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.

As a first step, members within higher education institutions need to evaluate their relationships to the histories of the lands on which they occupy. We, therefore, pose the following questions to staff and instructors within the “Ivory Tower”:

• What do you know about the history and experiences of Indigenous, Black, migrant, queer, disabled, and neurologically diverse communities in education?
• Do you understand the histories of the lands you have occupied and the particular stories these lands have had with each group over the decades?
• What is the point of academic freedoms, if only a few voices are privileged?

We urge instructors to expand their concept of professional expertise to include responsibility for communities affected by their research.

Higher Education

Since Canadian education flows from settler colonial logics and epistemologies, un-colonizing means confronting the kinds of institutions, theories, practices, and literature that the system has built, and evaluating one’s relationships to them, which is an act of educational citizenship (Tanchuk et al., 2018).

In higher education, these endeavours often fall under the heading of equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI), and decolonial efforts, which are supposed to produce mandates and employ accountability mechanisms. However, such efforts often result in statements of values with no associated action plans–and when there is action, it often falls disproportionately on the shoulders of students who are expected to provide this labour free of charge.

Well-meaning instructors often lament that they do not know where to start. Yet a simple Google search will tell you that February 2022 alone has multiple starting points that can raise awareness about the issues and challenges facing multiple communities within Canada, all of whom are connected to students in the classroom setting:

1. MMIWG2S awareness (February 14) 
2. Black history month  
3. Mental health awareness month  
4. Anti-bullying and community support (February 23)

When universities fail to cultivate a curriculum that is able to discuss topics born out of our shared society, they simultaneously fail their teachers-in-training and those students taught under them, reproducing settler colonial logics.

The Classroom

Inclusive pedagogies are defined as barrier-free (UNESCO, 2017), meaning that universities must address with nuance, not blanket policy, the specific barriers facing members from diverse communities.

As students, we have witnessed how current instructors relinquish their responsibilities to justice-oriented issues, claiming that such issues are “uncomfortable,” that they require academic specialization, or that academic freedom precludes them from having to engage.

Educational spaces where oppressive language goes unchecked invite students to mirror such inappropriate language and behaviours, like ableism (“…this database even has a read-aloud function if you’re too lazy to read the article yourself”), transphobic comments (“…there is research showing that gender-diverse folks are ‘confused’”), or outright student endangerment and abuse.

We maintain that it is particularly egregious for a department of education to actively facilitate colonial and oppressive futures.

Concretely, this means that teachers must support their students’ learning agency–“the feeling of ownership and sense of control that students have over their learning.”  Note that agency does not mean autonomy; rather, it is a demonstrated ability to engage in social relationships with community members. Because agency is student-centred, however, this does not mean that the student teaches the teacher.

Since Canadian teachers are predominantly English-speaking white settlers (Sterzuk, 2021), asking racialized students or those descended from non-English speaking backgrounds to be responsible for anti-oppressive work is, in fact, oppressive. During departmental meetings, when professors and staff lightheartedly suggest using graduate student “free labour” to complete arduous tasks–in front of graduate students–this, too, is oppressive.

Anti-colonial and anti-oppression work requires departments to build internal supports, making training and resources available for when professors identify a gap in their knowledge or do not feel equipped to discuss a particular issue.

In our own department we have observed several roadblocks to promoting anti-colonial and anti-oppression work. Specifically, professors, staff and the Provost, unwilling to admit to gaps in their knowledge, model this unwilling behaviour to their own other faculty, staff, and in particular to students. When training is offered, it often takes the form of voluntary short workshops or online modules, which does not lead to long-term systemic changes. Moreover, students are subjected to endless surveys on EDI issues, but the outcomes are late in implementation, ultimately failing to serve the population that was first surveyed.

Moving Forward

As educators-in-training, we want Canadian faculty to connect their teaching to the settler colonial logics that birthed them and to the oppressive hierarchies entangled within them, and to critically examine their relationships to these institutions.

We specifically ask faculty to take a more collaborative and non-hierarchical approach with their students, which can be achieved through the following means:

• Confronting and being accountable to one’s internal biases and defensive mechanisms that inhibit teaching  inclusively;
• Supporting graduate and undergraduate students, and providing mentoring research from both faculty and staff, according to subject specialization;
• Implementing multi-stage mentorship programs that address both the formal and informal needs of students;
• Using evidence-based EDI principles for curriculum design, and;
• Concretely supporting Indigenization endeavours in higher education.

As Canada continues its long-term migration project, now sourcing its population from many countries beyond France and the United Kingdom, holding any form of citizenship to the “Canadian” settler colonial state, no matter how temporary (e.g., LTA contracts or work visas), necessitates evaluating one’s relationship to the educational histories on that land. With ample avenues available to researchers to begin and maintain the work, any avoidance can only be understood as collusion with oppressive settler colonial logics.

The language and behaviour modelled in departments of education have ripple effects; these are the environments in which future educators calibrate their moral compasses before beginning their professional careers. We urge faculty in these departments to assume their inherent responsibility by taking concrete, immediate action towards a more equitable future for education in so-called “Canada”.

References

Battiste, M. A. (2013). Decolonizing education: Nourishing the learning spirit. Purich Publishing Limited.

Sterzuk, A. (2021). Pre-service teachers’ critical dispositions towards language: Transforming taken-for-granted assumptions about racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse learners through teacher education. In G. Li, J. Anderson, J. Hare, & McTavish, M. (Eds). Superdiversity and Teacher Education: Supporting Teachers in Working with Culturally, Linguistically, and Racially Diverse Students, Families, and Communities. Routledge.

Tanchuk, N., Kruse, M. & McDonough, K. (2018). Indigenous course requirements: A liberal-democratic justification. Philosophical Inquiry in Education, 25(2), 134–153.