How Can We Teach When We Are Constantly Learning? De/Colonising Canadian Literature in Grade Seven English Language Arts

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I explore the transitional spaces of teaching and writing by restorying an anomalous event in my teaching of Canadian literature in a grade seven classroom and my efforts to decolonise that teaching. Thinking with Elizabeth Ellsworth’s concept of pedagogy as it relates to knowledge in the making and the learning self, I take seriously the manner in which this pedagogy challenges the cultural myth of teacher as expert identified by Deborah Britzman. In my story of de/colonising teaching, a transitional space opens up when I become aware of the ways in which I work against the goals of decolonising in my very efforts towards them, the risks I take, and the damage I can do as I implicate myself and my students in this process. As I teach and as I write, I build from the ruins of this difficult knowledge what it means to de/colonise as an educator.

KEYWORDS:

• Decolonising
• literacy
• teacher education
• pedagogy

Story, in the current idiom, is a portal through which a person enters the world and by which their experience of the world is interpreted and made personally meaningful.

(Connelly & Clandinin, c.f. in Clandinin and Rosiek 2007, 3)

As we acknowledge and are reflexive about the shifting boundaries of our subjectivities, we ‘will find that much else begins to shift as well’

(Pillow 2003, 191, citing St. Pierre)

Introduction: recognising hope

A friend asked me the other day where I find hope. After a long pause I answered, fumbling, with a description of a force inside me that, whenever things come crashing down, drives me to construct new meaning out of the pieces. While the process is interminable and always incomplete, it has never failed to give me enough hope to keep going. I’ve come to see this process as not about finding a teleological Meaning, but as an abundance, a creative effort, a constant work of evolutionary differentiation, a means of survival. Parker Palmer (2003) has been partly to thank for my understanding of hope, as shown from this quotation copied down from a podcast into my notebook last year:

And yet, as I worked my way through that darkness, I sometimes became aware that way back there in the woods, somewhere, was this sort of […] animal life – […] I don’t know, maybe of the life force generally – and that was somehow holding out the hope of life to me. And so I now see the soul as that wild creature way back there in the woods that knows how to survive in very hard places, knows how to survive in places where the intellect doesn’t, where the feelings don’t, and where the will cannot.

There is something more-than-human about this force that Parker is talking about, something that learns and adapts, that might allow humanity, or something meaningful, (not me) to survive past this Anthropocene era. I hope. As a teacher and researcher in the field of education, I’ve been experimenting with the axiom that everyone has this driving force in them to some extent, that everyone has a drive to learn.

So the part of me that feels and desires this version of hope lit up with recognition as I read about Elizabeth Ellswoths’s concepts of pedagogy in relation to knowledge in the making and the learning self, in her (2005) book Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy. Pedagogy, for Ellsworth, encompasses more than just the method by which curriculum is transferred through teaching: Ellsworth’s project is ‘to think pedagogy in ways that make pedagogy encompass curriculum’, thinking it rather as ‘a force out of which curriculum itself emerges’ (12). Curriculum, when we think of it as knowledge as thing, is only an aftereffect of the ‘first and most fundamental reality we have’ (Clandinin and Rosiek 2007, 8): ‘the thinking – feeling, the embodied sensation of making sense, the lived experience of our learning selves that make the thing we call knowledge’ (Ellsworth 2005, 1). This emphasis on experience causes Ellsworth to tentatively call this approach a ‘new pragmatism’ (17). Since this process never stops, Ellsworth asks that her readers consider instead a curriculum that is knowledge in the making. Thus considered, pedagogy becomes ‘the impetus behind the particular movements, sensations, and affects of bodies/mind/brains in the midst of learning’ (2). Or, put in terms closer to those of myself and Palmer, ‘the force of the experience of the learning self’ (12, emphasis added). And this pedagogy goes beyond the making of knowledge through experience. For Ellsworth, it is a continuous motion of the making of the self, which gets to ‘the root of what we call learning’ (1). The teacher’s pedagogical endeavour is made up of and takes place within an evermoving stream of knowledges and selves in the making.

If teachers take Ellsworth’s new definition of pedagogy seriously, it has deep implications for our work. It challenges Britzman’s cultural myth of teacher as expert, ‘that real teachers do not need to learn since they already have experience’ (2013, 103). To seek out instances of this pedagogy in action, I follow Ellsworth’s suggestion to look at ‘anomalous places of learning’, that is, ‘peculiar, irregular, abnormal, or difficult to classify pedagogical phenomena’ (5). In Places of Learning, Ellsworth looks at places of media and architectural pedagogy specifically, and also points to transitional spaces (after Winnicott) as places where the effects of the pedagogy of knowledge in the making can be found. Winnicott coined the term ‘transitional space’ in order to more fully explore ‘the paradoxes of selves in the making, of self-change, and of the self in creative dissolution and self-augmentation’ (29). Transitional space is where experiences of learning happen, a threshold between ‘a state of habitual (“natural” feeling) compliance with the outside world’ and ‘a state of creatively putting those expectations, traditions and structures to new uses’ (30). Ellsworth also describes such places of learning as pivot points, hinges, and ‘vehicles through which we come to know differently’ (37). These metaphors all suggest movement and the relation of one point to another. Specifically, they put the self in relation to the other, or our inner realities in relation to outer realites. These oppositional relations begin to break down and blur into each other in transitional spaces, within which what we know of ourselves is transformed by experiences of the outside world, and what we know of the outside world is transformed by our inner experiences.

I suggest that an ‘anomalous’ transitional space, a pivot point or hinge, might look like an educational event (Badiou, c.f. in den Heyer and Waks 2015), the loss of lovely knowledge (Pitt and Britzman 2003), Palmer’s darkness, or in my own words, when things come crashing down. What is a teacher to do when she, as a self in the making, is faced with the void, the difficult knowledge (Pitt and Britzman 2003) that everything she knows might be wrong? What does it look like to play in the rubble of her lovely knowledge?¹ How can she teach when she is constantly learning?

Restorying de/colonising

I have a story to tell you about an anomalous place of learning located within my own teaching experiences. As I tell it, I restory it. Connelly and Clandinin (1990) explain that ‘We restory earlier experiences as we reflect on later experiences so the stories and their meaning shift and change over time’ (9). When a person restories an experience, that person ‘returns to present and future considerations and asks what the meaning of the event is and how he or she might create a new story of self which changes the meaning of the event, its description, and its significance for the larger life story the person may be trying to live’ (11). This process often takes place while writing, and is often invisible, as the writing fixes the story in place and time. As much as possible, I try to uncover the tracks of restorying as I write here and now. In taking up writing as inquiry, writing becomes a transitional space of holding, with opportunities to follow paths of intuition or feeling, diverging from set teleological paths towards a predetermined conclusion. I trace patterns of ‘detours through memory, forgetting, desire, fear, pleasure, surprise, rewriting’, and thus writing holds ‘the potential for an unknowable and unforeseeable “more”’ (Ellsworth 2005, 55). Acknowledging restorying as a generative process illuminates the pedagogy of writing as knowledge in the making, and that as the writer, I am a self in the making.

This story takes place in a setting that requires, more than many settings, the deconstruction and reconstruction of knowledge, and therefore of self. As a white settler teacher attempting to do the work of decolonising my grade seven English language arts classroom in Alberta, Canada, my role has two parts: it requires the deconstruction of ever-present colonial structures and the reconstruction of Indigenous onto- and epistemologies (Battiste, c.f. in Higgins 2019). Within this setting, I have come to see (not without distress and discouragement) that my work would more appropriately be called de/colonising, in the sense that ‘decolonizing cannot be wholly framed in opposition to colonization, at least not within academic and other formal educational spaces given the complexity of their material-discursive structures, even if and when they pursue decolonizing goals’ (Higgins 2019, 224). As a teacher with limited (though emerging) understanding of historical and contemporary Indigenous ways of knowing and being, I am complicit, especially when I’m unaware of it and even when I’m trying to work against it, in the ‘violence of invasion’ that ‘is reasserted each day of occupation’ (Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández 2013, 73). Within this setting, the predicament of the teacher who is also a learning self becomes evident: how can I ethically teach decolonising when I am aware of the continuing colonisation in which I participate?

What makes this particular story I’m about to tell you an anomalous place of learning, a pivot point or hinge, is the transitional space that opened up when I became aware of the ways in which I was working against the goals of decolonising in my efforts towards them. In my efforts to be a ‘cultural hero’, my anxieties around being a ‘cultural dope’ (Britzman 2013, 106) were built upon a binary understanding that I could be only one or the other.² I couldn’t work towards decolonising if I were also an actively colonising presence. The pragmatic question, what is to be done? paralysed me. At the time, though, with things having crashed down around me, my identity as cultural hero destroyed, and the next day of teaching always looming on the horizon, all I could do was rebuild.

Gilbert’s work in queer theory can be useful here (with respect given to the specificity and importance of that field’s work on gender and sexuality) in terms of her call for hospitality to whoever and whatever comes: this hospitality ‘necessarily emerg[es] from the conflict between what we imagine and what we can do, and [insists] that our commitment to justice and human rights does not, and indeed cannot, lie flush with social practices’ (Gilbert 2006, 33). I imagined I could decolonise, when the work I did was more accurately called de/colonising. This story lives within the ambivalence and aporia between the ideal Law of hospitality as unconditional welcome and the laws of hospitality that structure our social relations (Derrida, c.f. in Gilbert 2006). We should set aims built upon our ideals for the future, but in doing so we must also learn to live in the present moment of conflict and discomfort when the difference between our aims and our actions becomes visible. In a transitional space, ‘we come to know the world by acting in it, making something of it, and doing the never-ending work and play of responding to what our actions make occur’ (Ellsworth 2005, 56). My pedagogical, ethical question became not what I should do in the future, ideally, but what I should do now, practically. With this in mind, I tell the story.

The story within the story

Having taught grade seven English language arts and social studies (in which students study Canadian history, according to the Alberta curriculum, where I teach) since my first year teaching is only ironic insofar as I grew up in the US and didn’t learn a lick of Canadian history until my first day on the job, when I asked my students what they thought the word ‘confederation’ meant. Except, I had taken a course in my education degree about Aboriginal education contexts and a Canadian literature course, both of which told some of the first versions of Canadian history I had heard, both positing, in my memory, that the relationship between Euro-settlers and Indigenous peoples of Canada was the most singular and significant aspect of that history. Having grown up in a community empathetic to issues of social justice, the painfulness of these histories impacted me as I took them in.³ In my second year, more aware of the curriculum of Canadian history my grade seven students would be experiencing that year in their social studies classes, I saw a significant opportunity to extend their understanding of Canadian history and current society through the use of literature in English language arts.

Since the vast majority of the texts they would be exposed to would be from a Eurocentric perspective, texts by Indigenous writers seemed like a good place to start. In particular, we read a short story, Borders (1993), by Thomas King, a Canadian-American author of Cree descent, and two novels by Margaret Pokiak-Fenton, an Inuvialuit woman who attended residential school in the 1940s, and her daughter-in-law, Christie Jordan-Fenton: Fatty Legs (2010) and A Stranger at Home (2011). But, since I had funding available for one more novel set, I wanted to find the ‘perfect’ book to end the year with.⁴ When I chose to teach the book The Mask that Sang by Susan Currie (2016), I had limited knowledge about the complexities of Indigenous protocol around certain knowledge and Indigenous onto-etymological authenticity in literature. I simply wanted to find an empowering, age-appropriate novel by a contemporary Indigenous author to share with my students. A review in Quill and Quire (n.d.) describes what the book does well:

The author draws on her own adoption and Cayuga ancestry to tell a story centring on contemporary urban aboriginal experiences, highlighting complex topics such as bullying, poverty, and racism. Her use of plain and engaging language while depicting the intricate intergenerational legacies left behind by colonialism and residential schools renders these topics accessible and relatable. […] The Mask That Sang forces readers to confront the ongoing impact of the mistreatment of Canada’s aboriginal peoples, yet at the same time it offers a hopeful and positive perspective, focused on healing and the importance of embracing one’s community and culture.

For a freezeframe moment, I found that perfect book in The Mask That Sang.

Thus, I was troubled to read a critical review of the novel (Reese 2016), just a few weeks before I was planning to teach it, on Debbie Reese’s website, American Indians in Children’s Literature: in short, she did not recommend the novel because Currie represents Haudenosaunee medicine masks in a manner that goes against Haudenosaunee policy and is inauthentic to Indigenous onto-etymology because of her use of magical realism. I trusted Reese’s authority, and her argument was strong. I had just learned about her project from Pokiak-Fenton and Jordan-Fenton at a professional development day where they had been guest speakers. Being confronted with this new-to-me knowledge, I felt humiliated by my ignorance (I was a cultural dope!) and considered pulling the book from my classroom curriculum. I outlined my frustrations in a personal email (16 May 2017) to a few colleagues. I include excerpts of this email as artefacts of a moment in time, a snapshot of the transitional space that took shape after my idea of the perfect book crumbled.

The way I saw it, I had several options. We could read the book because (quoting from my email) ‘this novel connects historical events with modern issues in a way that students can connect with’ and ‘students need to hear stories from Indigenous perspectives’. I had hopes that reading the novel could help ‘continue conversations about intergenerational trauma and the legacies of colonialism and residential schools, and make these topics accessible for students who are beginning to build their historical and critical thinking skills’. My hesitations, prompted by Reese’s review, included that the way ‘Currie writes about traditional Haudenosaunee false face masks as having paranormal or magical qualities is inappropriate, misinformation, and religious intolerance of Haudenosaunee practices’. I remember feeling very concerned when Reese explained Currie’s actions in terms of religious tolerance: ‘I definitely don’t want to teach that anyone’s spiritual beliefs are equivalent to believing in magic’. The most overwhelming piece of difficult knowledge for me was the idea that ‘this way of writing is Eurocentric – it sounds like it’s written by someone who isn’t Native’. I had never before encountered, or at least had not fully processed the idea that genres, or the novel as a text form itself, could be rooted in a Western epistemology. If some novels could be, according to Reese, more authentically Indigenous than others, and just how Native they were was a concern, how could I succeed in making ethical judgements about what and how to teach Indigenous texts, as a settler teacher growing increasingly aware as time went on that I knew nothing, in the grand scheme of things?

I posed the following solution as a ‘possible win-win’, though it still felt vulnerable. Even though reading problematic or controversial novels alongside primary historical/cultural and secondary critical texts is not revolutionary in a secondary English language arts classroom, it is less common in grade seven than in higher grades. And I was still jarred by my earlier focus to find that perfectly representative novel. I can feel my past self’s gears grinding as I tried to reverse direction from seeing The Mask That Sang as an ideal text to an idealised one. I wasn’t at the point yet of seeing that the problem wasn’t with the novel as disqualified to enter some new decolonised canon, but with the idea of a canon itself, which I came to see later. Below I include the full text of this section of the email. It reveals my personal questions about teaching the novel, in that moment:

• We could read the book as a class and read excerpts from Barrie’s article about it. We could discuss this as a current event and read stories from the news about other authors who problematically claim Indigenous heritage. We could research to find authentic descriptions of Haudenosaunee false face masks and notice the differences in their portrayal by different individuals.⁵

• One of the main goals of our social studies curriculum is to discuss individual and collective identity. Studying this collection of texts would open up opportunities for our class to discuss appropriation, authenticity, and cultural hybridity. We could discuss questions like:

  • In social studies we talk about historical perspectives, such as Anglophone, Francophone, and First Nations perspectives. Today, who can speak from these perspectives? Who can’t? Whose perspectives get heard the most? Whose don’t get heard at all? What makes a voice authentic?

  • Is this a bad book? Knowing what you now know about its misrepresentation, would you recommend it? Should the author be allowed to publish more books from an Indigenous perspective, or should her publisher stop buying her books if she writes about things she doesn’t understand? How could she write a book that’s more authentic to her personal identity? Is her authenticity as a writer important?

  • Many books include magical or paranormal elements – there are whole genres devoted to these books. When is fantasy okay, and when is it offensive? Is it okay to turn real religions or spiritual beliefs into fantasy?

I ended my email with a further nod to my uncertainties, and an attempt to pre-emptively decriminalise myself from any risky behaviour I was enacting:

Overall, since I haven’t taught this book before, I don’t know how the students will respond to it. I don’t know how conversations like this will go. I could easily be persuaded not to read this book with the class, if any of you are questioning the students’ ability to handle these complex issues. But… if we could have honest and open discussions as a class about the questions above, it could be a very powerful for these students.

As a new teacher, teaching something I hadn’t taught before was par for the course, so I find it interesting that I thought it justifiable or necessary to point this out. It points towards my semi-awareness of my own knowledge in the making in this instant, which stood out to me more starkly than on most teaching days. I was becoming aware of the damages I could do to the efforts of decolonising, even within my own attempts towards its aims. I was beginning to see that ‘For Indigenous people colonialism is not an historical period that is now over; it continues to define the relationship between our people and the European newcomers. In this respect, Indigenous peoples live with the practical, and philosophical, effects of colonialism in the present’ (Turner & Simpson, c.f. in Tuck 2011, 34, original emphasis). And while I cringe at any ways in which my self-reflection may imply self-aggrandisement, in my one classroom as one teacher, I wanted as much as possible to effect change in ways that promoted better possible futures through the thoughts and actions of myself and my students in this present.

As Brizman (2003) acknowledges, ‘Changing education, whether it is the transformation of people and changing their minds, or the introduction of new knowledge and perspectives to the curriculum, is more difficult than we imagined’ (6). One of the reasons it is so difficult is that ethical decisions come in pedagogical moments of relationality ‘with the outside worlds of things, other people, environments, and events’ within which we move, not only as agents but as selves in the making amidst a stream of worlds in the making, effected and effecting each other as we are swept up and swimming in the current (Ellsworth 2005, 30). While ‘the immediacy of classroom life threatens to unravel efforts to be thoughtful’ (Britzman 2003, 6), it is also only within this stream that creation and transformation is possible. The uncertainty I felt was uncomfortable, but it was also freeing. When things come crashing down, new opportunities for creation lie in the broken pieces around you. I was not only creating new lesson plans for how to teach The Mask That Sang, but I was recreating myself. Once recognised, this transitional space can be a location of joy and revival: ‘A flexible, responsive holding environment meets the self-in-transition with curiosity and playfulness, and the good-enough holding environment is open to itself being changed in turn – as the result of having been in relation with a learning in the making’ (Ellsworth 2005, 29–20). Through restorying this personal, anomalous place of learning, I am working to understand, in the future anterior sense, what it will have meant for me (den Heyer and Waks 2015) as I continue my (unending) truth-process towards understanding what it meant to de/colonise as an educator.

The vitality of teaching while learning

Encouraged by one of the colleagues I’d emailed, whose research focus is postcolonial literature, I ultimately decided to use the book The Mask That Sang (I have now taught it three times),⁶ because as Eve Tuck (2011) says ‘We get blisters from using inadequate tools, but blisters can be drained and the work can still be completed’ (35). In order to address the book’s issues, I chose to include the contents of Reese’s critique in the class discussion. We read the book together after I cautioned students with a hook, that I wasn’t sure we should be reading it, since it might be considered illegal. (Pause for students’ scandalised gasps.) While sensational, this interest-grabbing question came straight from my own concerns as I tried to make sense of the novel’s implications considering Haudenosaunee policy, and ethically speaking, this question still bothers me today. Students, while becoming immersed in the novel’s story, also read with an eye to this question, so that when, midway through the book, we paused to read the 1995 Haudensaunee policy on false face masks (Akwesasne Notes 1995), student exclamations of ‘Ohhh’ rang through the room. As we unpacked the ways Currie’s book went against the policy’s explicit rules, we also began to ask questions together, for which I did not have the answers. For example, how do Haudenosaunee policies get enforced? If the Haudenosaunee are a nation within the nation of Canada, what is the Canadian government’s responsibility to Haudenosaunee policy? Didn’t Currie know about the policy, and if she did, why didn’t she follow it? What does it mean for us, now that we have gone against Haudenosaunee policy by reading this book?⁷ Ellsworth states that ‘The time of transitional phenomena is the time of the question: What are we making of the past right here and right now … and what is that making of us?’ (67). By reading this book, we were implicated in a very current issue.

So I asked my students to consider, to what extent did the author of the novel go against a significant policy in her book, and what should we do now that we know this? Their responses to this question, in discussion and writing, revealed their abilities to hold conflicting ideas alongside one another, many of them reaching a conclusion that while they felt Currie was wrong to have written about false face masks as she did, and that we were wrong to have read the book, they were glad to have read it.⁸ They identified Currie herself as a cultural hero and a cultural dope (in their words, ‘smart and kind of stupid’) for writing about something she didn’t fully understand in a way that dishonoured important protective cultural protocols, and yet she also taught her readers valuable lessons about social justice, friendship, and understanding⁹ a culture other than their own. Students made it clear in their writing that they understand that cultures are different from each other, and that is a good thing.

So much more could be written about these students’ responses to the experience of reading the novel and its context. Here I’d like to focus on how I have perceived my choice to take up the novel with my class in the midst of my learning and uncertainty to have effected the vitality and generative nature of this pedagogy. By engaging in this question with my students, I positioned myself ‘radically in relation to [my]self, to others, and to the world’ (Ellsworth 2005, 2), so that through this relationality, new thinking and ways of being together could emerge that I could not have predicted before taking up the book and its context with them. When I chose to use my own uncertainty as a jumping off point for my teaching, I enabled ‘a pedagogy that invites the experience of the learning self as a newness in the making’ (36), so that, for my students and myself, we engaged in a ‘relationship to the outside, to others, to the world, to history, and to the already thought in a way that keeps the future of what we make of that relation and what we might think there open and undecided’ (54). We were implicated in our positions as agents of de/colonising, not just as a part of history, but in the present and possible futures.

Conclusion: pedagogy as hope

When I began to understand my role in decolonising as de/colonising, I began to be able to ‘imagine what it might mean to risk falling out of love with idealized aims, and after such loss, to find value in the imperfect process of trying to know as the creative ground of both learning and research’ (Farley 2015, 450). As I write and restory my experience, I continue following this truth-process begun in that transitional space of deciding how to teach The Mask That Sang. I’ll continue it further when I decide what to teach and how to teach it again in coming school years, addressing Ellsworth’s question, ‘What will we make of the continuous emergence of pedagogy?’ (2005, 175). Teaching loses its vitality when we turn to using scripts because we deny the self in the making that we are: ‘In the midst of pedagogy’s continuous emergence, it is the work and play of teachers to keep the flow of difference, movement, sensation – and their destinations – open and undetermined’ (175). Will I teach The Mask That Sang again? Will I teach it in the same way I have taught it in the past? When I say I hope not, I’m putting my faith in that force of pedagogy of the self in the making that drove me here in the first place, the one that ‘knows how to survive in places where the intellect doesn’t, where the feelings don’t, and where the will cannot’ (Palmer 2003, n.p.). Rather than asking how we can teach when we are constantly learning, it may be better to ask how we can teach otherwise. It’s the story of pedagogy of the self in the making that makes teaching liveable.

Acknowledgments

Teaching this novel was part of a national project on teaching postcolonial literature for social justice, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and led by Principal Investigator Ingrid Johnston. Many thanks for this support. Thank you, also, to Marc Higgins for his generous conversations and feedback regarding the writing of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Angela Hostetler

Angela Hostetler is a joint PhD student in the University of Melbourne Faculty of Education, Australia, and Centre for Sociological Research at KU Leuven, Belgium. She wrote this paper while completing a Master’s in Secondary Education at the University of Alberta, Canada.

Notes

1. Throughout this paper I use stories, conversations, footnotes and excerpts from personal records, such as journal entries and email transcripts, to try to illustrate what knowledge in the making, or the making of the self, looks like. Ideally, it depicts a rich image of self and story as layered through time and space. Realistically, it’s messy and disjointed, inevitably still incomplete and distorted: ‘Messy texts are many sited, intertextual, always open ended, and resistant to theoretical holism, but always committed to cultural criticism’ (Marcus c.f. in Pillow 2003, 187–188)

2. In following Priyadharshini’s (2012) advice to think alongside the archetype of trickster, I am now able to find the space in between these opposing roles:

Trickster is culture hero because it provides necessary tools for social and physical survival; it is selfish buffoon because it usually reveals those tools through its own comic folly, misadventures, anti-heroism, and hedonistic appetites. Yet those two roles may not be dialectical oppositions as they are sometimes presented. They may also be seen as dialogical relationships, speaking to each other, and grounded in the more primary function of crossing borders. (Salinas 2013, 145)

3. This slip-up in my story – that I hadn’t had ‘a lick of Canadian history’, at least not the official sort of the Grand Narrative variety, when in fact I’d had two quite in-depth courses on it – is trace of colonial logic still at work in me as I write.

4. Again here, I can see colonial logic working in me to find an ideal subject to represent the Indigenous Other in the curriculum. I can’t say I hadn’t heard warnings of this logic, see Andreotti (2007) or Adichie (2009), but the warnings didn’t innoculate me from the colonial virus.

5. Another trace here of my knowledge in the making: even after reading Reese’s review, I could not see the epistemological difference between colonial interest in false face masks and Haudenosaunee protocol around knowledge of these masks. When it finally sank in that any representation of these masks outside of protocol went against Haudenosaunee policy, I chose to read the policy itself alongside students in order to identify ways in which The Mask That Sang went against it. Further traces of my students’ difficulty making this distinction showed up soon after our discussion, when they raced to look up images of the masks online later that day. They delighted in the masks’ shocking faces and the cheap prices for which they could be found on Ebay. When I questioned the ethics of their actions, they asked blithely, how can it be wrong it it’s on the internet? Thus opening a whole new can of worms to grapple with together.

6. How many times can I teach it before it loses its vitality? How far removed can my teaching get from my transitional space before ‘pedagogy, when approached as a process of recomposition, loses something in that process even though it may reproduce subject matter, facts, and models perfectly’ (Grosz & Eisenman, c.f. in Ellsworth 2005, 163).

7. This last question points especially to my own ethically troubling role as a cultural dope (Britzman 2013), and selfish buffoon (Salinas 2013), having required students to read this book without knowing the answer to this question myself.

8. How much did my choice to use the book as a teaching tool already set my students up to answer the question this way? While I shared my own concerns openly, my positionality in the classroom may have spoken louder than my words. My hope is that ‘there is a space between knowledge already made and knowledge in the making for the children to formulate and to hear – out of wonder, not out of compliance – their own questions’ (Ellsworth 2005, 174).

9. While we say understanding leads to respect, there must also be room to respect without understanding (Gilbert 2006). This is a lesson that might have broken down when I chose to teach the book regardless of the policy.