Decolonizing pedagogies

The role of educators in colonialization and decolonialization

“Citing the core challenge of the TRC as the “broad lack of understanding of the unjust and violent circumstances from which modern Canada emerged” (Sinclair, 2015, para. 14), Justice Sinclair made it clear that education will be fundamental to reconciliation. Settler awareness of Canada’s oppressive and racist treatment against Indigenous peoples is an unlearning process of settler-decolonizing, enacted through  in-person experiences and interactions with Indigenous students in Indigenous community spaces.”

Lisa Korteweg and Tesa Fiddler, Lakehead University (Unlearning Colonial Identities while engaging in relationality: Settle Teachers’ education-as-reconciliation).

This section aims to explore challenges educators need to navigate, such as exposing the legacies of colonialism in education, cultural harms and systemic racism in curriculum, and personal privileges as educators.

Breaking down resistance

“To disrupt and expose (teachers’) ignorance as settler-colonial complacencies, rather than permit (teachers) to assume a professional teacher identity that cloaks ongoing colonialism”, Lisa Korteweg and Tesa Fiddler identify “sticky points of disruption (that) revealed how willing or resistant (teachers) were to opening themselves up to teaching-as-reconciliation through re-learning and contending with Canada’s real history of colonization against Indigenous Peoples, engaging with decolonizing their own teacher identities, or expanding their active, genuine engagement with Indigenous students and families.”

Some of these sticky points that Korteweg and Fiddler identified were:

• This Indigenous history is so bleak and terrible; how am I supposed to teach this? Sometimes educators “disengage or express resistance when they realized that these complex issues of decolonization and reconciliation along with the overwhelmingly tragic colonial history of Canada could not be easily distilled into “nice” fair lesson plans”. Educators also often express their preference for a curriculum where they “just celebrate everyone’s cultures as a multicultural history of Canada”, reverting back to a celebratory narrative of Canada as European immigrant history, erroneously lumping Indigenous peoples into a multicultural mosaic myth”. For Korteweg and Fiddler, “in this double move of erasure and displacement, the (teachers) would avoid a truthful telling of Canadian history as violent conflicts, government inflicted tragedies or cultural genocide against Indigenous peoples.” (Daschuk, 2010; Dion, 2009; Gaudry, 2016).
• How are we, as non-Indigenous teachers, supposed to teach their traditions and their culture? How do we avoid making a mistake or doing things improperly? What are their spiritual beliefs? What is their culture? Sometimes, educators expect that “Indigenous cultural teaching is a checklist of the top ten teaching strategies – do not make eye contact, bring a tobacco offering, use oral learning strategies, make activities all hands-on – assuming that there is one First Nation culture that applies to all communities (a pan-Indigenous and inappropriate approach).” For Korteweg and Fiddler, teachers often expect “a teachers’ guide as a formula or curriculum-as-thing to then apply in their own classroom teaching absent Indigenous relationships, connections to communities, or engagement of families.” (Madden, Higgins, & Korteweg, 2013).
• “I’m just as un-privileged as Indigenous peoples”: Grappling with White privilege and systemic racism. It is very important for teachers to identify “the systemic conditions of settler-colonialism and racism in/through curriculum and teaching along with other institutions such as child welfare, health, and justice”.

Key points for decolonizing pedagogies

Heather McGregor explains that “revising the content of education to better reflect Indigenous perspectives is often the focus of curricular reform. However, revising pedagogy used to produce and transmit Indigenous curriculum content can be equally important to effectively changing educational practice to make it more inclusive, holistic and reflective of Indigenous ways of teaching and learning.”

As educators explore how to decolonize their pedagogies, McGregor identifies some key points to guide this work:

• Acknowledgement of the history of wrongdoing and mistreatment towards Indigenous peoples by the government and other forces (i.e., capitalism).
• The importance of Indigenous Peoples’ involvement in educational decision-making regarding their own systems of education.
• Recognition and inclusion of Indigenous ways of teaching and learning.
• The importance of parents, Elders, and a commitment to community in building educational capacity.
• Respect for the environment, all its inhabitants, and more sustainable relationships therein.
• Recolonizing research and education from pre-school to post-secondary.
• Investment in preservation and vitality of Indigenous language and culture.