Ex(er)cising Student Voice in Pedagogy for Decolonizing: Exploring Complexities Through Duoethnography

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Notes

As this article draws on global Indigenous perspectives and is intended for an international audience, we utilize the term Indigenous throughout. Within Canada, the Indigenous peoples are often referred to as Aboriginal and include First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples.

Drawing on our summary of the goals of the Association of Canadian Deans of Education Accord on Indigenous Education (ACDE, 2010), we utilize the term Indigenous education throughout to refer to (1) attending to Indigenous–non-Indigenous relations; (2) promoting Indigenous knowledges in educational settings; (3) advancing Indigenous leadership; and (4) nurturing and mobilizing Indigenous research and methodologies.

Pedagogical encounter refers to the temporal activity leading up to, marked by, and following the pedagogy for decolonizing facilitated by Brooke.

We view the graduate students who participated in this pedagogical encounter as colleagues, but refer to them as students in this particular context for simplicity.

We draw on Derrida's (1976) notion of the subject as an effect of subjectivity where transcendence of language is an impossibility. The subject we explore is never stable and is involved in the ongoing, active process of taking up certain subject positions in the form of local reactions and responses to specific, and changing, colonial relations of power in which they are embedded (Britzman 2003; Foucault 1980; Jackson and Mazzei 2012).

We utilize the term Indigenous knowledges to refer to Indigenous cultural knowledge, traditions, and values that collectively “can be seen to constitute a particular world view, a form of consciousness, or a reality set” (Kirkness and Barnhardt 1991, 4–5). Holistic and dynamic, Indigenous knowledge “is not a uniform concept across Indigenous peoples” (Battiste and Henderson 2000 35); knowledges are situated within a cultural context/environment and generally acquired experientially and through demonstration (i.e., Indigenous pedagogies) (Archibald 2008; Kawagley and Barnhardt 1998).

Several prevailing pedagogical approaches to engaging Indigenous education in higher education exist and often overlap such as multicultural pedagogies; learning from Indigenous knowledges, knowledge holders, and pedagogies; antiracist/anticolonial pedagogies; and place-based pedagogies.

At the time of planning for the facilitation, no student in the class had identified as an Indigenous person.

For coursework that week, three journal articles were assigned by the professor. They explored: the status of whiteness in education (Leonardo 2009), the roles of Indigenous knowledges in education (Haig-Brown 2008), and Canadian intercultural relations (Schick and St. Denis 2005). Brooke interpreted the topics presented in this set of readings to be commensurate with, and an opportunity to engage, pedagogy for decolonizing.

In an attempt to focus on oral instead of text-based engagement with topics, Brooke made arrangements with the course instructor to wave the weekly requirement for students to post on the course blog and instead prepare comments for the sharing circle.

We use the singular form of the noun voice intentionally as pedagogies for decolonizing, as well as other critical approaches often respond to notions of oppression that necessitate group/political solidarity articulated through a common voice toward a shared goal(s).

Pedagogies for decolonizing have been positioned as emancipatory when utilized with Indigenous and/or non-Indigenous students as they aim to challenge the ontological and epistemological constraints imposed through Eurocentrism and additional colonial strategies (e.g., Dion 2007; Iseke-Barnes 2008; Strong-Wilson 2007).

In referring to examining and negotiating constructions of subjects, voice, power, and privilege through duoethnography, we feel it is important to clarify our shared views of colonial relations in our social context. Within colonial relationships characterized by domination, we view discursive and nondiscursive intersections of racial, gendered, economic, and state power as organized into particular systems and social relations that secure colonization of traditional Indigenous territories, obstruct the capacity of sovereign nations to govern, and enact epistemic violence through the exclusion and delegitimation of Indigenous knowledges (Coulthard 2010; Jiwani 2011; Hubbard and Razack 2011, 321).

Because duoethnography “is not a fixed blueprint but always emergent and uncertain” (Norris, Sawyer, and Lund 2012, 25), we veer from duoethnography as defined by Norris, Sawyer, and Lund (2012) in two significant ways. First, although duoethnography typically avoids beginning “with a survey of existing literature” (Norris, Sawyer, and Lund 2012, 34), we initiated this dialogic methodology with a theoretical framework in place. This decision reflects the pivotal role that the bodies of literature that focus on Indigenous education and critique and call for voice played in aiding the authors in considering pedagogy for decolonizing. Second, instead of focussing on a broad topic in general, as others have (e.g., gender, sexual orientation, and activism, Lund and Evans 2006; creative writing, Norris and Greenlaw 2012; learned concepts of beauty, Shelton and McDermott 2012), our exploration of pedagogies for decolonizing centers a specific time-limited shared experience from which we hope to make meaning.

Permission has been granted by students to include excerpts from the course blog in this article.

I argue elsewhere (McGregor 2012) that this is owing to the substantially smaller and more transient non-Indigenous population, the shorter history of colonization, the climate, the linguistic and cultural vitality of Inuit society, and completed land claims.

Upon reflection I notice this metaphor resonates with poststructural notions of the unstable subject and shifting relations of power and resistance that are continually reconstructed, reconfigured, reconstituted: “all categories are unstable, all experiences are constructed, all reality is imagined, all identities are produced, and all knowledge provokes uncertainties, misrecognitions, ignorances, and silences” (Britzman 1993, 22). At the time I had no such intention for that sense of the message or metaphor.

In my experience, this is becoming standard practice in university courses not specifically focused on Indigenous content. I do not mean to suggest that these topics were taken up in a tokenistic manner, rather that most students likely had very little previous experience with Indigenous knowledges and pedagogies. The professor's decision to pair weekly readings that explored the status of whiteness and the role of Indigenous knowledges in education, as well as Canadian intercultural relations, suggests the professor viewed an analysis of whiteness as a necessary component of engaging in anti-racist and anti-colonial critiques (Simpson and Yun 2011).

I do not consider whiteness static or uniform. Material and discursive dimensions of whiteness are historically constructed and internally differentiated (Frankenberg 1993, 1997, 2001). Through internal differentiation, whiteness emerges as a multiplicity of identities that inhabit local custom and national sentiments and, moreover, are spatially and temporally dependent, gendered, class specific, and politically manipulated (Twine and Gallagher 2008).

Permission has been granted by the student to include elements of his story as well as excerpts from the course blog.

Cruikshank (1998) warns, for example, that the postmodern troubling of narrative runs the risk of disregarding Indigenous claims that are based necessarily on authoritative oral tradition. She points out that the possibilities inherent in theoretical work require the interruption of scholarly norms, and associated vulnerability (Cruikshank 1998, 165).