Education: Curriculum Resources

This book convincingly argues that effective culturally responsive pedagogies require teachers to firstly undertake a critical deconstruction of Self in relation to and with the Other; and secondly, to take into account how power affects the socio-political, cultural and historical contexts in which the education relation takes place. The contributing authors are from a range of diaspora, indigenous, and white mainstream communities, and are united in their desire to challenge the hegemony of Eurocentric education and to create new educational spaces that are more socially and environmentally just. In this venture, the ideal education process is seen to be inherently critical and intercultural, where mainstream and marginalized, colonized and colonizer, indigenous and settler communities work together to decolonize selves, teacher-student relationships, pedagogies, the curriculum and the education system itself. This book will be of great interest and relevance to policy-makers and researchers in the field of education; teacher educators; and pre- and in-service teachers.

Across Canada, teachers unfamiliar with Aboriginal approaches to learning are seeking ways to respectfully weave Aboriginal content into their lessons. This book introduces an indigenist approach to education. It recounts how pre-service teachers immersed in a crosscultural course in British Columbia began to practise Indigenous ways of knowing. Working alongside Indigenous wisdom keepers, they transformed earth fibres into a mural and, in the process, their own ideas about learning and teaching. By revealing how they worked to integrate Indigenous ways of knowing into their practice, this book opens a path for teachers to nurture indigenist crosscultural understanding in their classrooms.