Unsettling "Difficult": Nuances in Unpacking the Teaching of Indigenous Content in Primary and Secondary Classrooms

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 1
  In Roundtable Session: Indigenous Content and Students: Undoing Settler Ideology

Abstract

This paper engages with data from two practitioner inquiry studies to take up the tensions, challenges and nuances in how Indigenous content is unpacked in classrooms. We use the lens of 'difficult knowledge' to look at how students perceive and interpret Indigenous content as 'difficult,' if they do at all. Our data shows how two classrooms can act as “sites of contestation, of possibility” against construing Indigenous content as impossible, or as difficult knowledge. We strive here to explore epistemological complexities in K-12 public education settings. The significance of this paper hinges on the the roles and responsibilities of educators to make what is impossible, possible; to find ways to teach ‘difficult knowledge’ in public classrooms.

Authors

• Velta Douglas, University of Toronto

• Fiona Purton, OISE/University of Toronto

• Daniela Bascuñán, Toronto District School Board