Abstracts
Abstract
In response to the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action (TRC, 2015), a school board teamed with university educators and educational partners to generate a professional learning series to support educators’ engagement with Indigenous knowledges. A research team that assembled two years later interviewed the learning series participants to explore how educators were navigating Indigenous knowledge within a Eurocentric school system. This research acknowledges the challenges of doing this work within shifting institutional policies and initiatives, the wider politics of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations, building intercultural understandings and community partnerships, and negotiating epistemological difference. The researchers — including Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples — echoed resonances with the participants that occurred throughout the data collection process and often spoke about the parallel paths of research and schooling — both historically used as tools of colonization and now having a role in decolonization. To disrupt colonial propensities, we share our reflections as researchers, specifically around complexities and tensions of engaging Indigenous knowledges throughout our research processes concerning the participants’ experiences. By sharing the tensions and (un)learning that emerged on these parallel paths, we honour diverse entry-points and experiences to animate how trans-systemic knowledge building might ensue.
Keywords:
- Indigenous education,
- Eurocentrism,
- trans-systemic knowledges
Download the article in PDF to read it.
Download
Appendices
Bibliography
- Abram, D. (1996). The spell of the sensuous: Perception and language in a more-than-human world. Pantheon Books.
- Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Duke University Press.
- Alberta Education (2018). First Nations, Metis and Inuit Education: Education for reconciliation. Retrieved from https://education.alberta.ca/first-nations-métis-and-inuit-education/education-for-reconciliation/everyone/overview/
- Alberta Education (2019a). Leadership Quality Standard. Retrieved from https://education.alberta.ca/media/3739621/standardsdoc-lqs-_fa-web-2018-01-17.pdf
- Alberta Education. (2019b). Teaching Quality Standard. Retrieved from https://education.alberta.ca/media/3739620/standardsdoc-tqs-_fa-web-2018-01-17.pdf
- Archibald, J.-A. (2008). Indigenous storywork: Educating the heart, mind, body and spirit. UBC Press.
- Battiste, M. (2013a). Decolonizing education: Nurturing the learning spirit. UBC Press.
- Battiste, M. (2013b). You can’t be the doctor if you’re the disease: Eurocentrism and Indigenous renaissance. CAUT Distinguished Academic Lecture, April 26, 2013.
- Britzman, D. P. (2003). Practice makes practice: A critical study of learning to teach (revised). SUNY Press.
- Caruthers, L. E. (2007). The soil of silence: Deconstructing socio-cultural and historical processes that have influenced schooling for First Nations people and African Americans. American Educational History Journal, 34(2), 303-313.
- Dei, G. J. S., & McDermott, M. (Eds.) (2019). Centering African proverbs, Indigenous folktales, and cultural stories in curriculum: Units and lesson plans for inclusive education. Canadian Scholars Press.
- Donald, D. (2009). Forts, curriculum, and Indigenous métissage: Imagining decolonization of Aboriginal-Canadian relations in educational contexts. First Nations Perspectives, 2(1), 1-24.
- Donald, D., Glanfield, F., & Sterenberg, G. (2012). Living ethically within conflicts of colonial authority and relationality. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 10(1), 53-76.
- Four Arrows (Wahinkpe Topa), aka Jacobs, D. T. (2008). The authentic dissertation: Alternative ways of knowing, research, and representation. Routledge.
- Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum Publishing Corporation.
- Government of Canada. (2020). Indian Act (RSC, 1985, c. I-5). Retrieved from https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/I-5/
- Graveline, F. J. (2000). Circle as methodology: Enacting an Aboriginal paradigm. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 13(4), 361-370.
- hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.
- Kapyrka, J. & Dockstator, M. (2012). Indigenous knowledges and western knowledges in environmental education: Acknowledging the tensions for the benefits of a “two-worlds” approach. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 17, 97-112.
- Kovach, M. (2009). Indigenous methodologies: Characteristics, conversations, and contexts. University of Toronto.
- Little Bear, L. (2000). Jagged worldviews colliding. In M. Battiste (Ed.), Reclaiming Indigenous voice and vision (pp. 77-85). UBC Press.
- MacDonald, J. & Markides, J. (2018). Called to action: Dialogue around praxis for reconciliation. In L. Daniels, S. Deer, D. Donald, B. Low, and D. Wiseman (Eds.). Taking up the Calls to Action of the TRC in Teacher Education [Special Issue]. McGill Journal of Education, 53(2), 213-232.
- MacDonald, J., & Markides, J. (2019). Duoethnography for reconciliation: Learning through conversations. Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 65(2), 1-16.
- Mann, B. A. (2003). Native Americans, archaeologists, and the mounds. Peter Lang.
- McDermott, M. (2020). On what autoethnography did in a study on student voice pedagogies: A mapping of returns. The Qualitative Report, 25(2), 347-358. Retrieved from https://nsuworks.nova.edu/tqr/vol25/iss2/5
- Mignolo, W. (2002). The geopolitics of knowledge and the colonial difference. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 101(1), 57-96.
- Miles, M. B., Huberman, A. M., & Saldaña, J. (2014). Qualitative data analysis: A methods sourcebook (3rd ed.). Sage.
- Patel, L (2016a). Decolonizing educational research: From ownership to answerability. Routledge.
- Patel, L. (2016b). Pedagogies of resistance and survivance: Learning as marronage. Equity & Excellence in Education, 49(4), 397-401.
- Regan, P. (2010). Unsettling the settler within: Indian residential schools, truth telling, and reconciliation in Canada. UBC Press.
- Ricoeur, (1990). Oneself as another (K. Blamey, Trans.). University of Chicago Press.
- Sandoval, C. (2000). Methodology of the oppressed. University of Minnesota Press.
- Sensoy, O. & DiAngelo, R. (2012). Is everyone really equal? An introduction to key concepts in social justice education. Teachers College Press.
- Sheridan, J. & Longboat, D. R. “He Clears the Sky” (2006). The Haudenosaunee imagination and the ecology of the sacred. Space and Culture, 9(4), 365-381.
- Shohat, E. & Stam, R. (2009). What is Eurocentrism? In A. H. Itwaru (ed.) The white supremacist state: Eurocentrism, imperialism, colonialism, racism, (pp. 137-156). The Other Eye.
- Sleeter, C. E. (2001). Preparing teachers for culturally diverse schools: Research and the overwhelming presence of Whiteness. Journal of Teacher Education, 52(2), 94-106.
- Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples (2nd ed.). Zed Books.
- St. Denis, V. (2007). Aboriginal education and anti‐racist education: Building alliances across cultural and racial identity. Canadian Journal of Education, 30(4), 1068-1092.
- Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (2015). Truth and reconciliation commission of Canada: Calls to action. Winnipeg: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Retrieved from http://trc.ca/assets/pdf/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf
- United Nations General Assembly. (2019). Adequate housing as a component of the right to an adequate standard of living, and the right to non-discrimination in this context (A/74/183). Retrieved from https://www.undocs.org/A/74/183
- wa Thiong’o, N. (1986). Decolonizing the mind: The politics of language in African literature. James Currey.
- Wagamese, R. (2016). Embers: One Ojibway’s meditations. Douglas & McIntyre.
- Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation – An argument. The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257-37.