(IND4) Decolonizing Pedagogies: Enacting Beloved Community, Collective Care and Resistance

We invite Folx across disciplines, geographies, communities and decolonizing journeys, from Turtle Island to Palestine, whether you’re ready and haven’t yet started or you have been enacting decolonization for years, to join us for 90 minutes of dreaming, collective care, and co-liberation. This workshop will open with a smudge and will take place in a Sharing Circle format. We will begin by sharing our stories of decolonizing pedagogies at King’s University College through the Decolonization Advisory Circle, in the classroom, and with/in The CARE Collective (Insta: @c.a.r.e.collective). The Decolonization Advisory Circle is a group of faculty, staff and students currently working on an interdisciplinary decolonizing and indigenizing pedagogy pilot at King’s. The CARE Collective is a student-led mutual aid initiative that is part of the curriculum in courses taught by Jess Notwell and Lesley Bikos that addresses (settler) colonialism, systemic racism and interlocking oppressions through Healing Circles, Teachings shared by Elders Mary Lou and Dan Smoke, community kitchens, pot lucks, and community/direct action. Participants will then be invited to share the wisdom and truth of your own decolonizing journeys, including experiences, co-creation, challenges, lessons learned, and freedom dreams (Kelley, 2002). If you haven’t started yet but are inspired to begin decolonizing your pedagogy, we invite you to share your hopes, questions, and decolonial visions. As we co-create beloved community in the Circle, we will discuss ways to walk with one another after the workshop and throughout the year to support and sustain our individual and collective work toward decolonizing pedagogies through enacting beloved community, collective care and resistance. Tags: Indigenous Studies

Organizers: Jess Notwell, KIng's University College at Western University, Lesley Bikos, King's University College at Western University, Kate Hickey, Red Deer Polytechnic, Deborah Canales, King's University College at Western University

Presentations

Claire Polster, University of Regina

The Potential and Pitfalls of Ongoing Attempts to Indigenize Canada's Universities

Just when it seemed that there was little hope of reclaiming the public serving nature of our nations corporatized universities, the Truth and Reconciliation Commision of Canada released its Calls to Action and sparked a major shift within Canadian higher education. Today, ideas and initiatives to Indigenize or decolonize our universities abound, and they are being supported and institutionalized through significant investments of human and financial resources. This paper explores how the Indigenization/decolonization project could revitalize the public serving nature and contributions of our universities, while also acknowledging ways in which this projects transformative potential may be diminished if not extinguished by the corporate nature of our higher education institutions. Avoiding both naive optimism and debilitating pessimism, the paper also proposes steps that Indigenous and non-Indigenous members of the university community and the broader community could take to help amplify the progressive potential and outcomes of the Indigenization/decolonization project in the interest of all those who work and learn in our universities as well as the various publics that these institutions are meant to serve.

Karine Coen-Sanchez, University of Ottawa

Not all Educators are Teachers

There is a need to decolonize the post-secondary curriculum and promote space for diversity, equity, and inclusion for racialized students pursuing higher education in Canada. Inclusivity will ensure the academic success and retention of racialized students. The current academic structure needs a place-based education that provides a safe space for racialized students to succeed with the absence of daily harms and barriers and help restore cultural knowledge for all students to triumph academically. Learning and education are not just about the formal curriculum that you see on the syllabus. They are also about the informal curriculum - things not expressed in the syllabus -but which are part of the learning experience. There is an entire social curriculum that happens outside and beyond the classroom. In this article, I present preliminary research on racialized students in four Ontario post-secondary institutions to examine the role of systemic racism and how power centers are linked to maintaining the status quo to the disadvantage of racialized students. The data was collected through five focus groups composed of racialized students across Ontario post-secondary institutions. Canadian University systems for racist incidents (i.e., reporting mechanism) and racial attitudes within and outside of the classroom were investigated. The findings suggest that racism and existing values are ingrained in the colonial structures of Canadian educational systems. Subsequently, a series of recommendations outline avenues to address systematic racism in higher learning.

Zeina Jhaish, McGill University

The Role of Political Education on Palestinian Youth Activism in Montreal, Quebec

 The continuous displacement and refugee crisis of Palestinians worldwide is leading to a collective loss of Palestinian cultural and historical knowledge. More specifically, Palestinian displacement has also led to a loss of political knowledge among Palestinian youth worldwide. As more Palestinian youth move further away from Palestine, they become integrated into other societies where they may not be offered opportunities to be educated about their homeland. Though, with the age of accessible and decolonizing education, researchers (Masalha, 2012) observe transnational interest in accessing knowledge about the Palestinian political issue. Despite the displacement of Palestinian youth existing in Canada, Palestinian youth activism in Canada has been on the rise through multiple student and grassroots organizations (Davies et al., 2022) that are a part of the Palestinian social movement. This presentation’s main focus is highlighting how political education as an informal method of education engages and motivates young Palestinians in Montreal to achieve political action. The research also contextualizes the motives behind youth political activism for Palestine. Subsequently, the presentation defines political education, highlights the demographic of youth in the study, showcases the history of Palestinian youth activism in Montreal, and exemplifies current activism and political education initiatives in Montreal. The theoretical framework of the research stems from Paulo Freire’s (1970) premise that education is needed for those in political struggle to achieve their goals. Political education exists in various informal forms such as workshops, social events, and informal schools. Assman and Czaplicka’s (1995) characteristics of cultural memory drive the research’s goal of explaining the activists’ narratives. Social Movement Theory (Kornhauser, 1959) relates to the project in understanding how social movements require educating activists about Palestine and why. The research ultimately hypothesizes and will argue that political education has a positively changing effect on Palestinian youth activism in Montreal, Canada. This hypothesis will further be concluded after answering three inquiry-based questions: Research Question 1: What resources do Palestinian youth seek out to support their activist goals? Research Question 2: What forms of activism do these resources support? Research Question 3: How do popular education resources support identity and community building among Palestinian youth? The methodology of narrative inquiry will detail the experiences of the activists. The research will offer a holistic account of the activists’ experiences. The participants are Palestinian activists in Montreal who will be recruited through call-outs to Palestinian activist groups. The narrative inquiry methodology will be achieved by an interview process. Answers will be addressed by collecting semi-structured interviews from participants about their experiences with Palestinian activism. Answers from participants will be synthesized into a conclusion through thematic analysis. The final stage will be conducted by holding a focus group where the role of political education in the collective work of the activists is studied. The main drive for the research is to amplify Palestinian voices in support of their plight to return to a decolonized Palestine.The outcome of the research is to practically contribute to the Palestinian cause by including information for Palestinian youth activists about how popular education can be further integrated into their activism. Consequently, presenting the research at this conference is relevant to the conference goals on imagining sustainable and shared features. Palestinian youth are at the forefront of the Palestinian struggle (Davies et al., 2022) and studying how that impacts the current social issues in Palestine will engage conference attendees as scholars and citizens. Palestinian youth are also resisting the negative implications and consequences of their displacement by engaging in informal and political education to challenge hate narratives about Palestine and Palestinian activism. As scholars, studying how these youth activists challenge hate can impact academic theorization of current social issues like Palestine.

Carla Dew, London Ontario Activism

The Colonizer Who Lurks Within: The Most Effective Ways to Shift One's Consciousness and Decolonize the Minds of Settlers

Shifting the colonial mentality or consciousness of settlers requires that the hegemonic narratives of our society be disrupted. The social scientific literature says that education, relationship, and experience are the most effective ways to shift consciousness and to decolonize the minds of settlers. Consciousness refers to the understanding that a person interprets the world through lenses constructed by the society in which they live (Trent university, 2014). Indigenous peoples, anti-colonial theorists, anti-oppression educators, Marxists, and cultural critics have thoroughly examined ‘colonial mentality’– a saturation of consciousness by hegemonic narratives of the settler or colonial state. In order for the consciousness of contemporary Canadians to change to a new story, where Canadians recognize and acknowledge themselves as perpetrators of cultural genocide, occupiers of indigenous homelands, and sustainers of settler colonial practices in the present, their hegemonic narrative of what Canada’s past history and present reality are must be dismantled (Davis et al., 2017, p.399). Paulette Regan (2010), refers to this dismantling process of exposing and unearthing the deep colonial mentality as ‘unsettling the settler within’ (p.17). ‘unsettling the settler within’ or decolonizing the minds of settlers is not a quick or easy task. Anti-colonialists and anti-racists have been talking to Canadians for hundreds of years with no results. For instance, look at how numerous Canadians have known the truth about residential schools for a long time and did not care. Currently, if you tried to talk to the vast majority of Canadians about colonialism, they would simply shut down the conversation, refuse to listen, and become defensive. I seek to dream and work toward co-liberation with community organizers and academics enacting decolonization to explore the question: how do settlers (those who are positioned as hegemonic subjects within the state) come to perceive and come to grips with the foundation-rocking realities of their existence, leading them towards the decolonization of their mind and actions? My experience with London Ontario activism, @london.ontario.activism [1], and in active solidarity relationships with indigenous and Palestinian community, has taught me the importance of relationships that consist of active listening, exposure and time, and common ground, highlighting relationships between adversaries and relationships between indigenous-non-indigenous peoples. From this experience, i want to share questions, challenges, decolonial visions, and lessons learned through coalitions and alliances, dialogue, and shared ceremony with indigenous peoples that have opened up spaces in which settlers can witness a different way to be, drawing clear connection between the impediment of ‘settler certainty,’ decolonization, and land relations. I am keen to connect beyond the workshop and throughout the year to enact beloved community, community care, and resistance.