Indigenous instructors’ perspectives on pre-service teacher education: Poetic responses to “difficult” learning and teaching
Date
2020-01-27
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Race Ethnicity and Education
Abstract
Instructors teaching an Indigenous education course face the challenges of shifting students’ understanding and inviting them into the work of decolonizing education. Indigenous instructors take on the embodied and emotional work of highlighting diverse representations of Indigenous peoples, histories, and perspectives in scholarship in order to make this learning meaningful to students. Bringing such views to education students, who are mostly non-Indigenous, is no easy task. In this study, we examine instructor experiences of difficult teaching within a mandatory Indigenous education course in Canada. We adopt a ‘poetics of anti-racism’ to represent and explore the moments of difficult teaching that are indicated by what is said, and unsaid, by the Indigenous instructors we interviewed. We argue that poetic approaches are powerful in articulating the complexity of Indigenous instructors’ experiences, as well as inspiring moments of transformation in education.
Description
Keywords
Indigenous education, Anti-racism, Teacher education, Decolonizing pedagogies
Citation
Poitras Pratt, Y., & Hanson, A. J. (2020). Indigenous instructors’ perspectives on pre-service teacher education: poetic responses to difficult learning and teaching. Race Ethnicity and Education, 25(6), 855–873. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2020.1718085