March 3, 2014
10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. | Simon K.Y. Lee Global Lounge & Resource Centre, 2205 Lower Mall
Lisa Taylor is a settler Canadian and Professor in the School of Education at Bishop’s University.
Curran Jacobs is a Mohawk educator and Bishop’s University student.
Our pedagogy aims to use Indigenous approaches to stories and storytelling as well as recursive reader response to provoke future teachers to practice critical self-examination and self-implication in the ongoing processes of settler colonialism, including the institution of schooling. The use of reader response and creative writing exercises specifically aims to engage students in learning to listen, that is, witnessing and commemorating the testimonies of First Nations, Inuit and Métis (FNIM) residential school survivors as part of a larger historic process of revising the terms of colonial imaginaries and nation‑to-nation relationships. Our pedagogy pays close attention to the fraught dynamics of settler students’ responses to the demands of “difficult stories”: we plan for productive engagement of student resistance and defences through nested spaces of reflection, imagination, memory and building future- and action-oriented relationships around the gift of testimony. Our aim is for non‑Indigenous students to approach reading and listening to survivor testimonies as a process of self‑decolonizing as differently positioned treaty people.
WERA Global Ethics International Research Network and The Centre for Culture, Identity & Education (CCIE). Co-sponsor: Department of Educational Studies (EDST).