I am not a camper: confessions of an indigenous urban environmental educator

Abstract

In this article, I share with the reader my journey into environmental education, and how I came to understand that even an urbanite like me has something to offer. I look to the work of Indigenous scholars to frame the ways in which Indigenous pedagogies, combined with environmental, place-based, and land-based pedagogies, form a matrix of criticality that reveals layer upon layer of colonial stratigraphy and shines a light on the tensions between Western and Indigenous ontologies when it comes to how we think about and relate to the land. Building on insights from humour studies, I offer three teaching vignettes to ground my discussion and to illuminate the power of humour in pedagogical practice.

Keywords:

• Humour
• education
• land
• environment
• pedagogy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shannon Leddy

Shannon Leddy (Métis) is a Vancouver based educator and writer whose practice focuses on decolonizing education through infusing Indigenous content and pedagogies in teacher education. Currently, she serves as an Associate Professor of Teaching in Indigenous Education in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia, where she also teaches in the NITEP program. Leddy is the Co-chair of the Institute for Environmental Learning, a UNESCO Regional Centre of Excellence, through which her focus is to bring more Indigenous voices to the table so to expand current discourses of environmental and sustainability education to include Indigenous knowledge systems.