Teaching Settler Colonialism: K-12 Anti-Colonial Curricula for Majority Settler Classrooms

• In Event: Whiteness, Colonialism and American Exceptionalism in History and Social Studies Curriculum

Abstract

Following in the long critical tradition to push social studies curricula away from White Settler Colonial norms, this paper asks what an anti-colonial curriculum that targets white settler students would like it. Specifically, this paper argues that K-12 social studies curricula deployed in classrooms with majority white settler students need to teach more about the process of colonization and move away from anthropological lessons about Indigenous and other exoticized communities. We are not suggesting that content about Indigenous communities around the world be left out. Rather, we propose that this content must be scaffolded by lessons that explicitly engage with the concurrent settler occupation of Indigenous lands, the historical relationships between settlers and Indigenous peoples, as well as the onto-epistemological core of settler colonial projects worldwide.

Authors

• Gardner Seawright, The Prairie School

• Anne Innis, University of Utah