Decolonizing the Classroom Curriculum: Indigenous Knowledges, Colonizing Logics, and Ethical Spaces

Abstract

The current moment of education in Canada is increasingly asking educators to take up the mandate and responsibility to integrate Indigenous perspectives into curricula and teaching practice. Many teachers who do so come from a historical context of settler colonialism that has largely ignored or tried to use education to assimilate Indigenous peoples. This project asks how teachers are (or are not) integrating Indigenous perspectives into the classroom curriculum. It asks if and how Eurocentric and colonial perspectives are being disrupted or reproduced in classroom dialogue, and how learning spaces can be guided by an ethics of relationality and co- existence between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of knowing. Finally, it seeks promising pedagogical practices through which curriculum can be a bridge for building a new relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in what is now Canada. This project is a critical ethnography of five high school English classrooms in which teachers were attempting to integrate Indigenous perspectives into the curriculum. Over the course of a semester classroom observations, interviews, and focus groups gathered the stories, experiences and perceptions of five high school English teachers, their students, and several Indigenous educators and community members. The stories and experiences gathered describe a decolonizing praxis, which pedagogically situates Indigenous and non-Indigenous worldviews in parallel and in relation, each co-existing in its own right without one dominating the other. The teacher and students who took up this decolonizing praxis centered an Indigenous lens in their reading of texts, and saw questions of ethics, responsibility, and reciprocity as key to changing the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Despite this promising pedagogical approach, I identify knowledge of treaties and the significance of land to Indigenous peoples as a significant gap in knowledge for students (and some teachers), which allows many colonial misunderstandings to persist.