Teaching Desires-Based Indigenous Histories in the College Classroom

• In Event: Centering Students' Racialized Experiences: Shifting Paradigms in History Education

Abstract

Through a case study of one college-level course on histories of education for Indigenous students, this chapter examines how a desires-based approach (Tuck, 2009) to teaching histories of education can allow students to see the very real devastation of colonial forms of schooling for all students, while also encouraging them to imagine alternative forms of education that work toward our collective life and well-being. This is particularly necessary in teaching histories of Indigenous peoples, where deficit-centered narratives too often render us as past figures destroyed by colonial invasion, erasing our long histories of resistance and strategy.

Shifting from deficit to desire in the classroom allows students to look for histories of resistance as well as abundance. To demonstrate the impact of a desires-based approach to teaching both education history and Indigenous history, this chapter identifies practices that center contemporary Indigenous voices and their own tellings of the past. It documents strategies for helping students “learn to look” for resistance in education histories, and it illustrates how a desires-based approach to history can help students hold space for the “both/and” of histories of structural violence and resistance through schooling.

Author

• Meredith L. McCoy, Carleton College
  Presenting Author