Reconceptualizing Education Through Co-Curricular Making: Honoring Indigenous Connections to Land, Culture, and the Relational Self

• In Event: Supporting Indigenous Education and Centering Anticolonial Frameworks Across Teacher Education

Abstract

Canadian educators are charged with the weighty curricular responsibility of decolonizing pedagogies. The costs elucidate that education is failing Indigenous students and communities. As a team of Indigenous and non-indigenous teacher educators, our call to action seeks respectful and productive pathways for educators to pedagogically respond. In partnership with First Nations community partners, a university team co-designs curricular experiences with k-12 educators that are oriented towards fostering principles and practices that reconceptualize education in ways that honour Indigenous histories. Pedagogies responsive to the relational connections to land, culture, and understandings of self in the world are foregrounded. Negotiating such curricular terrain orients education away from competition and control and towards individual/collective growth and well-being, with the aim of dismantling injustices.

Authors

• William A. Cohen, University of British Columbia - Okanagan

• Margaret A. Macintyre Latta, University of British Columbia - Okanagan

• Karen Ragoonaden, University of British Columbia

• Sabre Lynn Cherkowski, University of British Columbia

• Jan Hare, University of British Columbia

• Terry Lee Beaudry, Central Okanagan Public Schools