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Read ONE of the following articles and reflect on how you can/do integrate Indigenous Knowledges into the Classroom?

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Learning recognizes the role of Indigenous knowledge

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Learning recognizes the role of Indigenous knowledge

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I’m fortunate that in the last three years my English department, in concert with our teacher-librarian, has worked really hard to integrate an Indigenous text at nearly every grade and level at our school. These texts include the popular Indian Horse (ENG2DI), Three Day Road (ENG4UI), and Seven Fallen Feathers (ENG3UI). However, I do think we as a department need to do more to understand how to teach these texts as Indigenous texts. As Jo Chrona suggests, we cannot teach Indigenous texts with the notion that the “story” has the same features and tropes as a Euro-centric narrative. Chrona reminds us that “the word ‘story’ in First Peoples’ contexts has different meanings...that [these narratives] are used to teach skills, transmit cultural values and mores...and explain [the] the natural world”. So in that respect, me and my colleagues have a lot of learning to do in order to reframe the way we teach an Indigenous narrative.

One of the ways we can do this is to invite Indigenous authors and leaders into our classrooms to provide that context of the narratives we read. This can pose a few potential challenges. One, is that it’s not always easy for a teacher to step aside and allow another voice to facilitate discussion, especially on a core text. I don’t envision this being an issue in my department, though. The other challenge is simply finding the right individual to come in and speak to your class. Unless you’re able to bring in a Tanya Talaga or Joseph Boyden into your classroom, you’ll need to ensure the individual you do bring in can speak to both the text and the “the richness of Indigenous histories prior to, and post, European contact with First Peoples in this land”.

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Look through the document below and answer reflect on how you engage in decolonization in the classroom.

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It’s interesting that this resource reminds us, quite explicitly, that education should not occur in a vacuum, and that “contextualizing knowledge, deepening understanding, encouraging community involvement, and reconnecting students” aren’t just aspects of decolonizing the curriculum, but aspects of great teaching in general.

I find that when teaching an unfamiliar text (i.e., one not previously analysed by a SparkNotes or Shmoop--a “classic”), I am very gung ho about building up the context around the novel, ensuring my students have the knowledge they need to understand more than just the plot. In collaboration with my colleagues, we’ve created some great content to support learning for both Indian Horse and Three Day Road, and currently are creating content for Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice. In short, with respect to the aforementioned texts, it’s less about decolonizing them and more about uplifting and highlighting the Indigenous voices and ideas. Not choosing to read a classic then in many ways is an act of decolonization.

And yet, I still struggle to decolonize the last of the classic texts we still teach such as To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men. Luckily, these texts are on their way out. When I think about why I still teach these texts through a colonizer’s lens, I think it’s in part because of the demographics of my high school and classroom. I teach at a predominantly White middle class school, so perhaps by default I cater to their perspectives and do not challenge them enough to ask questions of decolonization like “Who is in control of
knowledge? What is their role? How did they gain this role? What maintains their power?” I also think I teach these texts the same way I was taught them; the themes and overall messages they convey, albeit decidedly colonialist ones, still resonate in my head.

I’d be interested to know how you all approach these classic texts. Are they still an important part of your English curriculum at your school? Have you moved away from these texts and towards ones that BIPOC voices?

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Decolonization in an Educational Context

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Decolonization in an Educational Context

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Here, we are collecting resources to share with other teachers to broaden our own knowledge of First Nation, Métis and Inuit culture, language, arts, history and perspectives to learn ourselves, and have that library to share with others. In this post, please add the name of:
1. An informative book/resource that has helped you as an educator understand FNMI needs
2. A novel
3. A Short Story
4. A Play

Do not feel you need to contribute to all four. The idea is to get teachers to see what knowledge they already have, to share, and to gain ideas with what they can use in their own classrooms. I will then take the information and build our library in the main presentation.

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Looking at ONE of the two documents (attached below), answer the following questions:
1. How much do you feel you/your school do this now in the class/school?
2. How can you as an individual and your school as a whole ensure that you are meeting the Calls to Action?

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Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action

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Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action

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The TRC website has been archived using the Wayback Machine software. You can view the archived version by clicking here. The Wayback Machine is an archive system for websites. The archived TRC website will work like a normal website, however, it is not being maintained with current information.

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Ontario College of Teachers Ethical Standards for the Teaching Profession

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Ontario College of Teachers Ethical Standards for the Teaching Profession

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How Am I Learning to Include Indigenous Knowledge in the Classroom

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How Am I Learning to Include Indigenous Knowledge in the Classroom

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As summertime began to wane a few weeks back, I began my usual reflections about prepping for my university teaching responsibilities. Getting back into the classroom with my graduate students always carries a sense of excitement. Teaching is a deeply personal act for most of us. We bring who we are and what we care about, encountering students who have weighty hopes and dreams. It's an awesome responsibility.

But this year is different from others. There is a new duty felt by teachers at all levels of our education system to make good on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) calls to action, creating both a critically important opportunity and an unease about our preparedness.

Nation-wide, there are increasing efforts on the part of many universities, colleges and schools to " Indigenize" our curriculum and to " decolonize" how we teach.

Thankfully, many educators now understand our collective Canadian future depends on how effectively we reconcile ourselves to a past marred by the devastating reality of residential schools. A past that still imposes deep unfairness for Indigenous peoples today.

For my part, I have needed to find a way to make the process of understanding these past truths a personal journey.

Learning from Indigenous writers

As summer was beginning, I found myself in several bookshops featuring large displays of Indigenous authors. I wondered why I'd never, in all my life, seen such a display before. Naturally, the TRC had called attention to the issues regarding Indigenous peoples. Were these displays part of an ephemeral fad or the efforts of committed booksellers?

Rather than view this cynically, the hopeful me considered that everything has to start somewhere. So, here we are, at long last, shining a light upon Indigenous authors who have been carving out their writing lives for many years and have more than earned their time in the sun.

I knew little about this literature, although I did collaborate with Tompson Highway and Patricia Cano on an edited collection about theatre and education long ago. I also introduced some of Tompson's brilliant plays, like the Rez Sisters, to Grade 11 students in the girls' school where I taught in the early part of my career. And I have enjoyed the work of other Indigenous theatre-makers like Monique Mojica and Drew Hayden Taylor.

Still, I was taken aback that I hadn't, in all my years of formal schooling, encountered Indigenous fiction writers from this vast array now on display. It is a valuable exercise to face your own ignorance. I picked up several books to start my reading journey - a small but important step.

A few of the authors' names were known to me because they are political figures or activists or are, in some other way, in the public eye. Many were entirely unknown to me. I want to invite my settler students to follow up with just such an activity; it is a humbling recognition of the distance we have yet to travel, many of us. Rather than a depressing sign, though, I found hope in it.

I have learned so much from Wab Kinew's The Reason You Walk, about Anishinaabe life, about myself, about this land. Among others, I also read Joseph Boyden's now controversial work. Reading Boyden's fiction alongside that of commentators - who have weighed in on what is at stake, and for whom, on questions of identity, inheritance and appropriation - is also vitally important to this education work.

Art surely has a crucial role to play in working through these troubling questions.

What have we failed to know?

As another small step on my learning journey, I will assign some of this reading to the students in my advanced research methodology course.

You might ask what this has to do with research methodology? Well, everything really. If research is how we advance our understanding through the production of knowledge and build upon what it is we think we know, we would do well to ask some of the most fundamental questions to be asked by Canadians today: What do we know and how do we know it?

What have we failed to know and at what cost? Let's start here and see just how much more is possible to discover when we can look back, and look ahead, with integrity and generosity.

I start the reading in my research methodology course with Linda Tuhiwai Smith's 1999 text, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. She is a Maori scholar who, in this work, helps readers understand the devastating historical and on-going impact of the "Western cultural archive" on Indigenous people everywhere. And on the ways settlers have come to think about the very act of research and the ideas of imperialism we hold on to. She shows us how we see, literally, "through Imperial eyes."

What are our obligations as researchers?

I ask my students to take a few steps back from their imagined and often beloved research topics to consider how they have come to their interest in a particular area of research; what they have learned about it from scholarly communities and from the public record, alike. These students bring many different histories and different relationships to the canon of Western scientific knowledge. Together we begin a small exploration of how we have come to know what we believe we know, and to chart the pull to sameness of much of that knowledge.

We consider, simply, what it truly means to understand that perception is an act of interpretation. These are small explorations that often unearth discomforting truths about how we have been educated, what "expertise" we have doggedly held onto, and ultimately, the limits of our seeing and ways of knowing.

Adding Wab Kinew's memoir into our reading this year, I am inviting students to consider what they have learned about Indigenous history in Canada. And to ask what the implications might be of that learning - for their understanding of nationhood and their sense and dreams of themselves as researchers. We will talk about how memoir as a genre makes us bear witness in particular ways. We will speculate about what our obligations might be, as witnesses, when we take in another's story or carry out research.

(Library and Archives Canada), CC BY-SA

At one point in his book, Kinew says simply, "Colonization is not a good backdrop for family life." There is much for a group of emerging researchers to consider about not only colonialism, the historical abuse of survivors of residential schooling and the contemporary lives of their descendants, but also the on-going violence, misrepresentations, and eclipsing of Indigenous life, culture and care-taking of this land.

To what are we called, then, as education researchers?

A humble path to a better Canada

My first department meeting of the year was opened by a now-resident Elder in our community, Cat Criger, who helped us - settlers - better understand how to bring ourselves to the pedagogical and political act of land acknowledgment.

I was craving this lesson because of my growing discomfort with the now reflexive and largely symbolic land acknowledgements undertaken in many public institutions. As with many things in education, the risk of rote response looms large. But here, instead, we had the opportunity to bring ourselves, our different histories and identities, into the room and consider both the simplicity and the complexity of the acknowledgement we were undertaking.

And this is not a one-off event, thankfully. Faculty and students will have the opportunity to meet with Cat throughout the year for personal and pedagogical consultations. That is generous and valuable professional development; one sign, I hope, of taking our Indigenous education journeys seriously.

Those of us who teach have our own trek on this path to a different and better Canada. Guided by humility about what we don't know and listening carefully to those who do, will keep us on a good path.

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How I am learning to include Indigenous knowledge in the classroom

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As summertime began to wane a few weeks back, I began my usual reflections about prepping for my university teaching responsibilities. Getting back into the classroom with my graduate students always carries a sense of excitement. Teaching is a deeply personal act for most of us.