A Sojourn Through “Place-Identity” and Text: Young Students Mobilize Memory as a Multiple Voice to Learn About Indian Residential Schools

• In Event: Centering Student Identity in Our Practitioner Research: Crossing Borders, Systems, and Educational Life-Spans

Abstract

Objectives: This practitioner inquiry views the classroom as a place for students to imagine an ethical shared future with Indigenous peoples, while confronting history. In this study, I invite my students to mediate their lives and texts, while simultaneously accommodating a higher degree of connection and relationality to Indigenous peoples in the context of the Canadian settler-state.

Theoretical Framework: Our primary mode of enacting relationality between colonial actors relies on “re-storying”, an over-arching pedagogical mechanism that counteracts the common practice found in educational institutions: that non-Indigenous people need only be educated about Indigenous people, without any “reciprocal sharing by the former about their own history, cultural practices, world views and values”, thereby maintaining asymmetrical relationships and sustaining non-ethical interactions with Indigenous peoples (Regan, 2010: p. 34). Re-storying is in keeping with the perspective that people use literacies actively and purposefully, thereby allowing humans to partake in broader social goals. (Barton & Hamilton, 2000, p. 12) Additionally, Campano (2007) informs my use of story as a form of memory and counter-memory while highlighting the “epistemic significance” of student-generated knowledge. (p. 12)

Methods/ Data: This study showcases a collaborative and participatory student-generated analysis of writing produced by two of my grade three students in a publicly-funded school in Toronto. By interweaving the life texts of these children, classmates co-constructed eight themes, leading to a visual representation of thought. Their artistic theorization built on said themes, transforming students’ lives/ texts into a powerful source of knowledge for peers.

Findings & Significance: Using student writings rooted in their immediate worlds, recent histories were recalled, memories mobilized, and used as a starting point for venturing into notions of societal responsibility in this place. Hasebe-Ludt et al. (2009) illustrate the intersections of how “the self is “constituted through the specific geocultural places they originate from, and how these place-identities are themselves shaping the power structures of our world….” (Hasebe-Ludt et al., p. 67) It is in the process of writing and theorizing in and out of each other’s texts—while simultaneously deconstructing the Indian Residential School experience—that young children can develop a perspective that is informed by ethical relations.

Author

• Daniela Bascuñán, Toronto District School Board