Gender Unsettled During Storytime: Critical Literacy Practices to Disrupt Settler-Colonialism in Canadian Kindergarten Classrooms

• In Event: Confronting Settler-Colonialism in Early Childhood Education: Building Anticolonial Pedagogies for Social Change

Abstract

What does it mean for non-Indigenous early childhood educators to be mindful of “inquiry as invasion” (Tuck & Yang, 2014, p. 812) when sharing Indigenous picture books in kindergarten learning environments? As Pacini-Ketchabaw and Montpetit (2020) discuss, “Attending to the non-innocence of children’s picture books not only offers the possibility to unpack colonial messages but also allows us to interrogate how these books are presented to children” (p. 140). In response to Numbers 62 and 63 of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) Calls to Action (2015), and SOGI 123 curriculum in British Columbia and Alberta, this paper explores the potential for the sociocultural construction of gender and race to be questioned and ‘unsettled’ through Canadian kindergarten literacy practices.

Through the exploration of Indigenous authored and illustrated picture books such as 47,000 Beads (2017), When We Were Alone (2016), and Not My Girl (2014), this paper demonstrates the ways in which Eurocentric cultural expectations about ‘acceptable’ ways of being a child are often premised upon restrictive concepts of race and gender. By addressing and teaching about the legacies of the Indian Residential School (IRS) system in both Canada and the United States through picture book texts, ECE as a field can contribute to the urgent disruption of settler-colonialism’s harmful race- and gender-based ideologies.

This paper presentation advances Pacini-Ketchabaw and Montpetit’s (2020) assertion that sharing picture books by Indigenous authors, illustrators, and storytellers within early childhood education (ECE) spaces must, as a practice, necessarily refuse Western paradigmatic frameworks of inquiry in order to “acknowledge Indigenous onto-epistemologies as valid” (p. 148). As a cisgender, white, non-Indigenous scholar, I build on these authors’ suggestion that picture books be used pedagogically to make visible the value and legitimacy of Indigenous ways of being and knowing in ECE spaces (Pacini-Ketchabaw & Montpetit, 2020). I argue for the importance of sharing these texts during storytime with young children as pedagogical affirmation of the diversity of kindergarteners’ gender and cultural identities.

Theoretically, this paper grapples with Tuck & Yang’s (2014) framework for pedagogies of refusal in both qualitative educational research and practice: “Analytic practices of refusal involve an active resistance to trading in pain and humiliation, and supply a rationale for blocking the settler colonial gaze that wants those stories” (p. 812). Even as inclusive, ‘unsettling’ strategies for kindergarten storytime reading activities are outlined in this paper, taking into account the ongoing colonial context of Canadian public education, “critical consciousness” remains but an entrypoint (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 19) for confronting settler-colonialism in ECE. Thus, methodologically, this paper offers a critical literacy framework with focused attention towards Indigenous perspectives, thereby providing counterstories (Panel-Author, 2019) to the dominant narrative of settler-colonialism in ECE spaces.

Storytime through the “staple” of children’s literature (Pacini-Ketchabaw & Montpetit, 2020, p. 139) is therefore enriched by elevating Indigenous perspectives and storytelling, ensuring the momentum of anti-colonial efforts in ECE are applicable and relevant to the literacy skills and learning processes of all children.

Author

• Cayley Burton, The University of British Columbia