When I first learned about the history of residential schools and how the children had been severed from their communities, language, and culture, I felt a kind of kinship with the Indigenous peoples. Growing up in colonial Hong Kong, I understand, to a certain degree, what it is like to not feel a sense of belonging or to have to speak and excel in a language other than my own. Of course, none of my colonial experience could compare to the abuses and cultural genocide that Indigenous peoples have endured.
I have recently had the privilege of working with some pedagogical consultants in the ᓄᓇᕕᒃ Nunavik to explore teaching and learning in a context involving multiple languages. As an external consultant, I treaded with much reverence and care, keeping my eyes, ears, and heart open to voices and silences and to alternative perspectives and worldviews. As McGrath (2018) reminds us, “knowledge is relational and therefore knowledge renewal is relationship renewal” (p. 313). Relationship is not only with people but also land to see how selves are intertwined with and constituting each other as well as knowledge.
Our guest bloggers this week are a group of graduate students with first-hand experience of EDI initiatives within a “Canadian” university. The BILD editorship has agreed, exceptionally, that they may remain anonymous. As they say, “We feel exploited and unsupported within so-called EDI committees. We share these frustrations here.”
In order to plot a more equitable future for the field of education in what is now known as Canada, we must first grapple with our history both as a country and as a discipline. In 1867, the English and French empires officially carved provincial and territorial borders into the land, renaming it “Canada.” In order to achieve their long-term settlement goal, the governments of both empires colluded with the RCMP and Christian churches to enact a large-scale genocide of the people Indigenous to “Canada”, resulting in the death of over 4.5 million bodies. Among the Aboriginal communities that remained, over 150,000 children were kidnapped and placed into Residential schools, where staff abused them and attempted to indoctrinate them into Western epistemologies and religions. The last Residential school closed in 1996.
Currently, many Canadian universities and colleges are directly connected to these genocidal religious endeavours (i.e., Jesuit missions in the University of Toronto’s Regis college; Nova Scotia’s St. Mary’s; Concordia University’s Loyola College), and enslavement projects (i.e., McGill University), or are simply products of settler colonial government policies. Canadian classrooms, therefore, have a longstanding tradition of perpetuating colonial ideologies, not least through their history of segregation. In response to these histories, Canadian educational institutions must enact a long-term commitment to actively restore the knowledges of those communities they have targeted and harmed.
In short, Canadian education systems can either continue to serve as a site of Western-centric and settler colonial epistemologies (Battiste, 2013) or they can actively work to be anti-colonial (i.e., equitable) and anti-oppressive (i.e., inclusive of a diverse population). This letter appeals to those educators wishing to pursue the second path.
This week’s blog post includes a linked audio file. Just click on the link below if you would like to hear the post read aloud. Scroll down to read the text.
Inspirée par les billets de Caroline Dault et de Kathleen Green à propos des choix que les sociolinguistes/enseignants font dans le cadre de leur enseignement des langues secondes au Québec, je me suis demandé comment je négociais les normes et les politiques linguistiques en classe de français langue seconde (FLS), traditionnellement ancrées dans l’idéologie monolingue. Je suis sociolinguiste, enseignante de langues secondes, en plus d’agir en tant que professeure et formatrice de futurs enseignantes et enseignants de langues. J’essaie dans ma pratique d’adopter des approches plurilingues, de les appliquer en salle de classe et surtout, de convaincre de leur utilité dans les cours de français au Québec et en contexte francophone minoritaire.
Cette session, je suis chargée de cours à la Faculté des sciences de l’éducation de l’Université de Montréal et j’ai le plaisir de donner le cours de Sociolinguistique et FLS (français, langue seconde). Ce cours s’adresse à de futurs enseignants de français susceptibles de se retrouver dans des classes d’accueil au primaire et au secondaire ou encore d’enseigner la francisation aux adultes immigrants. Mon objectif dans ce cours peut se résumer grossièrement à sensibiliser ces futurs enseignants de français langue seconde aux enjeux de diversité linguistique à l’école québécoise. Continue reading →
