Literature Review

Confronting Colonial Structures

Decolonizing, liberatory education means deconstructing colonial structures and systems in teaching. My project embraces the dual oppression of land and Indigenous peoples as being at the core of Canadian Identity. This dark history of oppression and patterns has been an ongoing failure of the Canadian education system and the reason it has been impossible to teach about Indigenous peoples truthfully, and about settler-colonial/Indigenous histories. Whitewashed versions of history further oppress Indigenous people as a whole and on an individual level as Indigenous learners. Classrooms are shaped by settlers' vision of a successful learning environment, which dictates whether a child's education will mimic a factory output based on a transaction and memorization without any emotion or responsibility or if the space can be expansive -- filled with reciprocity and care. The current school system is designed in a way that is similar to the residential school system, where "classroom and curriculum, the intolerances, presumption, and pride that lay at the heart of Victoria democracy, that passed itself as caring social policy" (Milloy 1999,  p. xviii). As described in Alexa Scully's dissertation, Whiteness and Land in Indigenous Education in Canadian Teacher Education, the idea of "common knowledge" creates a universalized model of education that only includes linear Western knowledge without acknowledging other ways of knowing (2018, p.40). Scully turns to critical pedagogy expert Joe Kincheloe, who says: 

“One of the central dimensions of Western colonial domination has involved its production of ‘universally valid knowledge’ that worked to invalidate the ways of knowing that had been developed by all peoples around the world. In the name of modernization, salvation, civilization, development, and democracy, colonial powers have made and continue to make the argument that they know better than colonized peoples themselves what serves their best interests—and they have the knowledge to prove it” (2018 p.40).

To combat this paradigm, “Indigenous education in Canadian teacher education” should serve “Indigenous futurities in Canada through [what Paulo Freire calls] conscientization … and shifting Canadian common knowledge and accountability as these relate to Indigenous Lands, communities, and histories in Canada” (Scully 2018, p.4).

There are methods to change knowledge standardization and institutionalized oppression within schools by utilizing place-based education models. Place-based education is linked to critical pedagogy, a liberatory educational praxis committed to empowering all students, and connecting students to one another and the world (Freire 1970). Place-based education recognizes that there is an asymmetry in the ways in which history is taught to sustain power and domination. As Scully reminds us, “Under the guise of neutral and political views of education, practices of meritocracy… schools, thus function as terrain of on-going cultural struggle of what is accepted as legitimate knowledge” (p.84). Just as place-based learning empowers students to become active in knowledge creation and the pursuit of liberation, it also fosters their active participation in society. In A Critical Pedagogy of Place, author David Gruenewald says that “places are profoundly pedagogical…The kind of teaching and shaping that places accomplish…depends on what kinds of attention we give to them and how we respond to them” (Gruenewald 2003, p.621).