On Feb. 3, 2020, the Okanagan School of Education hosted a panel discussion on reconciling pedagogies.
Panel presenters are committed to supporting Canadian educators’ responses to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission calls to action (TRC, 2015), and especially to calls 62–65, which emphasize that Indigenous histories, perspectives, and approaches to learning must inform multi-disciplinary learning experiences. To respond adequately, educators and their students participate in co-curricular-making: that is, navigating curricula not as a predetermined guide to follow, but rather as meaning-making learning/unlearning paths that ask educators and their students to adapt, change, and build understandings. These understandings acknowledge that the particulars of place provide an essential context for decolonized and Indigenized co-curricular pathways.
Panel presenters shared what calls each of them to this work, revealing accounts of place and what reconciling pedagogies look and feel like in practice, alongside lessons learned, provoking further conversations.
About the Speakers
Dr. Bill Cohen (Okanagan College) | Dr. Cohen is from the Okanagan Nation with extensive kinship ties throughout BC and Washington. He specializes in the areas of Indigenous knowledge, research, education, and transforming pedagogy. For more than twenty-five years, he has engaged in community-driven, transforming projects, as parent, volunteer, advisor, facilitator, and director. He is an educator, artist, story-teller and author. The focus of Bill’s continuing research is to identify, understand and theorize the transforming potential of Indigenous and Okanagan knowledge and pedagogy through organic language and cultural knowledge revitalization.
Dr. Dwayne Donald (University of Alberta) | Dr. Donald is Papaschase Cree and Professor of Curriculum Studies and Indigenous Philosophies at the University of Alberta. He is Vice President (English) of the Canadian Society for the Study of Education. His research commitments are guided by Plains Cree and Blackfoot wisdom insights and the ways in which those can meaningfully influence understandings of teaching and learning today. Dr. Donald is particularly interested in representations of Canadian national narratives and citizenship that typically inform curriculum documents and perpetuate the general misrecognition and incomprehensibility of Indigenous experience and memory
Dr. Jan Hare (UBC) | Dr. Hare is a Professor and Associate Dean for Indigenous Education and Director, NITEP, UBC (Indigenous Teacher Education Program) and serves as a member of the UBC Okanagan School of Education Indigenous Education Council. As an Anishinaabe scholar and educator from the M’Chigeeng First Nation, her research is concerned with improving educational outcomes for Indigenous learners by centering Indigenous knowledge systems within educational reform from early childhood education to post-secondary.
Dr. Margaret Macintyre Latta (UBCO) | Macintyre Latta’s scholarship and teaching are at the intersections of the arts, curriculum, and teacher education. Macintyre Latta is Professor of Curriculum Studies and Director of the Okanagan School of Education in the Faculty of Education at UBC. Her published scholarship reflects a kinship with curricular Indigenization, and this body of work can be found in refereed national and international journals and in academic presses.
Dr. Nicholas Ng-A-Fook (University of Ottawa) | Dr. Ng-A-Fook is a Professor and Director of the Teacher Education Program at the U of Ottawa. He is the President of the Canadian Society for the Study of Education, the largest professional educational research association in Canada. In these administrative, educational, and research capacities, he is committed toward addressing the 94 Calls to Action put forth by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in partnership with the local Indigenous and school board communities. His research specializes in curriculum studies, and he draws on life writing research to develop culturally responsive and relational curriculum with Indigenous and first-generation immigrant communities.
Dr. Sandra Styres (OISE/University of Toronto) | Dr. Styres is a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Iethi’nihsténha Ohwentsia’kékha (Land), Resurgence, Reconciliation and the Politics of Education, and Assistant Professor with the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at OISE. Dr. Styres’ research interests include, but are not limited to, the politics of decolonizing reconciliation in education, the integration of Indigenous perspectives into teacher education programming, Indigenous philosophies and knowledges, culturally aligned methodologies and theoretical approaches to Indigenous research, ethics and protocols that guide the work in Indigenous and non-Indigenous research collaborations, and community engagement.