Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Social functions of the school; education and socialization; social, political, economic and cultural influences on the institutions and practices of education. May be applied towards the certificate in liberal arts.

COURSE DETAILS:

If you wanted to change a culture in single generation, how would you do it?
You would change the way it educates its children  

This course is hosted on the traditional, unceded and overlapping territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh Peoples and Musqueam Peoples. This course is developed in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action (2015) that implore post-secondary institutions to make a commitment to advance understandings of Indigenous identities, cultures, languages, values and knowledge systems in education. As such, this course utilizes Aboriginal and critical pedagogical methods to examine historical and contemporary social issues in Indigenous education. It focuses primarily on education in British Columbia but brings in perspectives from the rest of Canada and other countries as a way of addressing some of the broad concerns that shape schooling and educational practices in Indigenous educational contexts in settler nation states.  

This course will require looking at Canadian society and our own assumptions and social positions quite closely. This is required in order to understand the historic and contemporary relationships between Canadian society and Indigenous Nations and peoples that frame the topic of Indigenous Education in a Canadian nation-state founded in settler-colonialism. This course is meant to ensure that notions of history and power are taken into consideration so as to provide a thoughtful place to understand the challenges and opportunities within the concerns of this course.  

Goals:
· Invite course participants to examine assumptions about Indigenous education, knowledges and peoples as they are related to their social positions.
· Examine and enhance knowledge of Indigenous epistemologies, philosophies and visions of education.
· Examine the politics of knowledge production by focusing on the social, cultural and historical processes that frame the relationship between Indigenous education and Canadian society.
· Investigate historical and contemporary issues in Indigenous education including: settler colonialism, assimilation, decolonization, multiculturalism, anti-racism, self-determination and transformation, language revitalization, spirituality, and reconciliation.
· To engage students in a collaborative action and arts based group reconciliation project.      

Class Format

Our class format will be guided by an Aboriginal and critical pedagogy that is a combination of lecture, seminar, small-group discussion, talking circle, case studies, poster work, guest speakers, out-of-classroom experience (outside and in different institutional spaces) and in-class work time, to explore ideas experientially. As co-investigators, we are responsible for the tone of our discussions  

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: