• Pulling together: Participatory modes and Indigenous roads to enact anticolonial responsibility in social studies research

  Theory & Research in Social Education · 2023-06-13 · 3 citations

  article

  Researchers and practitioners in social studies education have not often taken up responsibilities to Indigenous communities on whose Lands they work and live. Drawing on Indigenous research methodologies, along with specific Indigenous stories and artwork, four authors of varied positionalities, contexts, and regions offer conceptual and methodological insight into disrupting settler colonial research habits and sustaining commitments with Indigenous Communities. Through vignettes describing our own research practices, we propose three attributes of anticolonial participatory research responsibility in social studies. We emphasize the need for Indigenous leaders to drive research processes and planning; integrated, relational views of theory, practice, research, and policy to transcend binary understandings and colonial outcomes of social studies education; and long-term, reciprocal partnerships with community members, to center Indigenous community practices and Knowledges in order to expand possibilities for social studies education. The article explores these features, their demands, and implications for all readers as educators on Indigenous Lands.

  PublisherDOI

• Wrong Rocks: Counterstorying a Curriculum of Erasure in Manahatta/n

  2023-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• A. Misha Davis

  Kerala Agricultural University

  1 shared

• Maia Sheppard

  University of Iowa

  1 shared

• Christine Rogers Stanton

  Montana State University

  1 shared

• Mary Ellen Wolfinger

  George Washington University

  1 shared

• Jenni Conrad

  Oregon State University Cascades

  1 shared

• Arshad Imtiaz Ali

  George Washington University

  1 shared

• Brad Hall

  Blackfeet Community College

  1 shared