Education, School of (Okanagan)
DSpace
UBCO
Hanson, Kelly
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD
University of British Columbia
Recently in British Columbia (BC) a redesigned K-12 curriculum plan was introduced (BC Ministry of Education, 2016). Undergirding the plan are The First Peoples Principles of Learning (FNESC, 2008; 2015), a learning philosophy that offers nine descriptions of what learning is, what it supports, involves, recognizes, and embeds (FNESC, 2008; 2014). The rationale for embedding the principles into all aspects of the curricular plan is to prioritize Indigenous perspectives and worldviews in classrooms for all students and at all times (BC Ministry of Education, 2015). As a practicing educator, my self-study research illuminated the FPPL as a vehicle for teacher education through the opportunity to develop my own curricular theory in relationship to my context (Chrona, 2014). A significant body of educational research makes it evident that a teacher’s understanding of curriculum is a primary influence with and for their curricular enactment (Macintyre Latta, 2018; Priestley, Biesta, & Robinson, 2015; Phelan, 2015; Pinar 2012). To build a conception of curriculum that would support my inquiry I drew upon theorists such as Aoki (1993, 2004a), Donald (2016), Macintyre Latta (2018) and Pinar (2012). I made sense of these theories along with my experiences, and described curriculum as contested, situated, and relational in nature. Between the years of 2015-2018, I documented my experiences with the FPPL through journal writing, and audio-recorded conversations with a professional learning community called Living in Circle. I shared what it looked like, felt like, and sounded like as I engaged in inquiry to better understand the FFPL and how self-study promoted and encouraged this inquiry. Through these experiences I improved, expanded, and adapted my thinking, a process referred to as re-storying (Atleo, 2009; Cherkowski, 2012; Corntassel & T’lakwadzi, 2009; Mockler, 2011; Ragoonaden & Macintyre Latta, 2020; Strong-Wilson, 2008). Merging my theory of curriculum with my teaching practice, I developed a relationship with FPPL that provoked me to critically examine my experiences as a settler educator and I shifted my thinking about learning. The theorizing that emerged from my research characterized my experiences as attending to worldview, expanding wellbeing, and embracing decolonization. These emergent themes were helpful for re-orienting my approach to teacher education and informed a pedagogical approach that involved interrelated practices of wisdom-seeking, truth-telling, relational- self-listening and loving community.
Living in Circle: An Educator’s Self-Study of Curricular Experiences with the First Peoples Principles of Learning by Kelly Hanson Bachelor of Arts, York University, 2001 Master of Teaching, Griffith University, 2003 Master of Arts, University of British Columbia, 2014 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSHY in THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES (INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Okanagan) October 2020 © Kelly Hanson, 2020 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the College of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a thesis/dissertation entitled: Living in Circle: An Educator’s Self-Study of Curricular Experiences with the First Peoples Principles of Learning submitted by Kelly Hanson in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy . Dr. Sabre Cherkowski, Faculty of Education UBC Okanagan Supervisor Dr. Margaret Macintyre Latta, Faculty of Education UBC Okanagan Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Karen Ragoonaden, Faculty of Education UBC Okanagan Supervisory Committee Member Dr. George Belliveau, Faculty of Education UBC Vancouver University Examiner Dr. Julian Kitchen, Faculty of Education Brock University External Examiner Additional Committee Members include: Dr. Braden Te Hiwi, Community, Culture, and Global Studies UBC Okanagan Supervisory Committee Member iii Abstract Recently in British Columbia (BC) a redesigned K-12 curriculum plan was introduced (BC Ministry of Education, 2016). Undergirding the plan are The First Peoples Principles of Learning (FNESC, 2008; 2015), a learning philosophy that offers nine descriptions of what learning is, what it supports, involves, recognizes, and embeds (FNESC, 2008; 2014). The rationale for embedding the principles into all aspects of the curricular plan is to prioritize Indigenous perspectives and worldviews in classrooms for all students and at all times (BC Ministry of Education, 2015). As a practicing educator, my self-study research illuminated the FPPL as a vehicle for teacher education through the opportunity to develop my own curricular theory in relationship to my context (Chrona, 2014). A significant body of educational research makes it evident that a teacher’s understanding of curriculum is a primary influence with and for their curricular enactment (Macintyre Latta, 2018; Priestley, Biesta, & Robinson, 2015; Phelan, 2015; Pinar 2012). To build a conception of curriculum that would support my inquiry I drew upon theorists such as Aoki (1993, 2004a), Donald (2016), Macintyre Latta (2018) and Pinar (2012). I made sense of these theories along with my experiences, and described curriculum as contested, situated, and relational in nature. Between the years of 2015-2018, I documented my experiences with the FPPL through journal writing, and audio-recorded conversations with a professional learning community called Living in Circle. I shared what it looked like, felt like, and sounded like as I engaged in inquiry to better understand the FFPL and how self-study promoted and encouraged this inquiry. Through these experiences I improved, expanded, and adapted my thinking, a process referred to as re-storying (Atleo, 2009; Cherkowski, 2012; Corntassel & T’lakwadzi, 2009; Mockler, 2011; Ragoonaden & Macintyre Latta, 2020; Strong-Wilson, 2008). iv Merging my theory of curriculum with my teaching practice, I developed a relationship with FPPL that provoked me to critically examine my experiences as a settler educator and I shifted my thinking about learning. The theorizing that emerged from my research characterized my experiences as attending to worldview, expanding wellbeing, and embracing decolonization. These emergent themes were helpful for re-orienting my approach to teacher education and informed a pedagogical approach that involved interrelated practices of wisdom-seeking, truth-telling, relational- self-listening and loving community. v Lay Summary In 2016, a re-designed K-12 curriculum plan anchored in an Indigenous learning philosophy titled the First Peoples Principles of Learning was introduced in British Columbia. Guided by the understanding that curriculum is a situated, relational, and contested process, my self-study research documented what it looked like, felt like, sounded like to live this curriculum as a settler educator. To improve, expand, and adapt my thinking, I shared my stories with a professional learning community called Living in Circle. The three themes that emerged from these experiences were: attending to worldview, expanding wellbeing, and embracing decolonization. These experiences also led me to articulate a pedagogical approach to my settler teacher education that involved practices of wisdom-seeking, truth-telling, relational-self listening, and loving community. vi Preface Ethics Approval Title: Learning to Live Curriculum: A Settler Teacher Exploration of the First Peoples Principles of Learning This study has been approved by the Behavioural REB of the UBC Okanagan, Research Services Behavioural Research Ethics Board UBC BREB NUMBER: H17-01715 vii Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………..ii Lay Summary……………………………………………………………………………………v Preface…………………………………………………………………………………………....viTable of Contents ........................................................................................................................vii List of Figures………………………………………………………………………………......xiiii List of Tables…………………………………………………………………………………...xiiii Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………….xiv Dedication……………………………………………………………………………….……..xvii Land Acknowledgement………………………………………………………………………xvii Chapter One……………………………………………………………………………………...1 1.1 An Invitation to Live in Circle……………………………………………….......1 1.2 Overarching Research Questions………………………………………………...6 1.3 Theoretical Framework…….………………………………………………….....8 1.4 Living in Circle Research Process……………………………………………...10 Living in Circle………………………………………………………………....12 Re-storying……………………………………………………….......................15 A Pedagogy for Teacher Education…………………………………………….17 1.5 Significance of Valuing Teacher Knowledge……………………………..........18 1.6 Prioritizing Experience………………………………………………………….20 Connection to the Social World………………………………………...21 Living in Questions……………………………………………………..21 viii 1.7 The Invitational Nature of Living in Circle…………………………………….23 Chapter Two………………………………………………………………………………….....27 2.1 Making Sense of Curriculum…………………………………………………...27 2.2 The Need to Indigenize the BC Curriculum……………………………………27 The First Peoples Principles of Learning ……..………………………………..28 Indian Residential Schools……………………………………………………...32 2.3 Curriculum as a Living Process………………………………………………...34 Reconceptualization of Curriculum…………………………………………….34 2.4 Currere: Making/Living My Own Theory……………………………………...39 Curriculum as Contested………………………………………………………..40 Curriculum as Situated…………………………………………………………43 Curriculum as Relational……………………………………………………….46 2.5 Ethical Considerations for Living the Curriculum……………………………..50 2.6 Decolonization………………………………………………………………….52 Ecological Imagination…..……………………………………………………..53 Lens of Appreciation..………………………………………..............................54 2.6 Implications for Teacher Education…………………………………………….57 2.7 Self-Study and My Teacher Education…………………………………………57 Chapter Three…………………………………………………………………………………...60 3.1 Self-Study Research Methodology…………………………...............................60 Self-Study and Currere………………………………………………………….61 3.2 Living in Circle: My Self Study Process………………………………………..66 Being in Community……………………………………………………………67 ix Communion with the Land………………………………………………...........72 3.3 Data Analysis .………………………………………………………………….73 Coding: A Data Dance……………………………………………….................73 Re-storying………………………… ………………………...............74 3.4 Themes Emerging through Experiences with FPPL…..………………………..75 When Themes 'Emerge'…………………………………………………………80 (Dissertation) Writing as Inquiry……………………………………………….81 3.5 Trustworthiness: What will be the afterglow?.…………………………............83 Chapter Four ….…………………………….…………………………………………………87 4.1 Theorizing Experiences With FPPL……….……………………………………87 Portage La Prairie, Manitoba …………………………………………...……....87 Becoming a Researcher…………………………………………………………88 Confronting my Stories..………………………………………………………..89 4.2 Attend to Worldview…………………………………………............................93 What does it mean to walk in two worlds?.…………………………………….93 How might I see my worldview(s)……………………………………………...94 How might I explore reflexivity through story? ……………………………….96 What kinds of learning conditions support multiple worldviews? …………...101 What might a holistic understanding of worldview involve?………………....104 4.3 Expand Wellbeing………….………………………………………………….110 What supports wellbeing during times of change? ……………………….......110 What do children need to be well? ……………………………………………111 What is the role of the Land in wellbeing?……………………………………115 x What is the value of struggle? …………………………………………….......118 4.4 Embrace Decolonization…………………………............................................120 How can I live with the fear of getting it all wrong? …………………………121 What might accountability look like? ………………………….......................125 Does my imagination need to be decolonized? ……………………………….127 What do I hear when I listen? ………………………………………………...129 4.5 Building towards a ‘Good Enough Theory’ of Curriculum…………………...131 Learning attends to worldview………………………………………………...132 Learning expands wellbeing…………………………………………………..133 Learning embraces decolonization…………………………………………….134 Chapter Five…………………………………………………………………………………...137 5.1 A Pedagogy for Settler Teacher Education………………………....................137 5.2 The Relationship Between Self-study and Pedagogy…………………………139 5.3 Living in Circle Pedagogy…………………………………………………….139 Wisdom Seeking………………………………………………………………142 Truth-Telling………………………………………………………..…………145 Relational-Self Listening...…………………………...……………………….146 Loving Community…………………………………..………………………..149 5.4 Looking Back and Looking Forward………………………………………….152 Limitations of My Research...…………………………………………………152 Missing voices……………….………………………………………………...153 5.5 The Circle Continues...………………………………………………………...154 Educators as Collaborative Changemakers……………………………………156 xi Framework for Educational Change…………………………………………..158 Self-Study Methodology and Indigeneity……………………….…………….159 References…………………………….……………………….………………………………162 Appendices ...............................................................................................................................183 Appendix A……………………………………………………………………………………183 Appendix B……………………………………………………………………………………186 xii List of Figures Figure 1: Representation of the Living Curriculum .................................................................... 40 Figure 2: Thematic Representation of Experiences with FPPL ................................................... 91 Figure 3: Representation of Theorizing My Experiences with FPPL......................................... 141 xiii List of Tables Table 1: Questions Organized by Data Themes............................................................................79 Table 2: Contrasting Approaches to Learning ............................................................................105 Table 3: Meyer's Dimensions of Knowing..................................................................................107 xiv Acknowledgements It has been an immense honour to be nurtured, stretched, and supported by the following incredible humans and communities over the course of my dissertation journey: Dr. Sabre Cherkowski has been absolutely legendary in her steadfast guidance, wisdom, grace, and mentorship over the course of this research. She has been the unwavering lighthouse that guided and encouraged me, and because of that, my wayfinding never felt alone or completely in the dark. Dr. Cherkowski supported my journey into educational research by welcoming me into her own process as a research assistant and by constantly creating conditions for learning that were spacious enough for me to find my own professional and personal potential. Her mentorship was courageous, and patient and these qualities were a tremendous gift to my research process, and were a way of being that I greatly admired. I would also like to thank my dissertation committee of Dr. Margaret Macintyre Latta and Dr. Karen Ragoonaden. While completing this research, I worked alongside of them as a research assistant. They both invited me into a lively community of critical-creative thinking, play, mindfulness, and friendship, and these experiences helped me conceptualize my own research and to engage more fully in the possibilities of living the curriculum. In addition, I am grateful that Dr. Braden Te Hiwi joined my committee as I neared the end of my dissertation journey. I greatly appreciate his time, efforts, and insights. This dissertation came to life through the evocative, energetic, innovative, and deeply compassionate perspectives of the Living in Circle community. Seeing teaching and learning through their experiences was remarkable. I am thankful for their openness to share with me. I learned so much from their willingness to push the boundaries of what it means to be a teacher, and what it means to honour relationships, wellbeing, and social change as educational priorities. xv I am also so grateful and enlivened by the ongoing support, creative energy, sense of purpose, and love that I received in abundance from my life partner Andrew, our daughter Emilia, my dearest Echo and the late- great Finnigan. I am always transformed and inspired by their spirited presence, gifts, and perspectives. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the following communities of influence and support: Westbank First Nations, Central Okanagan School District, Okanagan School of Education, Land and Water, and my ever-loving, ever-supportive parents. Given the remarkable nature of knowledge and the way that it builds, shifts, grows, and emerges collectively, the extent of each of these influences will forever be the essence of this account. I am beyond grateful, I am inspired. xvi Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to Indigenous children and youth across British Columbia and beyond. xvii Land Acknowledgment This dissertation was written on unceded Syilx Territory. Unceded means that the Land1 rights of the Syilx people are not surrendered nor acquired by the Canadian government through treaties. Vowel (2016) describes that Land acknowledgements need to continually be reflected on in terms of our beliefs and intentions and not just inserted into the signaling of the beginning of events such as staff meetings and whole school assemblies (para. 3). Styers (2017) shares that “living in a deeply sacred and intimate relationship with Land requires respectful acknowledgment of whose traditional Land one is on” (p. 55). Such a relationship also requires commitments to understanding the traditional stories of that Land and consideration of how one might be implicated in the colonial history. Asher, Curnow and Davis (2018) offer that respectful, and authentic Land acknowledgements could be a pedagogical practice that could deepen local relationships and an understanding of the interdependency of all on this shared Land (p. 317). Contemplating these perspectives, I reflect on the growing movement across British Columbia towards frequent Land acknowledgements. I wonder how the acknowledgements that I have shared through my role as an educator have reflected a sacred and intimate relationship with Land, or how they could they be improved to embody such a stance. Considering my experiences, I set the intention to be more mindful of how, through this practice, I might deepen my sincerity, substance, and potential to create change. 1 I write Land with a capital L as described by Styres (2017) who explains that Land is a “fundamental living being” (p. 47). xviii With this commitment in mind, I would like to acknowledge my Land relationships as fully as I know how to at this time. The following narrative is my attempt to respectfully acknowledge and to deepen my relationship to the Okanagan territory of the Syilx people. I am a settler on Syilx Land. Both of my parents are of European descent. I was born in Southern Ontario on traditional Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee Territory. Growing up I spent a significant amount of time living on the territory of the Huron-Wendat, Petun, Seneca and, the Mississaugas of the New Credit Indigenous peoples. The Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant covers this territory and is an agreement between the Haudenosaunee and the Ojibwe and allied nations to peaceably share and care for the Lands and resources around the Great Lakes. Almost a decade ago, I moved to the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia which is an unceded Syilx Territory and this is where I live and learn today. I am a guest on this sacred Syilx Land. When I first arrived in the Okanagan valley, I took long walks in a small provincial park near my home. Years later the park remains one of my favourite and most special places. However, when I return to the rolling mountains, the expansive vista of the valley, and uninterrupted views of Lake Okanagan, I am struck by what I did not see on those earlier walks and I feel a sense of humility for all that I still do not understand. Armstrong (1998) explains that the “Elders say that it is land that holds all knowledge of life and death and is a constant teacher—it is constantly communicating… we survived and thrived by listening intently to its teachings—to its language—and then inventing human words to retell its stories to our succeeding generations” (p. 178). Looking back at my time on the Land, and how I walked amongst the beauty of the pasture sage, saskatoon berries, rabbitbrush and under the watchful xix eye of the many coyotes that inhabited the park, I am struck by my lack of understanding of the ecology of the Okanagan. Syilx Indigeneity holds an intimate understanding of this Land and how it is rich with food sources, meanings, and histories. My settler gaze, characteristic of the dominant worldview2 I was raised in, was disconnected with nature at the depths of communion described by Armstrong. I did not speak the language of the Land and I still do not, yet as I learned about and experienced Syilx ways of knowing the Land through attending local workshops and community events such as the yearly Siyaʔ Festival, I experienced opportunities to reshape and strengthen my relationships. By learning more about Syilx knowledge, stories, I also develop a deeper self-reflexivity to honour this knowledge, without appropriation, in a way that contributes to my capacity to be a teacher in this geography. I am deeply grateful to be welcomed here. 2I have moved from using the term ‘Western’ to describe the Eurocentric, Christian, white-privileging, male-dominating culture of Canadian society that is mostly invisible and naturalized. I have come to prefer the term, dominant, because it “draws forth images of the overpowering of one culture over all others, including people who are not men, heterosexual, physically or mentally perfect or white…" (Wilson, 2008, p. 35). 1 Chapter One 1.1 An Invitation to Live in Circle As an educator, I am inspired and provoked by conversations about how to live well in the world, the purpose of education, and how best to accomplish these aims. These conversations occur between myself, family, colleagues, students, scholarship, literature, and media in ongoing ways that shape who I am and who I hope to be. Through these everyday encounters I can improve as an educator. As I listen intently to the perspectives of others, I find the opportunity to explore my beliefs, unsettle my habitual nature, and spark my creativity. I continually challenge myself to value these experiences that allow me to inquire into my beliefs about who I am as a teacher and the essence of what it means to live the curriculum. In this dissertation I share my experiences over the course of several years of self-study as I engaged in an impactful and important conversation regarding the need for all teachers to embrace an Indigenous conception of learning. A re-designed K-12 curriculum plan was introduced recently in British Columbia (BC) (Ministry of Education, 2016), and undergirding the plan are The First Peoples Principles of Learning (FNESC, 2008; 2015). These principles are a learning philosophy that is inclusive of First Peoples from across BC (Grass, 2017, p. 4). The rationale for embedding the principles throughout the new curriculum plan was to prioritize Indigenous perspectives and worldviews in classrooms for all students across all subject matter (Ministry of Education, 2016). Such an aim is extensively articulated as a requirement for social justice and the improvement of education by Indigenous educators, theorists, and allies (Archibald & Hare, 2016; Battiste, 1998, 2000; Battiste & Henderson, 2009; Kanu, 2011), and is echoed in Canada-wide calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Report (TRC, 2015). Self-study is an inquiry approach that is well suited for exploring the challenges teachers 2 face, at all career stages, when they seek to engage with issues of equity, diversity, and social justice. A primary affordance offered by this methodology to educators who seek to uphold social justice endeavors is the opportunity to reflect on their perspectives and worldviews (Kitchen, 2019, p.1). As a frame for my research, self-study supported the weighty demands involved in the curricular change. It was a way for me to attend to the need for a transformed approach to my teacher education. There is a call for teachers to learn how to live Indigenous perspectives respectfully and with integrity (Cannon, 2013; Dion, 2007, 2008; Kirkness & Barnhart, 1991; Stanford, Williams, Hopper, & McGregor, 2013; Tanaka, 2016). Further, self-study was a way to uphold an inquiry stance that focused on my identity in relationship with my context and the world. Through self-study methodology I created knowledge about how to notice and understand some of the complexities and ambiguities that lived within my experiences of teaching and learning with the First Peoples Principles of Learning. The First Peoples Principles of Learning (FPPL) offer nine descriptions of what learning is, what it supports, involves, recognizes, and embeds. The FPPL are not a set of lesson or unit plans that educators can adopt for quick use in their schools and classrooms, but there is an expectation that teachers will find ways to weave the principles throughout their teaching and learning. Chrona (2014) is a member of the First Nations Education Steering Committee (FNESC). She contributed to authoring the principles and she created an online blog resource to help teachers interpret the principles (https://firstpeoplesprinciplesoflearning.wordpress.com). On her blog she describes that teachers have been challenged by their responsibility to develop their understanding of the FPPL in a contextualized way. She explains: 3 Many educators who are interested in including more First Peoples’ content into their schools and classrooms, or who would like the First Peoples Principles of Learning reflected in their classrooms might hope to encounter a detailed list of criteria and specific content to match up with grades and/or subject areas. This request is understandable; however, it would actually contradict one of the foundations of the First Peoples Principles of Learning, which is that context is paramount… [and] will vary from place to place, and community of learners to community of learners. (Welcome section, para. 4) This gap between what the FPPL offer and how teachers understand and take up these learning principles in their classroom provoked my research. Another way to describe a gap is as an opening. Openings are the possibilities for growth and renewal that are created through the ongoing, interpretive, nature of sense-making. Martusewicz (2001) describes that an opening is the result of a process that creates more connections in our understandings. She writes, Opening requires the constant reinvention of thought and consequently the freedom of thought. For educators interested in social justice, this requires that we understand the potential in our relations with students for infinite creation of new ideas… It also requires that we recognize those forms, behaviours, and processes that might shut down or block these creative possibilities. (p. 10) My self-study research was situated in this context of an opening created by the BC curriculum reform. It is offered as an account of experiencing curriculum through engaging with theory and practices to develop my own theorizing stance about the FPPL and teacher learning. For me, the openings created through my research foregrounded an appreciative, life-giving commitment to learning more. 4 Spanning the years of 2016-2019, I engaged in a self-study practice of documenting and making sense of my experiences with the First Peoples Principles of Learning. My self-study research illuminated the FPPL as a vehicle for teacher education through the opportunity to develop my own curricular theory in relationship to my context (Chrona, 2014). The purpose of my research was to pay attention to my relationship to the FPPL and to notice how these experiences influenced my fundamental beliefs about teacher education. Through this reflective process I aimed to uncover a new awareness of what it means to learn as an educator. I began my career as an educator nearly 20 years ago and I have taught in many different learning environments across Ontario and BC. At the heart of my career has been developing an inquiry/constructivist perspective. This orientation to teaching and learning has been established through many years of seeking how to engage more authentically and relationally in my teaching commitments (Hanson, 2017). At the time of the introduction of the revised curricular plan I was already exploring how learning is dependent on context and is actively constructed and socially negotiated (Gergen, 2015). Engaging with the FPPL both continued and disrupted this orientation. What was new learning, or a new perspective for me, was my growing recognition of how my identity as a Canadian born settler3 educator was central to how I teach and learn. The nature of First Peoples learning principles invited me to consider the influence of being a white, cisgender settler educator. At the beginning of my research, I knew very little about Indigenous ways of being and knowing, and I soon came to realise that my identity offered me inherited privileges that had been largely invisible to me over my teaching career. In some 3 As described by Snelgrove, Dhamoon, & Corntassel (2014) I define a settler as someone who lives on and owns land appropriated from Indigenous peoples. Settler land rights are generally protected by laws which have been denied to Indigenous peoples. People who fall under these criteria are diverse in privilege and power. Often the term settler is used with an understanding of settler colonialism and the one-way flow of European values, which overtake the culture and history of the location they come to inhabit. However, many settlers are new to Canada and come from non-European countries that have their own negative experiences with colonialism. (p. 13). 5 ways, I fit Dion’s (2007, 2009) description of a ‘perfect stranger’ in terms of my relationships to Indigenous perspectives. ‘Perfect stranger’ (Dion, 2007) is a stance whereby settlers do not perceive their connection to Indigenous perspectives, but rather they believe that they embody an identity of innocence because of their lack of experiences. This identity is “informed simultaneously by what teachers know, what they do not know, and what they refuse to know… the fear of offending, the fear of introducing content that challenges students’ dominant stories of Canadian history, all support the claim for the position of perfect stranger” (p. 331). Although I recognized the fear of engaging with the FPPL because of my lack of knowledge and experiences with Indigenous education, history, ways of knowing, and perspectives, I was also aware of my desire to live out my work as a teacher in authentic and meaningful relationships. This desire pushed me to engage in the vulnerable, challenging and complex work of continually learning about and with myself and others through self-study. This research was not my first exploration of self-study. In previous teaching experiences I had drawn upon the inquiry approach to support me to be more mindful and to consider how my identity and judgements influenced how, what, and who I attended to. I noticed that when I improved the quality of my awareness, I saw more ways of contributing and connecting to the lives of my students and colleagues. Further I noticed that as I attuned to myself and others, new understandings of creativity, agency, and connections emerged (Hanson, 2017). When the BC curriculum was introduced, I recognized again that there were aspects of my identity that I had not explored. The stance of a perfect stranger, of maintaining distance to Indigenous ways of knowing, whether out of fear or not knowing, is not mindful, relational, or inquiry oriented. I needed to learn more, and differently, if I was going to shift this stance and engage with the FPPL in my teaching and learning. This self-study about what it meant for me to learn to embody 6 the FPPL in my teaching and learning through the re-designed BC curriculum became an opportunity for me to move toward my aim of learning to live well in this world as I engaged in an authentic, and transformative relationship with my teacher education. 2.1 Overarching Research Questions This self-study research was an opportunity to attend to the challenges of, and the need for, teachers to be learners of teaching at all career phases. As Russel (2010) describes “teacher education is far more complex than it has commonly been taken to be” (p. 690) and self-study is an opportunity to look to the self as an opportunity to engage in continual learning. Self-study helps educators “capture, unpack and portray the complexities of teaching and learning about teaching in ways that might lead to deeper understandings of practice” (Loughran, 2005, p. 13). Through the following questions, my self-study engaged with the First Peoples Principles of Learning in my own teaching and learning: • What does it look like, feel like, and sound like when I, as a teacher, engage in inquiry to better understand the BC curriculum as an Indigenized curriculum? • How does self-study promote and encourage this inquiry? • Are there emergent themes from my self-study process that might be helpful for re-orienting future teacher education? These questions felt meaningful and important, but given my position as a settler educator who had little background knowledge of First Peoples approaches to learning, I was unsure of how to proceed with my inquiry. I was unsure how to interact with the FPPL without appropriating or misrepresenting them through my settler perspective. I saw the FPPL as an abundant and transformative gift4 offered to all teachers by FNESC, and I wanted to honour that 4 Kuokkanen (2007) notes a tension in describing First People and settler knowledge exchanges as gifting. This is because the shared history of First People and settlers is fraught with abuses of power and appropriation of land (p. 7 generosity as fully as I could. I also hoped that through my inquiry I would be able to work from a contextualized understanding of the FPPL to better meet the needs of my students. Macintyre Latta (2018) emphasizes: curriculum comes to life through the genuine inquiry into what is worth knowing, rather than simply following a curriculum document… educators and their students [need to] be able to articulate why, how and what they are orienting their practices toward, and to embody these ways of being within their lived practices. (p. 40) I imagined that articulating my understanding of FPPL was possible, worthwhile, and would positively influence my choices about what would be important to learn and what kinds of learning experiences to create for, and with, learners based on the contexts of my school and the learners that make up my particular classes. Thus, while I felt vulnerable and uncertain at the start of my self-study, I was encouraged by the possibility of learning and growing with my students and colleagues as we explored what it meant to engage with the FPPL. I was committed to engaging with the FPPL with the deepest level of “respect, relevance, reciprocity and responsibility.” This language has been offered to educators by Kirkness and Barnhart (1991) and is often referred to as the 4R’s. Kirkness and Barnhardt (1991) explained that when educators and schools respect Indigenous cultural integrity, provide education that is relevant to Indigenous perspectives and experience, foster reciprocal relationships, and demonstrate responsibility through participation, we can begin to Indigenize and decolonize our schools. While the framework was originally created for use in higher education settings, the 72). Despite this history, Kuokkanen persists with the concept of the gift as not a form of exchange or as having an economic function. She offers that gift can be understood as “a reflection of a particular worldview characterized by a perception of the natural environment as a living entity which gives its gifts and abundance to people if it is treated with respect and gratitude (i.e., if certain responsibilities are observed)” (p.71). It was this recognition of life and abundance that I intended when I described the FPPL as a gift. 8 4R’s are important benchmarks for many settler educators. They helped me to consider how I might support, and not appropriate, the intentions and experiences of Indigenous education as described by Indigenous people. Such consideration has been historically absent; school curriculum in Canada has been a vehicle for colonization, holding up the persistent exclusion of Indigenous knowledge and perspectives and normalizing this exclusion at the expense of Indigenous students (Battiste, 2002, 2011; Battiste & Henderson, 2009; Tanaka, 2016). Given that I had only ever experienced colonial versions of curriculum in my own schooling, there was much that I needed to (un)learn about myself as I engaged with the FPPL. It was my hope that living the relational qualities expressed through the 4 R’s would help me to notice and move out from underneath some of the colonial habits in my ways of being. The First Peoples Principles of Learning inspired my spirit of inquiry towards improving myself as a teacher, and this self-study represents my learning about how engaging these Indigenous principles and related pedagogies changed the way I understood my role as a teacher, my relationships to curriculum, and how I became better attuned to new possibilities in teacher education. 1.3 Theoretical Framework To support my inquiry, I located my self-study within theories that helped me to articulate what I meant by curriculum, a term that is often contested in education because of the diversity of understandings that emerge from essential questions about what counts as knowledge, who decides, and who determines the worth of knowledge (Kanu, 2011). Additionally, there are contested understandings about the connections between curriculum, knowledge, and biography, and contested assumptions about the ethical responsibility of curriculum (Kanu, 2011, p. 18). For the purposes of my research, I described curriculum 9 in the verb form, as currere, which means to run the course (Pinar & Grumet, 1979). Currere is a description of curriculum that explores and illuminates experience so that it can be seen more clearly, understood more fully, and so that the agency of teachers and students can be deepened. I further described my understanding of curriculum as a contested, situated, and relational experience (Aoki, 1993, 2004; BCTF, 2017; Kanu, 2011; Pinar 2012). This stance embraced curriculum as a ‘complicated conversation’ (Pinar, 2012), meaning that curriculum evolves and unfolds through multiple encounters. Each encounter contributes to making multiple interpretations visible, and which, taken as a whole, informs ongoing meaning-making. An essential component of establishing my understanding of curriculum was looking to Indigenous curriculum scholars such as Dion (2007; 2009), Donald (2012; 2016), Four Arrows (2016), and Styres (2017) for their understandings of what it means to engage in complicated conversations about, and with, curriculum. Dion (2007) offers that educators can embrace a stance of ‘ethical learning’ through curriculum. Such a stance requires a reimagining of practices such as storytelling, remembrance, and self-reflection in ways that raise awareness of the ways in which the identities of all people in Canada have been shaped by the colonial nature of education. Likewise, Donald (2012a) expresses the need for ethical relationality in education, wherein “the values of balance and reciprocity can contribute to points of contact that entangle and enmesh” (p. 105) between Indigenous and settler peoples, and moves us towards more healthy and sustainable relationships. Similarly, Four Arrows (2016) describes the possibility of more healthy and sustainable relationships among and between Indigenous and settler peoples “by showing that it is in our nature to live more sustainably and peacefully than the dominant worldview allows and reclaiming some specific Indigenous understanding about being in the world, we can rebalance our life systems” (p.5). Armstrong (1990) describes that it is the 10 responsibility of all settlers to understand their part in colonial relationships by “turn[ing] over some of the rocks in [their] own garden for examination” (p. 143). She further suggests that settlers ought to “imagine interpreting for us [First Peoples] your own peoples thinking toward us, instead of interpreting for us, our thinking, our lives and our stories” (p. 143). As I reflected on these theories, I considered how living the curriculum ethically involved recognizing a greater connection between Indigenous and settler peoples. This perspective is not common in the dominant Canadian perspective on education which has embraced the logics of colonialism and has centralized and normalized Euro-centric ways of knowing and being. Inspired by the scholarship that framed this study, I aimed to better understand how to live out a more ethical approach to my relationships in education, and I aimed for an articulation of my learning to orient me toward new ways of living together that are not often explored in education. My self-study became an opportunity to learn how to engage with curriculum as a living process that honours the ethics of relationships framed within my developing understanding of my experiences with the FPPL. 1.4 Living in Circle Research Process There are a variety of methodologies that support teachers as researchers, including action research, participatory action research, and self-study (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009, p. 39). I framed my research as a self-study for several reasons. Firstly, it was my intention to situate my narrative within my own particular context, and to focus on my experiences as opposed to telling the stories of others that Armstrong (1990) advised against. Engaging with issues of social justice through a subjective lens are commonplace in the self-study discourse community, however few studies have taken up their research in the context of Indigenization. My research was an opportunity to contribute to the methodology by illuminating how self- 11 study, as a methodological tradition that continually situates the self in the world, might create kinships with Indigeneity. Turning my gaze towards myself through self-study, I began my research by documenting my experiences with the FPPL in my personal teaching journal. My early documentation included experiences with students, colleagues, various texts that I had read, and professional conferences that I attended. I often noted experiences that I wanted to learn more about or to remember, and over time, my journals sometimes reflected back knowledge that I took for granted and had not fully examined. The journals became a reflective practice of writing and reading to notice patterns in my thinking, emotions, hang ups, beliefs, and passions. Most of my documented experiences were from my time as a classroom educator teaching in a grade 6/7 community (2016-2017), and as a doctoral student (2016-2019). In 2017, my educator role shifted from the K-12 school classroom to the university setting when I took on the position as Faculty Advisor in a teacher education program. Across all of these settings I had the opportunity to work with the FPPL as central to teaching and learning in the Okanagan. My personal teaching journal entries were only one layer of learning for my self-study. Self-study is not a solitary practice, and in self-study community is critical for building a collaborative inquiry (Samaras, 2011, p. 5). In self-study, relationships form the foundation for understanding our practice, and I recognized that I needed to seek a community who would become my critical friend group to help me expand and shift my understandings of the FPPL beyond my personal reflecting in my journals. In September 2017, I brought together a group of educator colleagues who agreed to be my critical friends for this self-study. We called our collective learning relationship, Living in Circle. The name represented our commitment to the ongoing, interconnected, and circular nature of learning (Kovach, 2009; Styres, 2017), to the 12 medicine wheel (Four Arrows, 2016, p. 18), and to talking circles (First Nations Pedagogy Online, 2009). For me, the phrase, Living in Circle, was also a metaphor for my self-study as a whole, because my ongoing process of research involved an iterative, circular process of writing in my journal, sharing my reflections with Living in Circle, and re-storying my experiences to make sense of my experiences toward new learning. Living in Circle. The group of colleagues who formed Living in Circle included myself and seven other educators (identified in this dissertation by their pseudonyms): four K-12 teachers (April, Russ, Kimmy, Susan, John), one Indigenous instructional leader (Keith), and one school-based Indigenous education advocate (Andrea). From September 2017 to August 2018, our Living in Circle community met once a month at a local coffee shop. It was there that we shared our reflections on our practice and learned together from those reflections. We were a self-initiated learning community, and we were all committed to exploring the re-designed curriculum in ways that reflected and honoured Indigenous perspectives from within our diverse roles in education. In addition to our coffeeshop conversations that were recorded and that I transcribed as part of the data for this self-study, we also met on the Land to learn more about and experience Indigenous knowledge. For example, we gathered by and on the water for ceremony and to paddle together, we met in the mountains, and we met in a forest to connect to the teachings of the Land. In all of these places we listened to traditional Okanagan stories called captik w lh. Each member of our group was integral to my learning. Keith is an influential Indigenous consulting teacher in my district. He works tirelessly, educating teachers to support Indigenous youth in middle and high school and directly supporting these Indigenous students. He has been involved with a variety of policy initiatives in our district that support equity for Indigenous 13 students. He also facilitates courses on Indigenous pedagogy at a local university. Andrea is an Indigenous advocate at a large middle school. She is also a deeply creative and inspiring storyteller and talented artist. April is a mindful, middle school, math and science teacher. Her pedagogy focuses on multiple modes of contemplation to facilitate place-conscious inquiry learning and self-discovery. April and I had been teaching partners in previous years and we were already invested in supporting each other’s professional learning. Russ teaches in an innovative, interdisciplinary learning community at a local high school. He calls his approach to teaching and learning ‘campfire pedagogy,’ because he spends so much time on the Land with his students, literally camping in the wilderness, and telling stories around the campfire as a deep way of learning about the self and each other. Kimmy is a beloved art teacher at a large middle school. She is invested in Indigenizing her pedagogy as an art teacher. She had recently learned of her own Indigenous heritage, and was reconciling her lack of knowledge about this aspect of her identity. Like Russ, Susan also teaches in community, only Susan teaches at the middle school level. She is well respected for her Indigenizing efforts. Keith was fond of calling her one of the best teachers in the district at embedding Indigenous pedagogy and perspectives throughout her learning community. Finally, John is a transformative and influential high school educator who had recently taught First Peoples 12, and was a previous social justice chair for our local teaching association. Each of these educators was deeply committed to their students, and they were inspired to be change-makers. Each of us wanted to be part of a community that supported and encouraged us as we explored our teaching practices in relationship to the re-designed curricular plan. Tanaka (2016) writes that what is needed are more “opportunities where indigenous and non-indigenous people can walk alongside each other and learn together” (p. 196). Our community 14 was an effort at creating such an opportunity; we became a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous educators walking alongside each other as we learned about our teaching, our learning, our selves, and each other. We were a diverse and critically minded group. I believe that what made our time together so special was our desire to be deeply supportive of each other. The first time we came together we spoke openly about our passions to develop the quality of our relational awareness so that we might become better equipped to co-create curricular experiences that benefit each and every student. As we spoke during this first meeting, I wrote the following commitment to all of my relationships with Living in Circle in my journal: I see you. I value you. I care about you. (teaching journal, September 27th, 2017) This note echoed a description of a flourishing learning community (FLC) from Cherkowski and Walker (2018): Belonging to a group with whom we can derive meaning for our work, and, hopefully, our lives. We want to know that what we do matters. We want to know that we are seen and valued and that we are contributing to making a difference and helping to make our world a better place. (p. 98) Within the Living in Circle community, I felt respected and invited to truly be vulnerable when I shared my thinking. Forming these learning relationships was critical to my self-study and to upholding the spirit of the methodology more generally. Kitchen and Parker (2009) offer that “collaboration 15 among teachers has been part of self-study from its inception and is viewed as one of the defining characteristics of self-study” (p. 107). Schuck and Russel (2005) describe that engaging in continual dialogue with critical friends is essential to self-study, because it is impossible to escape our subjectivity and to reframe our own practices without the perspectives of others (p. 210). Attending to the dialogical nature of critical friends, Fuentealba and Russel (2016) explain that the relationship “champions the co-construction of knowledge through collegial inquiry, conversation, and collaborative reflection within a climate of mutual vulnerability and risk taking, trust and support (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1991; Bullough, Knowles, & Crow, 1991)” (p. 228). Re-storying. The conversations with the Living in Circle community involved me sharing my experiences with the FPPL that I had documented in my journal. These conversations helped me to uncover my values and assumptions about learning, so that I could attend to them and change them when I saw they were not serving me, my students, or my colleagues well. I audio-recorded and transcribed these conversations for further reflection on how those conversations were changing my perspectives. Through reflecting on my journal writing and the discussions with Living in Circle, I began to notice how I was re-storying my experiences and considering FPPL from a fresh perspective. Several themes emerged through re-storying as I was looking back and “seeing with fresh eyes and entering old texts with a new critical direction” (Strong-Wilson 2006, p. 59). Strong-Wilson (2006; 2007) explains this process is typical of self-study, and she describes her research with a group of teachers who together learned to transform their ‘touchstone stories,’ stories that are “formative of unconsciously held, perceptual “horizons” and thus not readily available to critique” (2007, p 115). Strong-Wilson’s research describes how touchstone stories are a part of 16 teachers’ colonial identities and that the “decolonization of stories entails that white teachers elicit those ‘touchstone’ stories that invisibly shape their perceptions of self and other (Strong-Wilson, 2006) and be confronted by a ‘counter-story’ (Smith, 1999, p. 2; Thomas, 2005, p. 242) that challenges the ‘master story’ (Greene,1995, p. 118) implicit in their touchstones” (Strong- Wilson, 2007, p. 116). Noticing my touchstone stories through the reflective process of analysing my reflections in my journal and through the Living in Circle conversations revealed several over-arching themes: considering the value of attending to worldview; expanding wellbeing; and embracing decolonization in learning. Attending to worldview referred to a process of knowledge-building through which we attend to our view of the world as both a gift and a limitation, and where we see the need for community to continue to evolve our knowledge. Expanding wellbeing involved recognizing, cherishing, and growing ethical connections as the pursuit of wellbeing. Embracing decolonization was an ongoing commitment to acts of freedom and agency for all, as opposed to accepting the various forms of reproduction that has characterized colonization in education. My journal entries were evidence of some of my touchstone stories and of habitual behaviours and thoughts that I aimed to change, and Living in Circle was the opportunity for me to gain further perspectives and insights to better enable my learning. Like the teachers in Strong-Wilson’s research, I recognized my touchstone stories through conversations with Living in Circle, and this helped me to adapt and change. Living in Circle was the community that supported me to build, shift, adapt and evolve and expand my thinking by strengthening my relationship to the FPPL, which ultimately led to me seeing new pedagogical possibilities for teacher education. 17 A pedagogy for teacher education. In my research, I used the term, teacher education, to refer to the broader experience of career-long learning, beyond pre-service teacher development that occurs in teacher education programs. In my experience, the ongoing nature of my teacher education lived in the practice of making sense of curriculum through ongoing questioning. Pinar (2012) described that through engaging in curricular inquiry teachers engage in “complicated conversations informed by self-reflective, interdisciplinary erudition” (p. 183). I interpreted Pinar to be describing all teachers at all careers phases who learn and grow as they ask questions about teaching and learning, and re-imagine their experiences through an open-ended process of theorizing through consideration of multiple perspectives. Loughran (2006) advocates for the possibility of self-study as a vehicle to develop a pedagogy of teacher education, and that “it is learning through experience that needs to be reflected upon and shared, as the nature of such deliberations within the teacher education learning community is critical to development” (p. 23). Reflecting on my learning through my self-study, I have identified four interrelated qualities that supported my approach to teacher education, and that I offer as an example of a pedagogy for teacher education. This pedagogy was grounded in my re-storied experiences with the FPPL as I attended to worldview, expanded my conception of wellbeing, and embraced decolonization. These experiences led to the articulation of four pedagogical practices: a) wisdom-seeking as a practice of engaging with the wisdom of Indigenous people, practices, policies; b) the practice of sharing personal truths; c) a reflexive practice of self-transformation by recognizing the relational nature of the self through listening; and d) creating conditions for communities to practice love and the absence of domination. Learning into these practices reflected how my sense of efficacy as a teacher, my 18 sense of my capacity to act, was supported by the experiences of learning that characterized this research. 1.5 The Significance of Valuing Teacher Knowledge Self-study was established in 1993 by a group of teacher educators who were interested in exploring the subjective nature of research. At that that time, they formed a special interest learning group called Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices (S-STEP). As per the name of the group, self-study is often a practice that is taken up by teacher educators, but the group is also open to the inclusion of the teaching experiences of teachers in the K-12 setting (Loughran, Hamilton, LeBoskey, & Russel, 2004). Despite this openness to educators from public school settings, examples are few and more are needed (Kitchen, 2020, p, 12). Attending to my experiences as an educator in a K-12 setting my research was an opportunity to really highlight the value of the experiences of teachers in the field to contribute to growing self-study as a methodology. Kitchen (2020) describes that “S-STEP adopts an ontological stance that places experience above theory as practitioners puzzle over practice in context, often with the support of critical friends and collaborators” (p. 11). My research offered an account of my experiences as an educator that led me to identify structures that might be helpful for inviting and supporting teachers to embrace the opportunities and challenges offered by Indigenized curriculums. There is an ample body of literature that illustrates that settler teachers often lack the needed knowledge, dispositions, resources, and administrative support to enact curriculum in ways that honour Indigenous perspectives (Battiste & Henderson, 2009; Deer, 2013; Cannon, 2013, Kanu, 2011). The findings from this research highlights how Canadian schools continue to be grounded in Euro-Western worldviews where little attention is given to considering Indigenous 19 perspectives beyond stereotyping and generalizing. I contend that these findings also illustrate a dire need in our teaching profession for teachers to see their role as sense-makers, rather than content deliverers, to engage in living out curriculum in ways that respond to the needs and passions of their students in their contexts and in relation to those around them. To shape this perception of teaching we need more “examples of teachers making decisions about their teaching with a greater connection to the social world” (Phelan, 2011, p. 214). My self-study research is an example of this way of living curriculum through authentic engagement with the FPPL and in connection to the social world. This self-study is significant in offering a storied example of the process of teacher(s) building knowledge together as research. In this way, I aimed to illustrate possibilities beyond the more traditional approach to teaching that seems to distance theory and practice and that establishes teachers as merely consumers of the theories of others (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009; Phelan, 2011). I hoped for my self-study to serve as a disruption to the safeguarding of these more traditional approaches to knowledge-generation through outside expertise (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009, p. 47). As I paid attention to my own agency for theorising and knowledge-building through my self-study, I was encouraged by the ongoing efforts I was seeing in the literature and among my colleagues to establish teachers as researchers who create new ways of understanding teaching and learning by generating knowledge within their own unique context and ways of knowing. Four Arrows (2008) describes dissertations reflecting this kind of research as ‘authentic’ dissertations. He advocates that authentic voices offer a great deal to the body of research, and should be recognized across disciplines as research by graduate students who seek to legitimize their ideas within academia. He argues that these authentic dissertations offer value through multiple modalities of theorizing and sharing research stories than are often presented through 20 the more traditional form of a dissertation (Arrows, 2008). I suggest that what is most significant about my research is that it offers a story about being a teacher that prioritizes experience through connecting with the social world and living in questions. Through this research, I aim to demonstrate the value of moving away from favored, dominant worldviews of teaching as a technical pursuit, and moving towards teaching as being fully present and responsive as we open ourselves to being changed by and through our encounters and our experiences with others. 1.6 Prioritizing Experience Attending to my experiences with the First Peoples Principles of Learning involved time, patience, and the valuing of experience. Dewey (1938) describes that there is an “organic connection between education and personal experience” (p.25), and this connection is often overlooked. He also cautioned that there is a need to clarify what is meant by experience as the term can become over-generalized. When I describe my research as prioritizing experience, I am referring to how I aimed for my research to support me in moving away from teaching ‘someone else's certainty’ (Phelan, 2005), and to move me instead toward thinking through my own challenges of better understanding the FPPL in my teaching and learning context. This kind of agency in teaching is sometimes overshadowed by efforts to (re)produce performances of teaching that are easily accessible for all teachers to copy. However, reproducing what someone else has done does not offer me genuine participation in new learning, and so reproduction does not feel terribly meaningful, evocative, or transformative. As a way of purposely valuing experience in my learning about how to engage with the FPPL in my teaching and learning context, I embraced the assumption that the complexity of teaching and learning calls for professional judgment and decision-making which can lead to improvement of education (Biesta 2015; Dunne 1997; Grumet, 2010; Phelan, 2005, 2011, 2015; Pinar 2012). 21 While the focus of this self-study is on myself as the learner, I aimed to notice the relational aspects of this learning experience. With a focus on the relational ‘I’, my attention to my experiences was neither fully inward or outward looking, but rather I sought improvement by focusing on the “space between the self and the practice engaged in” (Bullough & Pinnegar, 2001, p. 15). This was the relational space of experience, and it was a stance that thickened and developed as I learned to identify my connectedness to the social world more clearly. Connection to the social world. In my self-study, I committed to not being a ‘perfect stranger’ (Dion, 2007) teacher who distances herself from relationships out of fear of not having enough knowledge or experiences. Rather, I wanted to live with greater connection to the social, cultural, and political world around me. I wanted to recognize my agency in this world, to see my relationships, and to make changes towards justice. My research illustrated how my worldly connections happened at the level of day to day experiences as I engaged with my contexts and adapted to the needs of my environments. For instance, I paid attention to how the BC curricular plan was introduced about the same time as the nationwide Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015) report was released. This awareness led me to deepen my connection to relationships that were established and that I experienced in my work and life, but that were a result of historical practices of residential schooling. In noticing this connection, my understanding of my role as an educator expanded and became more political and complex in my thinking and acting. Living in questions. When teachers’ experiences are valued, curriculum can be enlivened as an “adaptive, changing, building process with other(s) that values curiosities and ensuing suggestions through generative sense-making” (Macintyre Latta, 2018, p. 37). The act of asking questions of myself focused my attention on my responsibility for exploring, explaining, 22 and transforming my thinking as an act of living the curriculum. As well, ongoing questioning shares an ontological stance with self-study. In self-study, researchers never stop asking questions in order to keep the possibilities of improving education at the forefront of all dialogue and sense-making. At the centre of the methodology is continually asking the question “how do I improve my practice?” (Whitehead, 1989). Whitehead’s insight to notice the important relationship between asking questions and improvement is also noted in other educational philosophies. Hansen (2015) encourages teachers to always live in questions, despite the pressure to want to come to conclusions. He writes that practices of education and the possibility of education must always be questioned and that “there is a special significance in living with it [the question of education] and in it, in holding it open despite the whirlwind internal and external pressures that can conspire to slam it shut” (p. 5). Hansen calls to educators to remain unsettled in their thinking about the nature of education and to continually ask why we practice education as we do. Through my research I asked questions as I explored the FPPL in hopes of enlivening a conversation about education and learning that moved away from “cultural norms of compliance and habit towards learning along unscripted lines” (Hansen, 2015, p. 7). Exploring my understanding of the FPPL by living in questions was an opportunity to move away from past teacher scripts that focused the majority of my attention on making sure that rules and routines and time schedules were followed. Such scripts often direct teachers to manage behavior by directing, correcting, and/or affirming students. By living in questions, I sought to respond, interpret, imagine, and think about my experiences without pre-determined expectations. Living in questions was “an invitation to risk one’s self-contained assumptions about education in favor of an outlook that is richer and more wondrous precisely because it is 23 not pre-set or predetermined” (Hansen, 2015, p.15). My research questions served as an impetus for my study and served as the contours for my research. I noticed that the questions continued to shift and change as my learning and my research grew. Valuing experience does not mean merely celebrating all aspects of teaching and learning. Rather, it means inviting “unwelcomed truths” (Mockler, 2011, 6). As I reflected on my journals and conversations, I noticed that many of my experiences brought with them emotions of shame and uncertainty as I noticed and reflected on my biases, my short-fallings, and my lack of awareness of Indigenous knowledge. I knew that the limits of my dominant worldview informed this research in ways that I had yet to uncover and that, regardless of my efforts to be self-aware, I knew the limits of my colonial teaching perspective. Yet again, it was within this context of possible critique and uncertainty that I recognized my vulnerabilities and shortcomings, and these illustrated the tender, complex, and evolving nature of experiences that are always in process. If learning is “a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing” (Dewey, 1897 as cited in Flinders and Thornton, p. 37), then perhaps it is how I chose to respond to my shortcomings and challenges that would ultimately be most important. 1.7 The Invitational Nature of Living in Circle The ongoing improvement of my practice through inquiry will continue to support me to re-imagine the story of what it means to be a teacher and what is possible for my students, for my colleagues, and for myself. I will always be uncertain of the impacts of my settler positionality on my teaching and how this positionality both creates and limits space for others to explore their own voice and identity. I am committed to the ongoing wondering about how my ways of being could create more space for others to explore their own voice and identity. Asking questions is 24 the best way that I know to make space for others and to attune myself to listen deeply. By asking questions and living in uncertainty, my research can be an ongoing process that may always continue. It is not a one and done endeavour. I am inspired by Wilson’s (2008) description of research as a “ceremony that [brings] relationships together” (p.8). Through this dissertation I aim to build learning relationships with other educators. I invite readers to join with me in ongoing inquiry, to join me and my colleagues in Living in Circle. Living in Circle created relationships that allowed me to confront my thinking in ways that offered opportunities for improving, deepening, stretching, and re-imagining knowledges and practices in ways that were unanticipated and worthwhile. This continual openness to learning created space for what Four Arrows (2008) aptly described as “mystery of knowledge” (p.5), the recognition that there is so much we don’t know and much we know but cannot describe. As an example from my context, I have learned that the Okanagan talking circle protocol is to always leave a space open for someone who might like to join the discussion. In the spirit of the ongoing, participatory, and communal nature of knowledge, I invite my readers into my research from their own perspectives and ways of knowing to join me in learning through the chapters that follow. Through this invitation I hope to create a sense of community through this writing, wherein myself and my readers are established as fellow learners who may walk alongside one another. Block (2018) writes, “invitation is not only a step in bringing people together, but it is also a fundamental way of being in community. It manifests the willingness to live in a collaborative way” (p. 122). In chapter two I provide an overview of the theoretical framework that supported my self-study. I describe how I understood curriculum as contested, situated and relational, and I highlight the curriculum theory that supports this claim. Further I describe how an attention to 25 ethics was critical to how I lived the curriculum. In chapter three, I outline my self-study methodology in more detail and share how I embodied practices of journal writing and critical friendships to re-story my thinking about learning. I describe how reflecting on my experiences led to the naming of the three themes of worldview, decolonization and wellbeing for how my thinking about learning deepened and changed through the FPPL. In chapter four I share the specific stories and conversations with Living in Circle that informed my three themes through a series of questions that were provoked by the First Peoples Principles of Learning. Finally, I conclude my dissertation with a description of the four qualities that make up a pedagogy for teacher education that I suggest offers a new orientation toward meaningful and engaged ongoing education for teachers. While my reader does not have the opportunity to experience Living Circle in real time, it is my hope that sharing my experiences and pedagogy through this research will inspire conversations and future circles that reflect the practices of truth-telling, relational-self-awareness, loving community, and wisdom-seeking that helped me imagine how I could improve my teaching practice and be a more confident curriculum creator through my understanding of the FPPL. Setting an invitational tone is important to me because I believe that the manner in which we communicate will sustain certain kinds of seeing, listening, and responding to each other and each particular situation (Van Manen, 1986). It is my hope that this introduction to my research serves as an invitation to continue to build knowledge beyond and through what I offer here. I hope that by framing my research as a continuing conversation and blurring the writing/creating/acting process that the boundaries across relationships will get closer. In this more intimate learning relationship, the role of the researcher becomes one of space-maker who 26 looks for new ways to engage in and share research stories. Such an invitation also holds true to the spirit of self-study methodology wherein the reader is essential in determining the degree to which we can rely on the concepts, methods, and inferences of the study (Samaras, 2011, p. 218). With that, I welcome you into the landscape of my stories, and I offer the beautiful words of Wagamese (2016): These stories… they are embers from all the relationships that have sustained and defined me. They are heart songs. They are spirit songs. And, shared with you, they become honour songs for the ritual ways that spawned them. Bring these words into your life. Feel them. Sit with them. Use them. (p.12) The stories I offer in the pages to follow are invitations to my reader; may they be taken in, and processed by way of authoring new stories by the reader about what is possible in education through their own experiences with The First Peoples Principles of Learning. 27 Chapter Two 2.1 Making Sense of Curriculum Understanding the pedagogical reasoning that underpins the teaching experience is fundamental to self-study (Loughran, 2006, p. 5). I see this understanding as interrelated to Armstrong’s (1990) metaphorical call to turn over the rocks in my garden to uncover the stories underneath the stones. This chapter represents my theoretical ‘rocks,’ the key theories from within the fields of curriculum theory that embodied and shaped my experiences with the First Peoples Principles of Learning. Within the context of my research, the notion of curriculum was a keystone concept. Discovering and learning from these theories informed my experiences as a teacher, graduate student, faculty advisor to teacher education students, and a passionate seeker of knowledge about teaching. These theories had a transformative effect on me, my research, and my beliefs about teaching. In this chapter, I explain my understanding of curriculum as a living relationship that made room for my inquiry into the First Peoples Principles of Learning. This conception of curriculum also included considerations of ethicality and teacher education. I begin with an overview of the FPPL and its relationship to the re-designed curriculum in BC. 2.2 The Need to Indigenize the BC Curriculum The introduction to the redesigned curriculum states that “Aboriginal5 perspectives and knowledge are both explicit and implicit in the redesigned curriculum and are evident in the 5 Celia Haig Brown (2017) describes that language has political implications and can/should be used strategically. I agree. Given that my writing took place over the course of several years, the language of naming groups of people (e.g., settler, First Peoples) and about ideas (e.g., dominant, Indigenous) have continued to change. For example, when I first started to frame my research, I used the language of Aboriginal. At the time in my local school district, we had an Aboriginal Education department, and each school collaborates with Aboriginal advocates. At a local discussion regarding reconciliation and education in my community, a Syilx speaker explained that he does not use the term Aboriginal because of an association of abnormal, non-original. Hearing this, I followed his lead with the intention to respect people’s autonomy to name themselves and our school board has also adapted the language of Indigenous. 28 rationale statements, goals, learning standards and some of the elaborations” (BC Ministry of Education, 2015, p.8). Further, the introduction describes that from kindergarten to grade 12 all BC students should experience Indigenous perspectives and knowledge as part of what they are learning regardless of grade and content (BC Ministry of Education 2016, pp.7-8). Indigenizing curriculum can be understood as a pedagogical practice wherein “every subject at every level is examined to consider how and to what extent current content and pedagogy reflect the presence of Indigenous peoples and the valid contribution of Indigenous knowledge” (Castellano, 2014, para.1). She further notes that “such an examination shifts the focus from remediating deficits in Indigenous students to addressing bias and omissions in the educational system” (para.1). In my self-study, I approached the First Peoples Principles as an opportunity to examine my core beliefs about teaching and learning and my practice of those beliefs. First Peoples Principles of Learning. Learning about the FPPL became a point of reflection for me in understanding the need for Indigenizing curriculum. The First Peoples Principles of Learning are a set of nine principles developed by the First Nations Education Steering Committee (FNESC): • Learning ultimately supports the well-being of the self, the family, the community, the land, the spirits, and the ancestors. • Learning is holistic, reflexive, reflective, experiential, and relational (focused on connectedness, on reciprocal relationships, and a sense of place). • Learning involves recognizing the consequences of one’s actions. • Learning involves generational roles and responsibilities. • Learning recognizes the role of indigenous knowledge. 29 • Learning is embedded in memory, history, and story. • Learning involves patience and time. • Learning requires exploration of one’s identity. • Learning involves recognizing that some knowledge is sacred and only shared with permission and/or in certain situations. Typically, the principles are presented as a one-page document that is most commonly distributed in the form of an 18" × 24" colour poster and displayed in classrooms. The principles were authored by FNESC, an independent, non-profit organization comprised of 111 members from diverse First Nations communities working on behalf of First Nations education in BC since 1992 (Grass, 2017, p. 4). FNESC plays an influential role in BC education as a policy and advocacy organization that represents and works on behalf of First Nations in British Columbia through their mandate to support First Nations students and advance First Nations education. (FNESC.ca). The First Peoples Principles of Learning were not specifically designed for the redesigned curriculum. They were initially designed and first offered to teachers across BC to support the course, English 12 First Peoples (FNESC, 2008). The rationale for creating the principles for this course was that First Peoples children, and all children, need to not only learn about First Peoples perspectives and cultures in schools, they need to learn through First Peoples pedagogy (Chrona, 2014). The principles were “articulated by Indigenous Elders, scholars, and knowledge-keepers to guide the development of the curriculum and the teaching of the course” (Chrona, 2014). The focus of the principles is on learning. There are no references or descriptions of teachers or students. However, as Chrona (2014) explains, the principles could be interpreted to 30 be pedagogical in nature. This means that the principles could inspire a particular way of teaching and learning. The Greek root words of pedagogy refer to “drawing out” or “guiding” as an orientation; a way of thinking and being an educator, drawing upon values and commitments such as respect for others and for wellbeing. As a pedagogical approach to learning the FPPL seem to highlight the value of reflection, experience and storytelling, as well as being concerned about our own and each other’s needs and wellbeing all at once. For example, after considering the FPPL, I began to develop my understanding of storytelling. To engage with story from a First Peoples perspective is not to merely read a story written from a First Peoples perspective. A reading alone does not necessarily relate to the FPPL’s emphasis on the experiential, reflexive, reflective nature of learning. Archibald (2008) explains that to engage with Indigenous story telling we need to attend to how we listen: Patience and trust are essential for preparing to listen to stories. Listening involves more than just using the auditory sense. We must visualize the characters and their actions. We must let our emotions surface. As the Elders say, it is important to listen with “three ears: two on the sides of our head and one that is in our heart. (p. 8) Likewise, the First Peoples Principles of Learning describe that learning involves time and patience and the commitment to learning from the wisdom of Elders is represented across several principles including: learning involves generational roles and responsibilities; and learning recognizes the role of indigenous knowledge. Taken as a whole, the principles represent diverse First Peoples perspectives. There is a recognition that while the principles of learning represent an attempt to identify common elements in the varied learning beliefs that prevail within particular First Peoples societies, it is “recognized that they do not capture the full reality of the approach used in any single First 31 Peoples society” (Chrona, 2014). This distinction is important to note because pan-representation of Indigenous practices and cultures have led to stereotyping and the appropriation of Indigenous perspectives, and so thinking about First Nations as an all-encompassing approach is problematic. However, FNESC continued to be committed to the value of the principles as long as they were considered within a local context. Thus, when the time came to redesign the BC curriculum, it was agreed that curricular design teams would reference the FPPL as an opportunity to recognise the importance of ensuring First Nations perspectives are evidenced and valued throughout all aspects of the curriculum. BC Ministry of Education describe that “curriculum writers need to consider the First Peoples Principles of Learning. The Ministry needs to ensure that First Nations ways of knowing are respected in all curriculum areas” (Chrona, 2014). Alongside the First Peoples Principles of Learning, the focus of the redesigned curriculum was on the development of educated citizens who are learning to be attentive to developing their own potential while also responsive to the well-being of others and society at large. To this end, the BC curricular plan orients teachers toward supporting student understandings of learning content through the engagement and development of core competencies of critical and creative thinking, communication, social responsibility, and self-awareness (BC Ministry of Education, 2017). Competency-focused curricula differ from content-focused curricula in that they are described as more humanistic and with a focus on ‘learning to be’ one's self (Faure, Herrera, Kaddoura, & Lopes 1972; Halbert & Kaser, 2015). This focus on growing greater self-understanding amplified my hope that the BC curriculum could be transformational for Indigenous students and all students. With the understanding that each student has different 32 strengths, needs, and context, a curriculum that focuses on competencies calls forth a more flexible and open-ended approach to teaching and learning. There could be greater sensitivity and responsivity to the needs of individual students such as Indigenous students who may have been overlooked through previous curricular approaches. At a higher level, I imagined that as students inquired into the nature of the self, community, and world in ongoing ways that seem relevant to them, they might begin to recognise and start to understand inequities in ways that called them to restore justice through their personal commitments to improving their world. Indian Residential Schools. The accounts of Indian Residential Schools (IRS) that were made public through the TRC report (2015) were integral to my thinking about the need for an Indigenized curriculum. The Canada wide Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report (TRC) (2015) shares accounts of Indian Residential Schools (IRS) survivors who attended the schools between 1929 and 1996. I read the first-person accounts that were offered through the report. The stories highlight the pain and suffering experienced by First Peoples children and their families when children were removed from their homes and communities to be indoctrinated into Euro-Christian education. At these schools, the curriculum was a process of socialization for the dominant culture at all costs. In the report, the survivors courageously describe the lasting impact of IRS on their lives and on their families. It seems that the beliefs about curriculum of that time had a devastating impact on the children and families who were forced to attend these schools and experienced a loss of culture, family ties and identity. Through reading the accounts of the survivors describing practices of hair cutting, cultural shaming, starvation, and violence that happened in those schools, I became keenly aware of the violent nature of past curricular embodiments. I could also better understand how current 33 settler commitments to Western culture, logic, and reason continue to result in a dehumanizing of the school experience for Indigenous children as well as many others. I could see, for the first time, that the legacy of residential schools has a contemporary life force that continues to impact Indigenous teachers, students, and communities. This occurs through intergenerational trauma and also through the continued marginalization and often absence of opportunities to learn about Indigenous cultures and knowledges within public schools. For me, the brave survivor stories challenged the myth of Canadian schooling as a fair and justice-oriented system that is based on cultural inclusivity, and revealed a school system that is built on assimilation and racism. All this informed my curricular sense-making. Wang (2010) describes that the ultimate paradox of learning is that the healing of pain often stems from reliving and re-experiencing the pain so that we can process the heaviness of the past and so that it can be balanced with the lightness of the future. This lightness comes from the intentional returning to the past we can nurture a more conscious and creative relationship with the present. Reading these accounts, I reflected on how curriculum can facilitate relationships to knowledge that empower and privilege those in control at the expense of all others. The stories of survivors gave historical context to continued evidence that describes the effects of consistent lack of consideration of First Peoples perspectives in schools. This includes significant and detrimental impacts on the graduation rates and on the health and wellbeing of contemporary Indigenous students (Tanaka, 2016, pp. 5-6 in Cowley & Easton, 2006; Statistics Canada, 2005a, 2005b as cited in Tanaka, pp. 5-6). By making these connections, I recognized that I needed to unpack how I hoped to live the curriculum in order to become better attuned to the needs of others, and to imagine curriculum in new ways. 34 2.3 Curriculum as a Living Process A primary understanding that surfaced for me as I concretely negotiated the First Peoples Principles of Learning and learned about the history of curricular violence through Indian Residential Schools, was the need for me to establish a re-conception of curriculum more broadly. The practice of studying and reflecting on conceptions of curriculum has a deep theoretical lineage and “to understand curriculum, ‘requires reading’-i.e. interpreting—those discourses produced by the field. ‘Practice itself is a text in this sense’” (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, Taubman, 2000, p. 50). Along with my teaching practices, my own theory of curriculum was being influenced by reading about curriculum scholars who argue for a new direction in the study of curriculum that is referred to as the reconceptualization of curriculum. Reconceptualization of Curriculum. My evolving understanding of curriculum as a living, relational experience that is always in the making was influenced by notions of reconceptualizing curriculum that developed during the late 1970’s as a critique of conceptions of curriculum as merely a product that teachers need to implement. The reconceptualization of curriculum scholarship moved away from an application model of knowledge in favour of understanding knowledge as an ongoing human-made process that is always in the making through the relationships in which we are living. Dewey’s (1938) primary notion of experience as an ongoing process of learning has been essential in moving forward reconceptualized curricular understandings. For Dewey, experience is a process of multiple relationships, and understanding an experience means that all aspects of the experience require holistic attention. In this conception both content and the learner are held with equal importance as they are connected through experience. When teachers understand the child and the curriculum as interdependent, they “abandon the notion of subject-matter as 35 something fixed and ready-made in itself, outside of the child's experience; cease thinking of the child's experience as also as something hard and fast” (Dewey, 1902, p. 16). Instead, both the child and the curriculum can be understood by the teacher as interconnected, fluid entities that should not be separated, but engaged hand in hand. When we are living the curriculum, the teacher is keenly aware of identity as well as subject matter. Based on the observed interplay of person and curriculum the teacher then creates environments that welcome opportunities for identity and content to bump up against each other in ways that promote reflective learning. This continual playing within the experience can support a more in-depth and rich understandings of both self and the world (Dewey, 1938; Macintyre Latta, 2013). The term living curriculum is also an indication of the primacy of experiences and is often associated with the work of Aoki (2004c) who explained that a central aim of curriculum should be to “contribute to the aliveness of the school as lived by teachers and students” (p. 165). Attending to living relations includes attending to the “personal, historical, social, and political context of these relations” (Pinar, 2015, pp. 111-112). Living curricular enactments as the embodiment of our relationships means that learning is always partial and needs to be continually called into question as it is being lived out. Teachers and students co-participate in knowledge-making through “adapting, changing, building and creating meaning together” with colleagues and students (Macintyre Latta, 2013, p. 2). The living nature of curriculum is dialogical in that it is a relational and active process of change. Bohm (1996) reflects on the nature of dialogue when he describes: Even one person can have a sense of dialogue within himself, if the spirit of the dialogue is present. The picture or image that this derivation suggests is of a stream of meaning flowing among and through us and between us. This will make possible a flow of 36 meaning in the whole group, out of which will emerge some new understanding. It's something new, which may not have been in the starting point at all. It's something creative. And this shared meaning is the 'glue' or 'cement' that holds people and societies together. (p. 2) Such a description of dialogue highlights how meaning-making can evolve by attending to all interactions with others and our self. This reflective process is situated within the particularities of the experience. Pinar (2011) describes that each learner “brings to whatever is being studied his or her own prior knowledge, present circumstances, interest… and disinterest” (p. 1). Thus, when we are living the curriculum, the role of the teacher is to be aware of identity, as well as subject matter. This is why responsiveness and teacher receptivity are so important within the curricular experience. Macintyre Latta, Schnellert, Ondrik, and Sasges (2017) are educators who document how they live the curriculum in their learning community. They speak to the importance of receptivity in their teaching and learning, not as an instrumental or applied skill, but rather as a practice “to see with and act on the possibilities” (p.12). They explain that receptive educators have the capacity “to draw connections across particular learning experiences and realities, to converse meaningfully with other(s), and build and articulate defensible understandings, [that] must be actively enacted and brought into being” (p. 12). Understanding curriculum as a living experience that can be more fully understood through responsive, receptive, and relational teaching shifts the conceptualization of curriculum away from the more traditional and influential conceptions of curriculum and instruction that are more technical in nature. For example, Tyler’s (1965) theories have been widely translated to become a stand, deliver, and assess curricular model. This popular model of curriculum holds the assumption that curricular outcomes can be controlled and tested in a standardized fashion. 37 This traditional stance often supports high stake testing, and leaves little room for personalized, or culturally relevant teaching and learning. Throughout the history of schooling, ‘stand and deliver’ models of curriculum implementation have largely been normalized and are deeply entangled within the dominant cultural conception of education (Doll, 1993). When knowledge is understood as something that is created outside of the classroom, the social nature of knowledge is masked and curriculum loses opportunities for richness, recursion, relations, and rigor (Doll, 1993, p. 216). Curriculum loses a human connection as it becomes more automated. Tyack and Cuban (1995) described how the ‘grammar of schooling’ makes the situatedness of curriculum hard to recognize. The grammar they describe includes practices such as age-graded school scheduling, short blocks of time for instruction, testing, and the delivery of standardized knowledge regardless of place or the identity of students, educators, and the community. The grammar of school focuses an educator’s attention on pacing their instruction in order to cover the prescribed content they were expected to teach with the acceptance that delving deeply into content was something that might have to be sacrificed in order to get through all of the content. Curricular practices such as lecturing, following textbooks, quizzes, and homework are inherent to the traditional grammar of schooling because they are all means of disseminating and collecting masses of information. I know this grammar well as it describes how I was educated and how I learned to teach. Learning to embrace a living approach to the First Peoples Principles of Learning was, at times, a struggle as I found the grammar of traditional schooling hard to move away from. I particularly noticed this struggle in the language I used to describe the redesigned curriculum. When I first began my inquiry, I kept using the term implementation to describe my curricular challenge, which I later reflected was a consumer metaphor as is curriculum delivery. I wondered 38 if my attachment to this language suggested that I did sometimes think of the curriculum as a technical process that was predictable and measurable. Over time, my use of language changed to be more reflective of curriculum as a living process which guided my inquiry forward tremendously. I think an understanding of living the curriculum was so helpful for my inquiry because there is a kinship between the FPPL and an understanding of living the curriculum. Macintyre Latta (2018) describes this kinship: The curricular opportunities to learn from Indigenous peoples’ experiences and perspectives offer transformative understandings that embrace the primacy of investing in classrooms as sites for disrupting colonial relationships and promoting relationship-building with Indigenous peoples. (Archibald, 2008; Donald, 2009; Hare, 2016; Lowan-Trudeau, 2014; Ragoonaden & Mueller, 2017). So, it is within these sites that I encounter much kinship between Indigenous ways of knowing and being with curricular enactment, understood as entering into complicated conversations and attending to the aesthetics of human understanding through adapting, changing and building co-curricular meaning-making (Cannon, 2012; Cohen 2001; Donald, 2009; Dion, 2009; Hare, 2016). I used the term living curriculum throughout my dissertation to refer to the process of learning to create my own account of curriculum that would support me to build my relationship with the FPPL through my experiences. These experiences were distinct from the First Peoples Principles of Learning as a curricular document, because they involved the diverse and dynamic elements of my identity and context, and the influence of the Living in Circle community. In the next section, I provide an overview of the theories of curriculum that informed the development of my sense of making of the FPPL as a living curriculum. This practice is sometimes called currere. Currere, as conceptualized by Pinar and Grumet (1976), is an inquiry 39 methodology for mapping the relationship between one’s life history, experience, and knowledge about learning environments in ways that create significant or transformative change for the participant through their sense-making. Pinar and Grumet’s articulation of currere methods involves four steps: regressive (memory work), progressive (looking to the future), analytical (compare step one and two with the present) and synthetical (moving one’s self towards a higher level of awareness and being). Norris and Sawyer (2012) add that this process occurs in relationship to others and to greater educational narratives around teaching and learning but rather in close relationship to them (p. 10). 2.4 Currere: Making/Living My Own Theory In 2017, the British Columbia Teachers Federation (BCTF) released a report that indicated that educators shared concerns about the challenges of implementing the redesigned curriculum which “exposed a crucial gap in understanding the process of curriculum change from teachers’ perspectives” (p.7). The BCTF urged teachers to re-imagine their understanding of curriculum to better understand what the BC curricular change entailed. The BCTF offered educators the following description of curriculum to anchor these efforts: We understand curriculum as a contested, relational, and situated practice (Chambers, 2012; Kanu, 2012; Pinar, 2015). Curriculum change, in turn, refers to both explicit and implicit shifts within a historical moment as to what is taught (e.g. curricular content) as well as how teaching happens (e.g. increasing reliance on technologies). (p.7) In my reading of this description, the BCTF signaled an alignment between their understanding of curriculum and the understanding that emerged within the progressive education movement. This positioning of curriculum as contested, situational, and relational offered a worthwhile framework to support my desire to understand the First Peoples Principles of Learning through 40 my self-study. I imagined the three concepts in relationship and I depicted this relationship in a circle, with each concept related to and blending with the next one (Figure 1). Figure 1: Representation of the Living Curriculum Wilson (2008) describes that when ideas are shared in a circle it implies that “the ideas flow from one to the next in a cyclical fashion. A change in one affects the others, which in turn affects new change in the original. All parts of the circle are equal; No part can claim superiority over, or even exist without, the rest of the circle” (p. 70). In what follows I bring these conceptions to life as they illuminated my experiences engaging in curriculum scholarship and with the FPPL. Curriculum as contested. There are many different theories and perspectives in education that describe what should be taught, how and why. These theories are all contestable and noticing the differences in understanding can result in questioning the aims and ways of curriculum. This contention is a good thing in that it can enlarge our thinking through multiple perspectives so that we may avoid “the conflation of one’s experience with "reality," and to CONTESTEDSITUATEDRELATIONAL 41 remind one of one’s being-in-the-world, one's situatedness, as historical, existential, and circumstantial” (Phelan, 2015, p. 35). As a settler educator, I had the privilege of teaching from within a worldview that was known, comfortable and familiar to me as the dominant worldview, the one that was naturalized as the appropriate way of knowing the world. Cannon (2012) points out that naming our stances and claims about curriculum is important. He writes, “Canadians must come to know and understand the privilege of not having to know, name, or otherwise mark their subjectivity and positionality relative to the ongoing project of settler colonialism” (p. 22). Before my inquiry, I had not recognized the extent of injustice inflicted on others who may live within a different worldview, whose ways of knowing and being are not reflected or counted as valid through what I was teaching when I presented knowledge to students without perspective-taking or reflection—without contest. The First Peoples Principles of Learning influenced my awareness of curriculum as a contested, polyvocal conversation. Historically, curriculum has been normalized to reproduce settler perspectives through privileging European worldviews about knowledge. Evidence of this bias has been documented across education and is particularly tangible in accounts of history, science, and geography (Four Arrows, 2013, p. 214). Reflecting on my own practice, I could remember experiences where I facilitated learning about how to map and name places in the world through an exclusively Eurocentric lens by only using colonial maps and names of places. Veracini (2011) explained that “settlers do not discover: they carry their sovereignty and lifestyles with them. As they move towards what amounts to a representation of the world, as they transform the land into their image, they settle another place without moving” (p. 206). The FPPL opened me to experiences through which I began to see how Western epistemologies dominated my curricular enactment in the classroom. For example, the certainty of how we 42 named the geography of our places left no space for contesting this way of knowing geography. There was no room for students or for me to even question the possibility of other ways of mapping the world. The opposite of a contested understanding of curriculum is a naturalized one. The lack of a desire to discover described by Veracini (2011), and the settler privilege of not having to know described by Cannon (2012), empower what Battiste (2011) calls universalized approaches to knowledge or cognitive imperialism. She defines cognitive imperialism as a racism bolstered by a lack of understanding of the complexities of modern thought by marginalizing all non-Western forms of thinking. Bluntly put, cognitive imperialism is “forced assimilation… ‘white-washing’ the brain” (Battiste, 2011, p. XIX). The following recount offered by Nishnaabeg scholar Simpson (2014) shares her sense of coercion from being schooled in ways that were Eurocentric and that did not recognize her Nishnaabeg ways of knowing. She describes her K-12 education as one of, coping with someone else's agenda, curriculum, and pedagogy, someone who was neither interested in my homeland, my language or history, nor my Nishnaabeg intelligence. No one ever asked me what I was interested in nor did they ask me for my consent to participate in their system. (Simpson, 2014, p. 6) As I learned more about contested curriculum, I saw that when curriculum is embraced as a contested space, voices such as Simpsons and her claims about her education are welcomed and they serve to create a more just future. Adding more voices to curricular discussions, I began to question curriculum more deeply, more broadly, and more holistically to combat the enduring impact of colonization on the psychological, cultural, and developmental dimensions of human life. Embracing voices of contention deepened my connection to an established understanding 43 that past Canadian curricula has promoted, and thus protected, a colonial history (Butler, Ng-A-Fook, Vaudrin-Charette & McFadden, 2015, p. 45). An understanding of the contested nature of curriculum is to attend to, and genuinely value, the many different voices that make up a community, including difficult and painful stories. This means welcoming a ‘curriculum of difficulty’ that may reveal frustrations, sadness, anger, and attachment, and that makes room for students to show up as unique individuals engaged in self-discovery that goes beyond our classroom, into the world community (Fowler, 2006). As well, living the contested nature of curriculum involves unearthing stories that are absent, because too many people have suffered consequences of being excluded from the creation of definitions over time. Living the First Peoples Principles of Learning through this self-study was a continual struggle for meaning that involved ongoing questioning of taken for granted assumptions of what is a settler approach to education and how might I expand my practice beyond these limits. These questions were not intended to be resolved, but rather to serve as ongoing questions that I can be asking of myself and others about education. Hansen (2015) writes that it is the process of asking questions that requires one to position oneself (as much as possible) outside of her culture that allows for education, which in Latin educare means to lead out (p. 7). The practice of questioning curriculum holds within it the opportunity to lead learning away from cultural norms and habits in favour of wondering, responding to the world, interpreting, imagining, questioning, and thinking. Questioning, Hansen (2015) explains, holds within it “an invitation to risk one’s self-contained assumptions about education in favor of an outlook that is more rich and wonderous, precisely because it is not pre-set or predetermined” (p.15). Curriculum as situated. Curriculum is lived in a specific place and time and understanding. This situatedness welcomes attention to Land and community. While the norms 44 and habits of education, what Tyack and Cuban (1995) describe as the ‘grammar of schooling,’ make this situatedness hard to recognize, Land-conscious education recognizes the deep connection between people, learning and the Land. Living the curriculum involves cultivation and observation of the relationship between people and the Land through which knowing and learning occurs. Cajete (2000) explains that knowledge and science are written onto landscapes that Indigenous languages “talk into being” through the “individual and collective consciousness of our communities” (p. 284). Our landscapes are the storied histories, philosophies and sciences of Indigenous knowledges and the living the curriculum moves through these relationships. Styres (2011) asserts that Land is the first teacher and that this premise can be, “easily adapted to any geographical space because it is land in all of its abstract and concrete fluidity and shifting realities that informs pedagogy” (p. 728). Styres, Haig-Brown, and Blimkie (2013) explain that there are multiple ways to engage the question of Land as curriculum and that this is an encounter that reclaims Indigenous knowledge. They write: Students engage the question of Land through (re)membered experiences and placed stories; (re)claiming Indigenous knowledge through interactions by way of Land-centred activities such as smudging and storytelling; re-membering their childhood connections to Land; learning to resist and (re)vision the conventional dichotomy often applied to Land (i.e. the natural world versus the built world); as well as (re)cognizing and (re)constructing those very old pedagogies around different, innovative perspectives that help students find new ways to interact with Land in their own teaching. (p.58) Seeking to understand my particular place as the lens through which I came to understand the FPPL, I spent a great deal of time on the Land over the course of my research. As I approached the First Peoples Principles of Learning as situated within the Okanagan, I looked 45 closely at the distinctiveness of this place and looked towards the people who lived here as my guide. For me, the concept of situatedness was closely related to notions of distinctiveness in that there is a call for attention to the details of the present moment as well as the past. This attention is important because there is a tendency when it comes to the FPPL to describe them as good practice that teachers are already doing. I remember the first time I read the First Peoples Principles of Learning as a middle school teacher. I felt that the principles represented everything that I stood for in education. I related to them from my own perspectives on wellbeing, story etc. However, through my self-study research I learned to foster a more profound awareness of how my settler ways of knowing and the settler educational contexts blindsided me from understanding the principles from a more authentic perspective that honours First Peoples epistemologies. Reading Kerr and Parent’s (2018) account of the FPPL, I learned that other educators have the same response. Kerr and Parent (2018) explain “that when teachers explain that ‘we are already doing this’, they minimize the power of the Indigeneity in the document… erase the distinctiveness of Indigeneity in the FPPL through a lens of what we would term cultural difference. When the differences are seen as cultural - simply different versions of the same thing expressed in different cultural ways - there is an erasure of the unique contributions that are being made” (p. 41). In contrast to taking the stance of generalizing the FPPL as good teaching practice are examples of teachers collaboratively growing and shifting their perspectives and creating situated knowledge of the First Peoples Principles of Learning. Such an account was offered by Schnellert, Kozak, and Moore (2015) who described a project called the Aboriginal Early Literacy Project that was a collaboration between 22 grade one settler teachers and 20 46 Aboriginal advocates. In their experience, FPPL was the framework through which participants’ co-learning was nurtured and anchored. For example, the principle, learning involves patience and time became an enduring principle that guided “the building of relationships and community; invitations to (re)examine potentialities for aboriginal advocates to have a more meaningful place in classrooms; and pedagogical knowledge development related to children’s literacy” (Schnellert et al., p. 222). In this instance, the collaborative impact of inquiring into the language of the First Peoples Principles of Learning connected teachers from across the province in ways that honoured the subjective nature of “helping teachers see and discuss their beliefs, assumptions and learning” (Schnellert et al., p. 232) and to grow new understandings. Curriculum as relational. Relationality arises “not merely as a function of an individual consciousness at work but as a by-product of the interaction, the relations, between and among persons in particular contexts” (Stengel, 2010, p. 141). Curriculum theorists often personalize their descriptions of relationality through metaphors and stories that make the nuances and possibilities of relationships more visible. For example, Martusewicz (2001) described how recognizing the relational nature of curriculum and seeing relationships created opportunities for new openings and ‘passageways’ in teaching and learning. Wang (2004) depicted the relational gap as the ‘third space of curriculum’. Macintyre Latta (2013) describes the ‘needed play’ in all curricular relationships, and Seidel and Jardine (2014) illustrate curriculum as ‘miracles’. Undergirding these theories are understandings that there are continual and important negotiations happening between curriculum as plan and as the lived experience because of the complexities of all of the different relationships that meet up through this encounter. Biesta (2010) argues that it is these relationships that matter most and “relation is always more real than the things it brings together” (p. 5). Put another way, it seems that curriculum-making is 47 relationship-making. I extended my thinking about the value of the relationship through Wilson’s (2008) observations that, “the more relationships between yourself and the other thing, the more fully you can comprehend its form, and the greater your understanding becomes” (p. 79). Aoki (2004b) described the capacity to see curriculum in this way as ‘emergent becoming’ (p.110), collectively coming to new understandings and ways of being. Aoki was highlighting that change is happening in the present moment and through relationships of self, subject, and community. The natural co-creation that emerges from relationships requires room for thinking and feeling. Within these processes, meaning is not predetermined or fixed, but instead is always in the making. Donald’s scholarship offers opportunities reframing curriculum so that our understandings better serve the needs and priorities of Indigenous communities. His work has been of great influence on me, and informed and inspired my thinking about the role of relationality in living the curriculum. Donald (2009) describes how fort teachings find expression in the stories told to children in classrooms through the curriculum that offers students a divided view of the world. Fort pedagogy is teaching and learning that maintains barriers between Indigenous content and settler content, and does not meaningfully consider Indigenous perspectives as living, ongoing and contextual (p. 4). Donald offers that “teachers, now confronted with the spectre of Aboriginal perspectives in their classrooms, are naturally finding it difficult to relinquish the more comfortable stories of Canada that they have been told and grown accustomed to telling” (p. 4). Living the curriculum as inherently contestable does not lend itself to the logics of fort pedagogy, but rather makes room for questioning assumptions about settler knowledge as a fundamental practice, and a way to grow out of the hold of traditions. 48 Donald (2012a) describes dominant settler narratives that are continually enforced in schools as ‘colonial frontier logic,’ the story that settlers maintain to represent their perception of equal opportunity in Canada that starts with how they understand the development of most of Canadian towns as fur-trade forts. Colonial frontier logic offers a validation of settler positionality with the logic that each fort was developed through equal opportunity—everyone had opportunities to build the forts that then grew into what settlers reported as ‘civilization.’ The fort people are remembered as settlers who took the opportunities available at the time and those outside of the forts, First Peoples, are remembered as having lacked a desire and ability to progress and develop. Having an awareness and understanding of this logic is one way to move away from it and to make space for a more ethical understanding of relationality. An ethical understanding remembers how these historical spaces were, in reality, built through relationships between First Peoples and settlers, even though they have been storied as separate spaces, where settlers were on the inside, and First Peoples were outside of developing society. Donald (2009) explains that a number of policy shifts seem to be asking for a reimagining of frontier logics: Historical, social, and cultural understandings of the concepts of fort and frontier have become conflated with ways of organizing and separating people according to race, culture, and civilization. The enduring message is that Aboriginal peoples and Canadians occupy separate realities. A critical social issue now being acknowledged by governments and jurisdictions across Canada concerns the roles that Aboriginal peoples, communities, and their diverse perspectives can and will play in the future of Canadian society. Provincial governments across Canada have recently introduced significant policy shifts in their curriculum documents that require meaningful consideration and 49 exploration of Aboriginal perspectives across subject areas. Suddenly, the fort walls have become permeable. (p. 4) Donald (2012 a) chronicles the colonial frontier logic as the story of Canada: “European Global Exploration= Trade= Settlement= Cultural Diffusion= Civilization= Progress= Freedom= Economic Prosperity= Development” (p. 96). Importantly, for the ongoing belief of the story, anyone who tries to reject this story is understood to be against freedom and economic prosperity. All educators need to “pay closer attention to the multiple ways our human sense is constructed through the minutiae of day-to-day events and through the stories and interactions which are imbued with an organic principle of reciprocity, and hence ethical responsibility for a shared future” (p. 102). There are other educational theorists that also explore the implications of the lack of recognition of relationality between Indigenous and settlers for Canada, and whose research reveals that the resulting stories about who we are that have emerged are deeply troubling. For example, Decter and Isaac (2015) offer an account of how settler perspectives “have calcified into reductive mythologies that substantiate colonial claims of entitlement and superiority” (Decter & Isaac, 2015, p. 102). Scott (2013) offers a picture of what this narrative looks like when it is lived in the classroom when he recounts his research on settler teachers: My research participants [settler educators] communicated that it was not always necessary to afford room for Aboriginal perspectives in the curriculum. They argued this is best undertaken when studying a historical event or issue where Aboriginal groups were specifically involved. Because the content they were addressing, namely assessing the economic and environmental impacts of globalization (Alberta Education, 2007), did 50 not explicitly implicate these groups, the teachers felt it was therefore not necessary to engage Aboriginal perspectives concerning this topic. (p.32) It seems to me, that through such a reading of the curriculum described by those teachers and their ideas about what needs to be covered, students are taught to celebrate a civilization processes, through the logic of the fort. They then learn to see that this way of thinking represents the standard for progress and development. When I looked to my time as a K-12 teacher, I recognized that there are many ways that I carried forward the traditional grammar of depersonalized curriculum. There were many times that I focused on skills or content at the expense of excavating and inviting stories of human connections. In the next section of this literature review, I add one further concept to my conception of curriculum, and that is my ethical obligation to living the curriculum. An ethical stance is part of the fabric of living the curriculum. Pinar explains that all educators have an “ethical obligation to care for ourselves and our fellow human beings, [and] that [obligation] enables us to think and act with intelligence, sensitivity, and courage… as individuals committed to other individuals” (Pinar, 2012, p. 190). As I lived the curriculum, I learned to continually consider what knowledge I was valuing and who benefited from my pursuits. In the following section, I highlight the importance of taking an ethical stance while living the curriculum and how theories of decolonization, ecological imagination, and appreciation offered insights that deepened my ethical considerations. 2.5 Ethical Considerations for Living the Curriculum Twenty years ago, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1991) put forth the following statement to the Canadian public within the context of an extensive report on settler/First Peoples relations: 51 Canada enjoys a reputation as a special place - a place where human rights and dignity are guaranteed, where the rules of liberal democracy are respected, where diversity among peoples is celebrated. But this reputation represents, at best, a half-truth. A careful reading of history shows that Canada was founded on a series of bargains with Aboriginal peoples - bargains this country has never fully honoured. Treaties between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal governments were agreements to share the land. They were replaced by policies intended to ...remove Aboriginal people from their homelands. ...suppress Aboriginal nations and their governments. ...undermine Aboriginal cultures. ...stifle Aboriginal identity. It is now time to acknowledge the truth and begin to rebuild the relationship among peoples on the basis of honesty, mutual respect and fair sharing. The image of Canada in the world and at home demands no less. (Looking Forward, Looking Back, para. 3). The report called for a reimagining of relationality, one that would bring people together by recognizing the systems of injustice created and maintained through our relationships. The report made clear that there are many societal benefits of realizing that collective harm the comes from not valuing or recognizing Indigenous perspectives. Despite the depth and scope of the report, settler understandings of their role in this relationship remained largely rooted in “historical myths and colonial mindsets” (Regan, 2010 p. 6) that perpetuate separation between the two groups to the advantage of settlers. Reflecting on Regan’s critique of social change in Canada, I wondered how documents such as the First Peoples Principles of Learning might elicit genuine transformation. Could living the FPPL be an act of decolonization wherein control is no longer 52 imposed or predetermined, but rather is re-found within the agency of learning for students and teachers by building new relationships? 2.6 Decolonization Decolonization involves transforming existing Eurocentric pedagogical frameworks by validating Indigenous knowledges and epistemologies (Battiste, 2013; Tuhiwai Smith, 1999, 2012) as do the First Peoples Principles of Learning. However, moving from being a document to a process of decolonization is complex and often elusive. Tuck and Yang (2012) assert that living decolonization is rare and more often an act of metaphor. They explain: Decolonization is accountable to Indigenous sovereignty and futurity. Still, we acknowledge the questions of those wary participants… who want to know what decolonisation will require of them. The answers are not fully in view and can't be as long as decolonization remains punctuated by metaphor. (p. 35) Tuck and Yang (2012) examine settler approaches to relationality as a lack of commitment to decolonization. They express the need to decolonize relationships and “not converting Indigenous politics to a Western doctrine of liberation; it is not a philanthropic process of ‘helping' the at-risk and alleviating suffering; it is not a generic term for a struggle against oppressive conditions and outcomes” (p. 21). Tuck and Yang explain that discussions of settler relationships that are metaphorical, where settler see themselves as helpers, are merely efforts to alleviate settler guilt and are self-serving. They critique: strategies or positionings that attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege, without having to change much at all. In fact, settler scholars may gain professional kudos or a boost in their 53 reputations for being so sensitive or self-aware. Yet settler moves to innocence are hollow; they only serve the settler. (p. 21) Tuck and Yang’s exposition of decolonization was critical to my engagement with the FPPL. I aimed to not respond defensively to their claims. Instead, I considered them deeply by asking how I might be unconsciously striving to remove myself from guilt and responsibility as a settler educator through the FPPL. I recognized the that FPPL needed to be a guide for enhancing the agency and sovereignty of Indigenous people and not be co-opted for the gain of continuing to live my dominant worldview with less guilt. It was my responsibility to understand how my relationships to the principles were building these possibilities, and how I was forming relationships in a good way or with a high degree of attention to ethical relationality. By ethical relationality, I refer to a decolonizing stance that involves paying close attention to how we live together and holding up these established relationships to ensure that all are benefiting from them. Donald (2012a) advises that there is a need for a “new or renewed ethical framework that clarifies the terms of which we can speak to each other on these pressing issues of shared concern” (p. 103). When we are considering the ethic of relationships it helps to imagine an ecology. Donald (2016) explains that relational ethics is ecological because, an ecological understanding of organic connectivity that becomes readily apparent to us as human beings when we honor the sacred ecology that supports all life and living. Thus, ethical relationality describes an enactment of ecological imagination wherein our thoughts and actions are guided by the wisdom of sacred ecological insights. Ecological relationality does not deny difference, nor does it promote assimilation of it. (p. 11) Ecological imagination. An ecological imagination invites community members to see themselves as part of the living system of the world, to see each other as interconnected and to 54 consider this connectedness when making decisions (Donald, 2012a). It also invites a way of seeking and seeing how connectivity, balance and reciprocity are key to thriving, ethical systems, and how either/or frameworks need to be abandoned. Either/or ideas about settler/Indigenous or insider/outsider, us/them are binaries that need to give way to “organic tensions in motion” (p. 105). Through tensions in motion, ideas, identities, and experiences colliding new ethical relationships are possible. Likewise, Kanu (2012) also sketches a conception of imagination in which “people come to know, understand, and experience themselves as members of a community” (p. 210). According to Kanu (2012) we need to shift the constructions of imaginaries so that we can reshape how individuals participate in the social world where “This imagining of ourselves as a community participating, interpreting ourselves, and creating knowledge together is critical to curriculum reform in a postcolonial context” (p. 219). Lens of appreciation. Finally, my thinking about the ethics of living the curriculum was influenced by the work of Cherkowski and Walker (2014) whose research makes apparent the power of positive lenses such as appreciation in educational change. Cherkowski and Walker (2014) offer that change is possible through an intentional shift in how we see the world. They explain: we are able to shape our lives, for good or for bad, for right or for wrong, for virtue and for viciousness, all based on how we perceive, react to and talk about our experiences… Shifting how we think, imagine and talk about communities in schools may shift how we perceive and experience the learning and growth that goes on within them (p. 6). Appreciation of Indigenous perspectives and experiences is essential for ethically living the curriculum. Seidel and Jardine (2014) help me expand my sentiment when they describe their 55 appreciation of all students, in every classroom. They describe that every child is a miracle of [their] ancestors’ survival, whoever they were, wherever they lived. Here we are together today, and that is all (p. 9). Within the context of Indigenous education, the idea that each child will be recognized as a miracle of their ancestors’ survival, whoever they were, wherever they lived is an important act of appreciation that has been missing in education. Wall Kimmerer’s research spoke to me as an illustration of ecological imagination and the lens of appreciation. She draws up the metaphor of sweetgrass to explain the beneficial relationships between people and their local environment. Sweetgrass is passed from hand to earth as “sweetgrass is best planted not by seed, but by putting roots directly in the ground” (p. 2). In the cultivating of sweetgrass people and the earth work together in union. Kimmerer is an Indigenous botanist who focuses on sustaining the living systems on which we depend on by careful attending to the stories of the land. Like Cherkowski and Walker (2014), she highlights the power of story to educate, and to differentiate, and to connect us. She writes that as humans we are the “same species, same earth, different stories” (p.7). Through her autobiographical experiences as an Indigenous woman and as a scientist Kimmerer recognized the diversity held in stories for understanding the world. She reflects that when she was first trained as a scientist, she felt that science privileged mind and body. She writes, there was a time when I teetered precariously with an awkward foot in each of two worlds— the scientific and the indigenous. But then I learned to fly. Or at least try. It was the bees that showed me how to move between different flowers— to drink the nectar and gather pollen from both. It is this dance of cross-pollination that can produce a new species of knowledge, a new way of being in the world. After all, there aren’t two worlds, there is just this one good green earth (p. 47). 56 The kinds of ethical curricular enactment that I have described as necessary for teachers to engage in toward Indigenizing curriculum cannot be sustained by old traditions of hierarchy and privilege. Instead, what is needed is for teachers to unlearn these practices by appreciating and discerning how our stories live in relationship to the stories of others. When we don’t engage in these ways of learning and unlearning, teachers learn to distrust their own experience and to neglect their practical wisdom. Instead, immersed in a culture in which they too are increasingly positioned as objects of policy, they develop a heightened self-consciousness and spend a great deal of time second-guessing themselves, looking over their shoulders before they act because they feel the need to determine as best they can how their actions may appear in the light of future evaluations which are, of course, reifications of someone’s view of appropriate achievement. (Phelan, 2015, p. 16) We need to learn how to tell better stories without fear of disrupting the status quo or revealing our limitations. Chambers (2004) describes ethical expertise as a kind of dwelling, sitting with our mistakes, and she offers further detail that “dwelling has a bad name in our ahistorical, pleasure seeking, and time-crunched society” (p. 11). However, she goes on to describe that “Mistakes, whether they are my own or those of my ancestors or neighbours, will not be ignored or denied; rather they must be attended to… in a generative way” (p. 11). This kind of curricular engagement and attention requires a teacher education stance that empowers educators at all career stages to continually shift and evolve their teaching practices. In this final section of my literature review, I provide an overview of research that highlights how self-study is a way of being in the world that supported me to recognize myself a as capable, legitimate, and ethically responsible participant in the development my curricular enactment. 57 2.7 Self-study and My Teacher Education Self-study invests in learning from experience within context and this is a needed way to approach teacher education according to Sanford, Williams, Hopper, and McGregor (2012) who state: The colonizing model of teacher education is no longer sufficient for providing the education needed by new generations of learners who will be facing a world with challenges that they will not be able to address with the current approaches to education. Increasingly, schools need teachers who are able to learn through adaptation and flexibility, engage in meaningful experiences that connect to students’ social lives, collaborate and share, and use innovative approaches to develop and share materials. (p. 19) They further explain that Indigenous principles of learning offer a significant alternative space for teacher education. They explain that engaging with Indigenous principles creates learning conditions “that appreciate the strengths of all, develop confident and strong teachers/leaders who are aware of context, place, and spaces for learning to emerge and grow” (p. 31). This kind of commitment to change and ongoing attention to growth undergirds self-study. Martin and Russel (2020) share that “teaching experience is acquired by investing time in the context of professional action; learning from experience demands reflection-in-action as the alternative frame of reference for personal learning” (p. 1059). In my experience, understanding the FPPL as a contested, relational, and situated practice created room to develop a more adaptive and flexible relationship with the FPPL whereby reflection-in-action was concretized. There is a cohesive relationship between self-study and the reconceptualization of the curriculum (Bullough & Pinnegar, 2001). In my experience, self-study offered a way of living 58 the curriculum that honoured Aoki hopes that curriculum “accommodates lived meanings, thereby legitimating thoughtful everyday narratives” (Aoki, 1993, p.263). For me, self-study created important contours for growing, testing, and refining theories about teaching and learning through embodying a researcher’s stance. Self-study helped me to position myself as a curriculum theorizer, and this was an educative stance. Phelan (2015) explains: curriculum theorizing is “a form of practical-theoretical reason” (Pinar 2004: 25) that draws on and reconfigures conceptual schema from the Humanities and the Arts in the hope that new and potentially more fruitful ways of talking about curriculum – lived, official, hidden, null – will be forthcoming (Macdonald 1975). (p.4) Similarly, Pinar (2012) argues that when teachers inquire to understand curriculum, their teacher education is the “professionalization of intellectual freedom, forefronting teachers' and students' individuality, that is to say, their originality, their creativity, protecting their opportunities to dissent, engaged in ongoing if complicated conversations informed by a self-reflexive, interdisciplinary erudition” (p. 183). Curriculum theorizing is not easy, because schools are complex places that are not “refuges for the problems of society” (Grumet, 2010, p.68), but rather they embody these challenges. The ability to discern and make decisions in these unique contexts takes time and can feel risky. However, as Tidwell and Jonsdottir (2020) describe “the qualitative nature of self-study and its ingrained call for social justice and change often disrupts and deconstructs what is known, pushing further into the unknown, it opens the possibilities and need for more creative and innovative approaches to the study of practice” (p. 418). For me, self-study was a way of being that helped me to adapt and change to the needs of my context, and while this often felt daunting, there was much to be gained. 59 Biesta (2015) calls the efforts of decision making by educators ‘the beautiful risk of education,’ in that it is always inherently risky to act in the moment, and is also beautiful because our choices are filled with possibility for improvement. In a culture that prefers measures of control in education, teachers’ subjective decision-making can sound negatively risky, because unpredictability and unknowing breaks with traditional positivist science paradigms. However, it is unknowing that needs to be embraced if teachers are to imagine education in new ways that allow for more opportunities for all students to express growth, identity, and multiple worldviews. As Phelan describes, “to control or constrain the production of certain [student]outcomes through practices that have been determined outside of the classroom makes little sense” (Phelan, 2011, p.208). Curriculum theorizing through self-study enabled me to act on my sites of practice as well as in them with “knowledge of the situated nature, and the contingency, of all teaching practice” (Green & Reid, 2008, p.27). In this chapter, I described how my understanding of living the curriculum was an important understanding that shaped the nature of my self-study. My theorizing of the principles emerged based on an assumption of the documents as inherently contested, situated, and relational in nature. In the next chapter I describe how self-study supported my research process. Self-study involves an ongoing metacognitive practice, and Tidwell and Fitzgerald (2004) write that “in order for teachers to progress in their knowledge of teaching, they must also progress in their understanding of reflection” (p. 85). Through self-study, I was guided into a deeper understanding of reflection as a research practice that supported my intention to lean into the complexity of curricular theorizing. In what follows, I describe in more detail how I was energized and guided by self-study methodology and methods to discern my storytelling and to recognize opportunities to re-story those understandings and perspectives though conversations with critical friends. 60 Chapter Three 3.1 Self-Study Research Methodology A circle teaching at that place tells us that no two people will experience the circle in the same way. However, if you journey around the circle (if you theorize) in deep and thoughtful ways, you will begin to see or understand something that was previously hidden. (Styres, 2017, p. 31) As I lived my self-study methodology, my teacher research was a ‘recursive act’ (Samaras, 2011, p.198) of knowledge building that resembled a journey around a circle. Each cycle of self-reflection and dialogue added depth and richness to my conceptualization of the First Peoples Principles of Learning. Styres (2017) explains the process of circularity when she writes, “although it may at first appear repetitive, particularly if one is unfamiliar with circularity, each cyclical journey adds dimension to the concepts as they are examined, explored, and connected across contexts” (p.31). In chapter two I depicted the integration between theory and my practice that brought into focus the conception of curriculum that framed my self-study research. In this chapter, I continue to “mediate between [my]professional practice and the universe of scholarly, scientific, and academic knowledge and discourse” (Bentz & Shapiro, 1998, p.66). In what follows, I outline the interplay between my experiences and self-study methodology, and I describe how each layer of my research knowledge was generated and seemed to be transformed into new considerations and questions. Self-study methodology was the vehicle that supported my cyclical knowledge-building by guiding my attention towards the relational self which simultaneously attends to the continual becoming of the self and other/world. I also share the details of how I engaged with the self-study methods of journal 61 writing, critical friendships, re-storying, and gathering on the Land, and how I drew upon the documentation of these experiences to re-story my understanding of the First Peoples Principles of Learning. Recognizing teachers as researchers and as interpreters, creators, users, evaluators, and re-creators of knowledge is not commonplace, though it is vigorously championed by scholars such as Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2009) who advocate: We want to argue loudly and clearly that practitioners who are deeply engaged in the work of teaching and learning know something about that work and, collectively with one another and with others, including parents and community groups, have the capacity to generate and critique knowledge, figure out how to use (or not use) knowledge generated by others, improve practice, and enhance student’s life chances. (p. 125) Without a doubt, my self-study research improved my teaching practice by empowering in me a “freedom of expression, thought, and action” (Phelan, 2009, p.4), and the methodology of self-study supported me to tell a story that could influence educational change and improvement. The valuing of a teacher’s experiences in finding ways to create new possibilities for student and teacher learning was an important catalyst towards building my confidence to share my story in the form of this dissertation. Self-study and currere. In chapter two I shared the personal nature of my curricular journey as an active process of currere. Wang (2010) describes that currere involves deep attention to “the everyday experiences of the individual and his or her capacity to learn from that experience; to reconstruct experience through thought and dialogue to enable understanding” (Wang, 2010, p. 2). Self-study research can be similarly defined. Samaras (2011) writes, “I believe self-study to be a personal, systematic inquiry situated within one’s own teaching context 62 that requires critical and collaborative reflection in order to generate knowledge as well as inform the broader educational field” (emphasis in the original) (p. 10). Practices of self-study are often thought to be symbiotic with living the curriculum. In fact, “self- study methodology originated in relation to the reconceptualization of curriculum, and the assumption that the journey through curriculum is a journey to know the self” (Bullough & Pinnegar, 2001, p. 18). In particular the idea that the formation of self occurs through experience in ongoing ways is a shared assumption between the two disciplines. Strong-Wilson explains: Awareness of self-formation is one part --perhaps the (necessary?) beginning part-- of self-study: the realization that identity is created through the self being shaped by experience and itself shaping experience in turn (e.g., through how the experience is interpreted). To me, also coming out of much reading on ‘teacher reflection’, the notion of formation is stronger or deeper in that it taps into the idea (from curriculum theory) of ‘curriculum as lived’ (e.g. Aoki, 2005). (p. 17) Rather than controlling the inquiry process as a means to seek certainty, efficiency, and predictability, both curriculum theory and self-study offer opportunities for the makings of intersubjective meaning through our social relations and how these interactions shape how we see the world. Beyond this important relationship with curriculum studies, self-study was distinctly nurtured by a community of self-study researchers who first came together to form a special interest group (SIG) at the educational conference the American Educational Research Association (AERA) (Samaras, 2011, p. 59). The SIG, Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices (S-STEP), brought together diverse researchers to form a collective counter-approach 63 to the dominant research paradigm’s long-held assumptions regarding the possibility of objectivity in research. At the heart of this movement was the recognition of the relational nature of the self, as well as the primacy of the self (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 1998; Hasebe-Ludt, Chambers, & Leggo, 2009; Kitchen, 2016; Samaras, 2016; Laboskey, 2004; Loughran, 2006). Teresa Strong-Wilson (2009) explains the nature of self in self-study: “I see self-study as study of the self as well as a study of oneself” (Strong-Wilson as cited in Pithouse, Mitchell, & Moletsane, 2009, p. 17). In this way, I think that she is naming a significant distinction between the different stories of self that we learn about through self-study. As a relational orientation to research, self-study attends to the granular stories that emerge from the lives of those involved with teaching and learning. These stories offer many opportunities for those most closely involved for generating new knowledge and awareness of themselves. But, what is the nature of the self that is also learned about through self-study? Self-study draws attention to how the self is constituted through multiple perspectives and interactions, and how, through on going questioning, the self can continue to evolve and grow (Mitchell, Pithouse, & Moletsane, 2009, p. 13). To access the complexity of the self in general and in particular, self-study research methodology embraces storytelling as both an interpretive and critical practice. In chapter one, I introduced the research of Strong-Wilson (2008) about touchstone stories as an example of how stories hold within them a version of the self that can be transformed through critical inquiry into those stories. The insights gained from self-study are characterized by Loughran (2006) as having the capacity to generate a pedagogy of teacher education. This is possible because “it is learning through experience that needs to be reflected upon and shared, as the nature of deliberations within the teacher education learning community is critical to its development” 64 (Loughran, 2006, p. 23). While Loughran is specifically reflecting on teacher educators who are engaged in self-study, in my experience the value of the insights generated by teachers in a K-12 setting hold the same promise of development. This stance is supported in the seminal Handbook of Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education (Loughran, 2004). Austin and Senese (2004) offer that self-study by classroom teachers is a way for teachers to find their own voices, to improve their practices, to extend their relationships, and to discover themselves as leaders of change. My research illustrated the pedagogical potential of self-study to see myself as capable of contributing to social change. Hasebe-Ludt, Chambers, and Leggo, (2009) explain that self-study research not only constructs the identity of the teacher in ways that are generative and empowering— “by speaking, writing and doing autobiographical research, curriculum scholars and teachers become interpreters and translators of human experience and provocateurs of individual and social change in their sites of living pedagogy” (p. 37). Beyond these underpinnings, how self-study is lived through research methods can be considered quite open-ended. Pithouse-Morgan and Samaras (2015) describe that there is not one pre-defined set of self-study research methods. This is because the most appropriate methods will always be those that facilitate the specific needs of the inquiry, and because of the uniqueness of each study’s inventiveness as a distinguishing feature (p. 29). Building on the language of inventiveness, Pithouse-Morgan and Samaras describe how self-study scholars adapt existing research methods from “narrative inquiry (Kitchen, 2009), arts-based methods (Weber, 2014), dialogic inquiry (East, Fitzgerald, & Heston, 2009), and autoethnography (Newberry, 2014) to enhance their relational theorizing” (p. 29). They illustrate that the methodological inventiveness of self-study is “imaginative engagement to inspire alternative, frequently arts-based and 65 transdisciplinary, methods that contribute to generative ways of knowing, with implications for social change” (Pithouse-Morgan & Samaras, 2015, p. 29). This understanding of self-study shaped my expectations of what this research could become. I was creating my own story, and following the call from Armstrong (1990), I was looking under the rocks in my own garden to tell my story. Attending to self, this research focused on what I was learning about myself. I was not making claims for or about the FPPL, although they were, as a whole, the catalyst for my self-inquiry. To this end, I do not offer an account of what each of the individual principles meant to me. That kind of knowledge has been offered by Indigenous educators such as Chrona (2014). As I have described, Chrona offers her own important interpretation of each principle on her popular education blog (https://firstpeoplesprinciplesoflearning.wordpress.com). Further, Battiste (1998) writes that Indigenous researchers need to tell their own stories and that settler scholars “may be useful in helping Indigenous people articulate their concerns, but to speak for them is to deny them the self-determination so essential to human progress” (p. 25). Taking a similar stance, Smith (2012) describes that “Indigenous peoples want to tell our own stories, write our own versions, in our own ways, for our own purposes” (p. 29). I wholeheartedly support the agency for which Battiste and Smith advocate. In my dissertation, I provide an account of how I focused on my learning through self-study methodology to share how I related to the principles and shifted my understanding of learning as a teacher. In the next part of this chapter I highlight the processes and rationales behind the methods of self-study that I selected for my dissertation research: journal writing, meetings with critical friends, and communing with nature. I also explain how reflecting on the data from these experiences became an opportunity for re-storying my relationship with the First Peoples 66 Principles of Learning and ultimately informed my recommendations for a pedagogy of teacher education that I offer in the final chapter. 3.2 Living in Circle: My Self Study Process Journaling is a common practice of collecting data in self-study (Samaras, 2011, p. 175), and it was a natural beginning for my research because I already had a sustained journaling practice. Long before I started my Ph.D. process, and starting when I was an early career teacher, I would write in a journal all year. Over the summers, I would deconstruct my journal entries and I would create thematic summaries of my experiences. I would weave my theory together as an effort to better understand where I had been and where I wanted to set intentions for the upcoming school year. This process of reflecting continued across my teaching career. This meant that when I started to focus my dissertation research on my experience with the redesigned curriculum, I already had documentation to draw from in the form of my journal entries. In that sense, I didn’t start journaling for this research; but rather, I used my established practice and the ongoing documentation of my own thinking as the starting point of articulating my relationship to the curricular plan. As my research became more focused on the First Peoples Principles of Learning, my journaling also became more focused on these principles and my learning about Indigenizing my learning and teaching. Through my journal documentation I was able to “track my own story” (Kelly, 2010, p. 84). The general length of my entries varied greatly. Sometimes I would write a reflection with great detail, and create a full narrative outlining my experience from start to finish. At other times, my entries were even briefer and less complete; they were written as partial notes that curated ideas and quotes from my readings in jot notes with arrows and diagrams between ideas. 67 Kelly (2010) illustrates the importance of documenting our stories as they “are the ecologies that nourish our learning spirits” (p. 83). Reflecting on her own journaling practice she shares, “this act of tracking allowed me to follow the pathway of my own lived curriculum and to explore both my environmental ecology as well as my spiritual ecology from a new perspective” (p. 84). The commitment to, and sense of utility for, change that Kelly articulates when she describes her journaling practices resonated with me. I relished the process of inquiring into my past experiences expressed through writing and the opportunity “to linger, to play with meaning and ideas rendering them unstable and filled with possibility” (Vagel & Hofsess, 2016, p. 334-335). Being in community. In the autumn of 2016, I began to intentionally document my learning with the First Peoples Principles of Learning in my journal. At this time, I purposefully sought opportunities to engage with Syilx community. I committed myself to taking every opportunity I could to learn from and alongside Syilx community members through attending cultural experiences offered to the school district and university. I joined community gatherings to learn about storytelling, cultural appropriation, ethnobotany, history, land rights, and water—all from Syilx perspectives. I also attended local ceremonies such as water ceremonies, winter dances, and spring Syia? festivals. These cultural experiences were meaningful opportunities to grow my understanding of Indigenous perspectives and my connection to Indigenous knowledge. While I documented these experiences in my journals, the relationships that I was forming were not critical friendships in the sense that are needed and central to self-study methodology (Samaras, 2011, p. 44). In self-study, the term critical friend is widely used to describe a relationship of listening that is framed by a commitment to think critically and dialogue openly. Kemmis and McTaggart 68 (1988) write that the title of critical friend “denotes a person who will listen to the research’s account of practice and critique the thinking behind the account” (p. 256). Over time, the interpretations of this role have evolved in self-study to emphasize the nature of these friendship as both critical and creative. Schnellert and Richardson (2016) describe their critical friendship as a mindful and relational professional development that allowed them to “iteratively check-in and examine where [our] actions and intentions are aligning and/or coming apart. Like all work involving social change, it is incremental and non-linear” (p. 41). I knew that my understandings about the experiences I had journaled about could be expanded further through dialogue with critical friendships. My journals held within them the ideas, images, inspirations, struggles and questions that fuel my work as an educator, and I wanted to find companionship to help me re-interpret those connections from a fresh perspective. I gathered together a group of colleagues who would form my community of critical friends for this study. Starting in September 2017, I met with my Living in Circle community once a month at a local coffee shop that was a convenient location for us all. It was also a meaningful gathering place because the coffee shop proceeds were reinvested into helping others through specialized community programs and professional coaching (see Appendix A for a timeline of these gatherings). Once I obtained official research consent in February 2018, all members of Living in Circle signed a consent form (see Appendix B) and from February to August, I audio-recorded our conversation sessions. Along with agreeing to have our time together audio recorded, by signing the consent forms my colleagues also agreed to be critical friends in my research. I explained to them that my research would be our unscripted sharing processes, where we all shared our reflections on 69 our practice and asked each other questions, shared related personal stories and offered suggestions for further learning. The protocols for our gathering were simple. I came to our meetings with journal reflections in mind that I wanted to dialogue about, and I shared them naturally in conversation. There were no set questions for feedback during our meetings. From the onset I explained that as critical friends they were welcome to comment on my reflections as they were inspired to and in a way that felt natural to them. It was most important that my research did not force a conversation, and to honour that our conversations were a space for all of our reflections on our practice, not just mine. We all commented on each other's struggles, interests, and perspectives. These conversations flowed naturally. It did not seem like the audiotaping changed our group dynamics. Our conversations continued to follow everyone’s needs and inquiries and examples of these conversations are shared throughout this dissertation. Living in Circle lived the qualities of listening, critique, iterative check-ins, and attention to action and intention. We trusted each other, and that trust nurtured a community of intellectual and emotional caring. Thus, while the collegial nature of critical friends might not be what first comes to mind when the term is first presented, a deeply supportive relationship of collaboration is at the core of self-study methodology. Samaras (2011) writes, “self-study builds on the necessity of a relationship between individual and collective cognition in teachers’ professional development and the power of dialogue in building a learning community of engaged scholarship” (p. 5). I was influenced by Tanaka’s (2017) account of walking alongside to involve being together, over a longer time period, rather than a brief sightseeing tour, [walking alongside] required all participants to embrace a sense of knowing while not knowing, careful and 70 generous listening, and emotionally engaged reflective practice period together, we stepped outside our respective comfort zones and went out of our way to be mutually engaged. (p.196) I appreciated how Tanaka learned and changed through her relationship to the community within which she situated her study, a community who listened to her and that she listened to as they learned together. Over the course of the year, each member of Living in Circle determined how much or how little they wanted to speak in the group. They knew they could also choose to leave the group at any time or ask for their comments not to be included in the research. No one requested this. Rather, it felt like we grew closer and more committed to each other’s learning through a dialogue wherein both myself as the researcher and my critical friends benefited from listening to each other. This kind of listening was life-giving. It literally kept my research going, because as my research progressed, I struggled with a growing sense that I was losing confidence in my perspective and inquiry. In my journal I expressed many fears about my research that were rooted in not feeling good enough to share, or worried that I was always saying the wrong thing. I journaled frequently about my fears that my lack of knowledge made me inept at writing my dissertation, and that my experiences could only fall short in offering anything of value to my community or to a research community. While my internal critic was continually unnerving me, within Living in Circle I had role models who inspired me through their words and ways of being to work through these emotions. For example, Kimmy shared how through Living in Circle she improved her confidence that she was going forth in changing her practice ‘in a good way’: 71 Kimmy: Because of all of our reflecting and discussions, I know I am coming in a good way and so if any of our advocates or Indigenous community members walked into my classroom, and many do all the time, and if they came in and said, “you know something is bothering me that I can see you’re doing or that some of your students working on…” I would not feel adversarial. I would feel like, “OK- that is such good information because I have some grounding- I am not worry about offending but I am open to learning.” Not that I don’t think I could offend, because I know I could, but if I did I would be open to that feedback and be able to learn from it. (Audio recording, June 5th, 2018) I related to this description, and it helped me put into words how critical friendships supported me to be more open to feedback more generally as we are practiced in it. I also started to recognize how confidence could make me more receptive to critique. My critical friends not only offered me feedback which changed my thinking, the supportive conditions of belonging and being a member of a community gave me the confidence to continue in my inquiry and allow myself to experience the needed vulnerability to change. Similarly, Tanaka (2017) reflects: If we share responsibility, it helps to disrupt our urge to be defensive because we then accept that our beliefs and opinions, perspectives are not about us as “persons.” Instead, our beliefs, opinions, perspectives—our knowing—is culturally informed and changes over time and with experience. Thus, we can practice holding our beliefs and ourselves lightly. (p. 265) In my experience, embracing the relational nature of becoming that Tanaka describes also involved a shared sense of vulnerability. When one person was brave enough to see their own thinking from fresh perspectives, it inspired others to follow. Another practice that shifted my perspective greatly was gathering on the Land. 72 Communion with the Land. Kelly (2015) names the Land as an instrument for knowing, and that it is through our senses, worldviews, and perspectives that we decipher what we learn from the Land (p. 10). Living in Circle gathered on the Land four times over the course of our year together to connect with the Land. I did not audio record these gatherings, but I documented them through journal writing and photography. On the Land we moved our bodies, we contemplated, we observed, we foraged (when appropriate), we observed, and we listened. On occasion, Keith and Kimmy shared Syilx traditional oral stories known as captik w lh with the group6. These stories are teachings that promote shared understandings and guidance to the members of the collective and they are culturally nuanced in both method and meaning as intergenerational knowledge is shared and transferred orally. Captik w lh stories held within them messages of sustainability, self-acceptance, interconnections and the stories had their own life force, their own ways of unraveling, and “the stories are like DNA chromosomes that are continually turning, spinning, and embedding our life-ways into our children and our children's children, coming from eons past into the present to the future. A story is never complete… a single word can have its own history, its own genealogy” (Ragoonaden, Cherkowski, Baptiste & Despres, 2009, p. 384). Captik w lh continue to guide the thoughts and actions of the present day through their retelling (ONA, 2013, p. 9). During my time on the Land, I found new ways to think about the complexity of the shared history of the Land. In my journal I wrote: The experience of winter in this moment, the cold in my bones, the wind is so immediate that the presence of this moment masks all that I cannot see as if it never was. At the same time, I know that I have stood on this spot on the mountain in the summer and felt 6 We honour that the scared nature of Syilx knowledge that should not be shared without permission. The stories Kimmy and Keith shared were from a collection of stories are published and approved by Elders to be used by the Okanagan community. 73 the heat and the dry just the same, so I know that something else is possible. Within my awareness of how I am experiencing place there is also a questioning of time and a realization that time spans beyond my experiences and that there is much underneath me and ahead of all that is important. Contemplating time, I wonder what can be learned in a day, a week, a month, one school year, one lifetime… ten lifetimes. (Journal, February 2018) By telling stories on the Land, hiking, and experiencing cultural ceremonies such as the water ceremony, I learned from the Land. I felt the cold of the winter, warmth of the fire, wet of rain, dirt beneath my feet. I smelled the Ponderosa Pine. I attended to the dance of my breath, and I found myself in communion with the world around me. Learning about local Syilx heritage while being on the Land in community supported understanding the of relationships amongst all living and sentient beings, and in turn, I began to develop relationships that were more apt to maintain the health and wellbeing of the Land through my relation to it. 3.3 Data Analysis The experiences that I collected from my journals and through audio-recorded conversations with Living in Circle became the data of my research. To learn from these experiences, I read and sifted through the documentation and reflected on what I had learned and how I had changed as I explored the First Peoples Principles of Learning. This process is often referred to in self-study as coding. Coding: A data dance. The recursive process of writing, bringing my journal writing to the audio-recorded gatherings with the Living in Circle community, and then reflecting on this data was an ongoing process of analysis that is typical in many self-studies. Samaras (2011) describes self-study research as a “dance” (p. 197) of data collection and data analysis. My data 74 dance did not just happen at the end of my research, but happened throughout my research as I continued to re-visit my earliest data and re-examined my interpretations of that data all along the process. My coding process involved listening to, reflecting on, and noting themes in my data. Through this process, specific stories began to feel more significant than others because they continually surfaced in different ways. Strong-Wilson (2008) describes the significant stories that we carry with us as touchstone stories. She explains that such stories inform our identities and guide our actions in ways that we do not often recognize, but they can be noticed and countered (p. 4). In my research process ‘storying,’ in the form of my journal writing, was countered with the process of ‘re-storying’ through dialogue with Living in Circle and through connections I was making as I read the literature that framed and informed this study. Through all these encounters I moved past some of my limitations and taken-for-granted assumptions of my touchstone stories as new connections emerged that helped me to re-story my understandings of learning within the context of the FPPL. Re-storying. Corntassel and T’lakwadzi (2009) explain that re-storying involves telling stories differently with the consideration of multiple perspectives; this is a form of resistance to colonization, because through re-storying we can begin to recognize people that have not been recognized and share their reality. Ragoonaden and Macintyre Latta et al. (2020) describe that re-storying offers “numerous opportunities to decolonize education by learning and re-learning, again and again; while re-conceptualizing and co-conceptualizing active and dynamic curriculum planning and development involving Elders, knowledge holders, and community members” (p. 35). Their description also aligns with the re-storying process described by Atleo (2009) who explains that re-storying can be a community-based, educational practice that brings diverse 75 people together through a shared resistance to colonization, because the act of re-storying recognizes and documents the reality of people who have been excluded (p. 454). During my encounters with the data, I continually asked myself how my current thinking could be an opening to a new story and through this process I created a grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). In other words, I discovered my theory directly from my experiences, as opposed to borrowing already established or “off the shelf” theories (Creswell, 2007, p. 63). While grounded theory originated from positivist underpinnings established by Glaser and Strauss in the late 1960’s, in more recent decades a constructivist approach to ground theory data analysis has gained popularity in education (Charmaz, 2005, 2006; Clarke, 2005). Charmaz (2006) describes grounded theory through an interpretative approach that highlights “the researchers view, learning about experience within embedded, hidden networks, situations, and relationships” (cited in Creswell, 2007, p. 65). The data from my journals held ideas, images, inspirations, struggles, and questions that fuel my work as an educator. Writing about data analysis Vagel and Hofsess (2016) note, “to linger, to play with meaning and ideas rendering them unstable and filled with possibility” (p. 335). I started to notice that a lot of what I was reflecting on was circling around an awareness of themes that emerged from my reflections on and with the data: understandings of wellbeing, decolonization, and worldview. I saw how these concepts were threads that connected the whole of my data and they continued to generate more and more questions about what I considered necessary for my ongoing learning. 3.4 Themes Emerging through Experiences with FPPL The thematic organization of my data emerged from noting regularities and patterns in the research data. Returning multiple times to my recorded conversations as I transcribed and then reviewed transcripts, I noticed how these concepts helped me to name the patterns that I was 76 seeing emerge throughout the data. This process also involved comparing and contrasting my data themes with literature from the theoretical framework for the study. Through these themes I started to make sense of the connections I was seeing. In order to make these themes visible, I created the following table to outline the kinds of questions that were surfacing through reflections on my stories (Table 1). In this chart, I present the connections between the kinds of questions I was asking about my experiences of living the curriculum through engaging with the FPPL and themes. In chapter four, I share a selection of experiences from the data that provide examples of how these questions were lived out. In chapter five, I offer a pedagogical reflection of my findings through the lens of teacher education. Data Questions Organized into Emerging Themes Worldview (exploration of identity in the making, self-awareness, perspective-taking) • What are the personal memories, stories, and histories that impact my relationships to learning? • What is my ancestry? How does my European heritage impact how I learn and how I support the learning of others? Where is home? What is home? • What is my sense of spirit? How does spirit inform my learning? • What is the role of imagination in my learning? What are the influences, responsibilities and consequences of imagining? • What is the relationship between learning and the exploration of personal truth? When is something true? • What are my hopes and what do I try to control? Table 1: Questions Organized by Data Themes 77 Worldview (continued) • What do I need to know? How will I know what I am looking for when I find it? • What does it mean to walk in two worlds? What kinds of dispositions support educators to journeying along multiple pathways? • What kind of presence does my research require? • What kinds of mindsets are limiting me? • What do I need to do differently, more of, less of, what knowledge do I need to empower myself to see myself? Wellbeing (exploration of identity- making, self-awareness, perspective-taking) • In what situations should I share my learning? • What do we (self, family, community, land, spirits, ancestors need to be well? • Where are we at right now? What is our sense of belonging like, how are we learning, and what are we learning, and do we find value in it? • What is the ethical nature of learning relationships? When are relationships good and when are they harmful? What kinds of permissions are needed to share what is learned in a relationship? • What is the role of indigenous knowledge in changing my thinking? • How is recognizing my thoughts and actions part of exploring my identity? • What is holding me back? What do I need to let go of? When do I feel most inspired by this inquiry? Table 1: Questions Organized by Data Themes 78 Wellbeing (continued) • What is the role of stress in learning about the FPPL? • How can I honour my need for belonging and safety in processes of change? What does it mean to learn in community with a focus on connectedness and reciprocal relationships? • What does fear look like and sound like as I am navigating the principles? • What do I learn from place (Okanagan)? • How might we celebrate our learning and the new relationships that we are building, while recognizing the ongoing nature of reconciliation? • How do I listen? How do I hear differences in perspective with my heart as well as head? Decolonization (Attention to world-making story, perspective, decolonization, imagination critically looking underneath the system and structures, seeing what is with fresh eyes) • Are the FPPL a decolonizing framework? Why might that matter? • When and how do the FPPL take my learning in a new direction? • What provokes my thinking in new directions? How will I know when my thinking is decolonized? • What kinds of examples ignite transformation; what kinds extinguish transformation? • When is story a myth? How do we take stories apart to see what they are made of? • What can we rebuild with the dismantled pieces of deconstructed stories? Table 1: Questions Organized by Data Themes 79 Decolonization (continued) • What is the relationship between truth and learning? • What is the relationship between decolonizing and Indigenizing? • What is the role of listening in decolonization? • What is the role of appropriation in creating a knowledge translation of the FPPL? • How does time impact learning? • What is revealed in time, what does such attention create openings for? Table 1: Questions Organized by Data Themes I curated these questions during a review of the whole of my research data after I had already coded the data for possible research themes. These questions helped me to organise my thinking about the themes, offered an opportunity to communicate the essence of my experiences as a whole, and created a clearer pathway between my experiences and the themes that emerged. Cherkowski and Walker (2014) describe storytelling as “the narrative thread that emerges [my emphasis] from stories, is an intimate aspect of our lives, and one of the most profound ways known to describe, share and come to understand our experiences in the world” (p. 205). Further, they explain that the stories we tell create a reality for us, and that through our reflexivity we gain insight into how the world is made through our interpretations of it. They write that “within this reality, we are able to shape our lives, for good or for bad, for right and for wrong, for virtue and for viciousness, all based on how we perceive, react to and talk about our experiences” (p. 205). Creating these questions was an exercise in telling the story of my research data and the themes that emerged through my reflective engagement with the data throughout the research process. 80 When themes ‘emerge’. Emergence is a difficult concept to pin down, with discussions of emergence found across educational theories of educational transformation and in relation to the idea that education requires room for the birthing of new possibilities and freedoms. Freire (1970) describes: education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world (p.39). Likewise, Wheatley’s (2006) research on emergence and systems change describes that the way to critically and creatively evoke transformation in a system is through awareness of the many connections that make up and connect the greater whole. She describes that through being really intentional about connection-making, new ways of understanding that are more responsive will emerge (pp. 97-98). She writes: knowledge grows inside relationships, from ongoing circles of exchange wherein information is not just accumulated by individuals but is willingly shared. Information rich, ambiguous environments are the source of surprising new births. (p. 104) Again, the metaphor of Living in Circle comes to my mind as a way to think about the kinds of knowledge relationships that Wheatley describes as simultaneous and never-ending acts of both thought and action. The primary concern of my research process was making new connections and finding ways to make sense of my emerging data within my research interests. Charmaz writes, “tensions between data collection strategies and what constitutes 'forcing' are unresolved in grounded 81 theory. What might stand as a viable means of gathering data to one grounded theorist could be defined as forcing the data into a preconceived framework by another” (p. 18). My data-analysis involved studying my autobiographical texts (journal writing and transcriptions of gatherings with critical friends) in order to deepen my relationships with curriculum, theory, colleagues, and students as a way to better understand my own stories and to create something new. (Dissertation) writing as inquiry. Finally, there is one last aspect of my self-study analysis that is worthy of consideration, and that is the act of writing this dissertation. Kovach (2009) describes that there is an “inseparable relationship between story and knowing” (p. 94). Likewise, Greene reflects that “accounts of people's changing relationships with one another, to language, and to power, may lead to new events in our understanding. There is no final solution; there is no packageable remedy. There is only more and more critical reading of the texts of action, the texts of practice, the texts of learning to learn” (Greene, as cited in Britzman, 2013, pp. ix-x). My experiences with writing this dissertation align with both of these statements. Writing, rewriting, and revising this document was part of my sense-making process in a significant way. For example, I started writing this dissertation before I knew what I wanted to say. In other words, I did not have an outline to follow. Rather, I had my ideas about curriculum, my journals, and my conversations with Living in Circle. However, my relationship with these ideas changed again and again over the course of my research, and so too did the nature of the story I was telling. The writing of my research was perhaps the most dynamic and creative sense-making process of all. While this was not a process that I originally focused on, the power of writing as a method of inquiry was noted in my journal from the beginnings of my research. In 82 the autumn of 2016, I was playing with the idea of how to create a cohesive story by weaving together multiple theories and wondering what the value of such a narrative might be. I wrote: The theories are too thick and grizzly to stitch into a solid fabric. Is a solid, cohesive picture possible, necessary, or problematic? As a seamstress, I fall short. A seamstress maps out how the final product will come together before she begins. Interested in colour schemes and area measurements, she works toward a fixed point and weaves theories in such a way that the gaps are not visible and but rather seem natural and final. Most days, this is not the kind of narrative that I want to write but I struggle because the work of the seamstress feels more logical, polished, and presentable. I try to recognize that this view is limited and to honor my own unique way of engaging with the world because I want to acknowledge that multiple ways of knowing are always possible. I know my journal offerings are always incomplete, appropriated, hybrid reflections on what has been valuable to me as I thicken my relationship to theory and my teaching practice. (Journal, October 2nd, 2016) Richardson and St Pierre (2008) describe that “Language is a constitutive force, creating a particular view of reality and of the Self” (p. 960). Richardson continues: Language is not the result of one’s subjectivity; rather, language constructs one’s subjectivity in ways that are historically and locally specific. What something means to individuals is dependent on the discourses available to them. (p. 961) The more I learned about myself and the FPPL through my experiences, the more my theories changed to explore new ways of knowing. These changes came out through my writing and editing. Nurturing my own voice involved multiple processes for re-writing, re-arranging and re-storying this dissertation. Although this process is continuous, with self-study you can take a 83 deliberate pause and share what you have learned once you feel that what you have created is sufficiently trustworthy. 3.5 Trustworthiness: What will be the afterglow? A body of research over the past two decades, particularly an extensive self-study handbook (Loughran, Hamilton, LaBoskey, & Russell, 2004), established the aim of trustworthiness in self-study methodology (Bullough & Pinnegar, 2001; Craig, 2009; Russell, 2009). The term trustworthiness is preferred to validity as self-study is not the search for a final truth, but a truth for now (Craig, 2009, p. 23). While it is the reader who is the ultimate judge of the trustworthiness of a self-study account, there are qualities that improve trustworthiness. For example, trustworthiness “depends on concrete examples of actual practices; fully elaborated so that members of a relevant research community can judge themselves their 'trustworthiness' and the validity of observations and interpretations” (Lyon & LeBoskey, 2002, p. 20). Part of what is needed to be shared is a coherent, thoughtful methodological account of my research. Such an account is important, because as individualized and idiosyncratic as aspects of my research may be, it also contributes to the improvement of professional practice through the generation of new knowledge about research methodology, in this case self-study. This research was grounded in uncertainty and shifting questions and offers a process of re-storying as a transformative act. I recognised throughout the writing of the dissertation the challenges that this presents in academia where notions of certainty and following certain research traditions may seem more valid. However, it is important to note that I attended to sharing my knowledge—as tacit, subtle, and nuanced as it may have been—through self-study guidelines for trustworthiness. These guidelines explain that self-study: 1) requires evidence of reframed thinking and transformed practice of the researcher; 84 2) involves ‘interactions with our colleagues near and far, with our students, with the educational literature, and with our own previous work … to confirm or challenge our developing understandings’; 3) employs multiple, primarily qualitative methods; 4) is undertaken with an intention to ‘formalize our work and make it available to our professional community for deliberation, further testing, and judgment’ (LaBoskey, 2004, pp. 859-860). I drew upon these criteria when I created the narratives that I offer in chapter four. These narratives also honour the advice offered by Bullough and Pinnegar (2001) that self-study accounts need to be, readable and engaging, themes should be evident and identifiable across the conversation or the narrative presented, the connection between autobiography and history must be apparent, the issues attended to need to be central to teaching and teacher education, and sufficient evidence must be garnered that readers will have no difficulty recognizing the authority of scholarly voice, not just its authenticity. (p. 20) I believed that dedication to the trustworthiness of my research would create a genuine opportunity for my readers to make authentic connections between my experiences and their own, and that through this imagining they would be able to see their own way forward in their learning through my research. The greatest challenge to my story telling was protecting the anonymity of my Living in Circle colleagues. I explained to my colleagues that, due to the nature of our critical friends' discussions (that we were all present together and witnessing each other), anonymity could not be guaranteed. As such, I stressed the importance for each participant to maintain the 85 confidentiality of all others, requesting that there would be no mention of names or topics of conversation outside of our meetings. However, the greater challenge was in my writing where I tried to minimize the risk of identification by providing very little biographical information about each community member. Since I work in a relatively small community, I felt it was important to reduce the chance of participants being personally identified in the research. Thus, the confidentiality and anonymity of colleagues participating in my research was protected in this written document and my research notes through the use of pseudonyms and through a lack of detail in my description. I hoped that the lack of this detail would be interpreted as a sign of respect to this community, but this will only be known in what Vagel and Hofsess call the “afterglow” (p. 339) of my research. Vagel and Hofsess (2016) describe how the afterglow of learning happens as “knowledge escapes and leaks in ways that we may not be able to anticipate” (p. 339). I liked this image a lot when I read it, because it reminded me that this research will have a life force of its own that could lead to new possibilities that I have not anticipated. In what follows, I share the questions and experiences that shaped the perspectives and understandings that led to me forming a new relationship with the First Peoples Principles of Learning. Donald (2012) predicts that when settler societies learn to share stories in ways that recognize their own colonial legacies and the interconnections between all histories, teachers will develop a new relationship to curriculum and pedagogy (pp. 106-107). This is a hope for the afterglow of this research. The stories that follow, are stories of my changing relationship to my conception of worldview, wellbeing and decolonization, and they share how I came to better understand the First Peoples Principles of Learning. By offering the three themes of worldview, wellbeing, decolonization, I hoped to honour the contextual, experiential nature of my learning as well as contribute to the sense- 86 making of others who seek to live the FPPL in their own contexts. While I realized that not every teacher who inquired about the BC curriculum would uncover the same understandings that I did, I did believe that offering these descriptions of my learning could invite and support other educators to go deeper in their own education through differing levels of agreement and dissension with my ideas and offerings. This is the nature of learning in a circle—we are each on our own journey and through our experiences with each other that challenge and support our thinking and feeling we keep going deeper into our learning. 87 Chapter Four 4.1 Theorizing Experiences With FPPL We must, in effect, seek a new way of thinking about how we do education. The question to be asked is, in what ways can Indigenous knowledges inform a philosophy of education and the process of schooling? (Styres, 2017, p. 90) Wang (2010) builds upon Pinar’s conception of currere as a mode of autobiographical teacher education and describes that one of the most transformative aspects of currere process are the non-linear, non-traditional arrangements of time. My curricular sense-making involved creating connections to experiences beyond my immediate personal experiences through memory work. Weaving my understanding of curriculum as a contested, situated, relational process, I also reflected on my own public-school education in Canada. In particular, there were two experience that kept coming to mind as they so closely followed a traditional grammar of schooling that I was attempting to unlearn through my research. Such memory work is an integral part of currere because by accessing our memories we can blur temporal boundaries which Wang (2010) describes is an effective way to unlearn (p. 279). She encourages educators particularly to lean into the shadow, or dark, aspects of their lives and engage with the challenging memories to regain life energy and to transform our thinking. These methods of currere can support educators to confront difficulty so that they may loosen its grip and allow educators space to learn anew about themselves (Wang, 2010, p. 279). I share these experiences from so long ago to draw attention to how the memory work of currere involved leaning into the shadows of my earliest experiences to learn more about who I am and ideas that I wanted and needed to move beyond. Portage La Prairie, Manitoba. From grade two until grade five, I lived in a small town called Portage La Prairie, Manitoba. As a child, I understood that I was living in a culturally 88 divided town. It seemed to me that First People community members lived on one side of the town. This side was separated by a bridge. On the other side of the bridge lived settlers, like me and my family. I think that I adopted this impression because the hub of our family was the local arena and this arena was across the bridge on the First Peoples side. My little brother played hockey and I figure skated, and so we were on the ice most days after school playing our sports. This play involved children from ‘both sides of the bridge.’ As it happened, my two best friends were both of First Peoples heritage. I remember this mostly because I was deeply disappointed that we did not all go to the same school. I also remember hearing conversations about my friends and their lives that gave me an unsettled feeling in the pit of my stomach—a conversation about an uncle who committed suicide was particularly etched in my mind. I also witnessed many microaggressions towards my friend’s community through the way the adults around me spoke about the community my friends were a part of. One that I have always remembered was ‘they only come to our side at Halloween because we have the best candy,’ or something like that. Becoming a researcher. In the fifth grade I was assigned my first research assignment. Our task was to compile a report on a First Peoples culture of our choice. We were to organize our research report into the following required sections: where the group had lived, what they wore, what they ate, did for leisure, and other. The category ‘other’ was an opportunity to record any other facts we found interesting on our topic. For me going to the library was a thrill! I took my time selecting multiple books on my ‘topic’—Algonquin People of Ontario. I remember the look and feel of some of those books, but I can no longer remember why I had chosen Algonquin People out of the many First Peoples’ nations we were instructed to choose from. What remains with me is how I studiously made my jot notes from my readings. 89 How I took pride as I organized my jot notes by cutting my notes into separate strips of paper that I was delighted to organize into themed clusters that would become my essay paragraphs. Oh, I remember that stack of jot notes. It was, in my mind’s eye, a huge stack, and I was amazed and excited by my accomplishment as a researcher. Looking back at this curricular experience pains me. It feels unacceptable that this was how I ‘learned’ about Indigenous culture in that classroom setting. I feel like I was being influenced to be less human when I was positioned to engage in research in such an impersonal and disconnected way. I like to think that if I had been provoked to engage with my lived experiences, rather than create a stack of jot notes, I might have had the opportunity and support to examine life experiences from grade two until grade five, when I had lived in a small culturally divided town called Portage La Prairie, Manitoba. Confronting childhood stories. When I looked back I recognized how much I wished I could have been supported to understand the systematic racism I witnessed in Portage through my research project. My fifth-grade assignment could have been designed as an opportunity for me to look critically at the history of First Peoples in relationship to settler history and to the contemporary lived experiences of both groups. I could have been supported to better understand my own life experiences. But I was not, and my past friendships and questions of injustice were the last things on my mind as I ‘selected’ my group to study. I don’t remember wondering about or learning about aspects of Algonquin life, only that they were laid out on strips of paper that I could relate to myself. The content of my detailed and exemplary note-taking was void of emotion or complexity, and the questions of racism were neglected and pushed away by time and silence. What might have happened if someone had asked me at that tender age who I was and where I 90 was coming from, and had helped me make sense of my experiences in ways that helped me build relationships towards living well with others? What could have happened in my mind and heart had I learned about the history of Algonquin people and felt a connection to real people and to how the Algonquin culture has evolved today? In September 2017 I met with three colleagues at a local coffee shop—April, Keith, and Andrea. At this first gathering we shared our intentions, hopes, and practices as educators who sought to learn and grow through and with the re-designed curriculum. We looked for connections between us that could be a starting point for us to collaborate and learn from each other’s diverse roles within the education system and we also made a plan for others to join us. At the time, April was a middle school classroom teacher. Keith worked out of the school board office as a lead teacher in the Indigenous Education department. Andrea worked at a large middle school as an Indigenous advocate, and I was working at the local university as a faculty advisor to pre-service teachers. From our various positions, we were each committed to learning to live the redesigned curriculum as an Indigenized curriculum. At our second meeting we were joined by Susan, Russ, Kimmy, and John who were all settler educators. We formed the learning community I have been describing as Living in Circle. Although Living in Circle was a learning collective, the sense-making reflected in this chapter is unique to my own perspective. In this chapter, I share audio-recorded quotes from April, Keith, Andrea, Kimmy, John, Russ and Susan to illustrate how they influenced my learning and to highlight the relational nature of the self. I do not attempt to offer evidence of their own sense-making. They each have their own learning story which is a valuable story for them to share in their own way as they choose. This stated distinction between our perspectives is part of what it means to embrace the circular journey of knowledge: 91 A circle teaching tells us that no two people will experience the circle in the same way. However, if you journey around the circle in deep and thoughtful ways, you will begin to understand something that was previously hidden. This is iterative process takes each of us on a journey around the circle, with each cycle adding depth and richness to our understandings and conceptualizations... each cyclical journey adds dimension to the concepts as they are examined, explored, and connected across contexts. (Styres, p. 31) My experiences with FPPL as a contested, situated, and relational process generated themes in my sense-making. As I made sense of my experiences, I found that I attended to worldview, expanded my conception of wellbeing, and embraced decolonization. Figure 2: Thematic Representation of Experiences with FPPL Sometimes, evidence of these themes emerged from the exploration of specific principles, and sometimes, the stories I shared were inspired by engaging with the principles as a whole document. Taken together these three themes offer a theorized account of my experiences ATTEND TO WORLDVIEWEXPAND WELLBEINGEMBRACE DECOLONIZATIONCONTESTEDSITUATEDRELATIONAL 92 and are a perspective that other educators might consider as they engage in developing and deepening their own understanding of the FPPL. As I explained to my Living in Circle community: Me: (Pulling out the Principles) Learning about and through the principles takes time, patience, and awareness of my own identity. It is not a straightforward process. Yet, this poster is a common tool that people are familiar with, so maybe the principles bridge our various perspectives by gifting us with common language that helps us to investigate and articulate our own understanding the nature of learning. Like we have been discussing, there is not one experience that will mean the same thing for all of us and any experience in isolation is not the thing. An experience is not an end. Learning is the focus but what do we mean by learning? Experiences continue to change through how we make sense of our experiences, and this often happens over time through our memories and returning to experiences again and again. (Living in Circle, Feb 20th, audio files) My words echoed the value of creating and sustaining what Darling, Erickson, and Clarke (2007) describe as a “good enough theory of curriculum” (p. 234). In a ‘good enough’ theory the goal is to “challenge is to sustain conversations about practice that allow us to discard those practices which are destructive to our learning community while selecting more useful practices the goal is to uncover not what is a pre-given ideal form but to create that which is possible to sustain” (Darling et al., 2007, p. 234). In this chapter, I offer what it looked like, felt like, and sounded like as I engaged in an ongoing dialogue with the First Peoples Principles of Learning within the collective learning community of Living in Circle over the course of my self-study. I created an understanding of the FPPL that was deeply anchored in an evolving consideration of worldview, 93 wellbeing, and decolonization. Further, I frame my account of learning within a series of questions to reveal how I circled around these three concepts over time, and how I went deeper and deeper in my sense-making with “each cycle adding depth and richness to [my] understanding and conceptualization” (Styres, 2017, p. 31). 4.2 Attending to Worldview What does it mean to walk in two worlds? My focus on the role of worldview in relationship to the First Peoples Principles of Learning began at a workshop in March 2015. I was invited to a day of collective learning that included First Nations Elders, community leaders, educators, students, parents, and partner groups. We all gathered on Westbank First Nation Land to discuss and create knowledge around the following prompt: What is meant by Aboriginal Perspectives and Worldviews in the Classroom7? The gathering was facilitated by the BC Ministry of Education, Indigenous Education Learning Division, the Central Okanagan School District, and Central Okanagan School District Indigenous Education. The intention of the day was to recognize the power of worldview in all teaching and learning, and to create collective language around what we, as a diverse group, understood worldview to mean, and to outline a ‘way forward’ through this understanding. That day, I wrote the following brief intention in my journal, “in order for our children to be whole educators all have to walk in two worlds. Walking in two worlds requires innovative partnerships through which dialogue drives school reform” (March 23rd , 2015). This idea that teachers need to be able to walk in two worlds returned to me again in a story shared by Archibald (2008). The story tells of a time when Coyote lost his eyes and then finds himself seeing the world through two different eyes. One of Coyote’s eyes comes from a 7 This conversation informed the creation of the BC Ministry of Education document: Aboriginal Perspectives and Worldviews in the Classroom 94 mouse and the other is from a buffalo. With these two different eyes, Coyote struggles. He is disoriented and unable to focus, because he does not know how to balance between these different eyes in order to see clearly. Archibald explains that ‘to be a whole human being (a complete coyote), one must learn to switch back and forth between the eyes of not only Mouse and Buffalo but all of the other animals (Tafoya, 1982, p. 24 as cited in Archibald, 2008, p. 10). The story offered me the metaphor of eyes and seeing to describe the challenge of worldview as learning to learn to balance one perspective with another. The opportunity to learn through the First Peoples Principles of Learning involved recognizing that there was something distinct about a First Peoples approach, and then seeing that this approach to learning from multiple perspectives would be of great value to the pursuit of living our human fullness… if I could learn to find my balance. How might I see my worldview(s)? In 2016 I taught in an interdisciplinary grade 6/7 classroom at a local middle school. Mid-November of that year, I attended a whole school staff meeting where we explored the redesigned curriculum as a staff for the first time. The meeting started with a guided exploration of the redesigned curriculum. Following this overview, we were asked to collaborate in small groups around a specific task. We were to work together to cut and paste pieces of the new curriculum together to form statements that could be used to describe evidence of student learning. The idea was for us to consider the relationship between big ideas, curricular competencies, and curricular content. With all I was learning about living the curriculum, this fill-in-the-blank activity was challenging for me to wholeheartedly engage in. I was disappointed that the First Peoples Principles of Learning were not part of the conversation. They were not part of overview or the descriptions of student learning. Thus, while other groups were arranging various parts of the 95 curriculum into descriptions of what student learning might look like in their classrooms, I described my sense of frustration to the colleagues at my table. I shared how I had been excited about working with the FPPL and that not seeing the principles in our process seemed a bit Eurocentric. I also shared that I felt that presuming how the students would take up their learning in isolated parts put together by teachers out of context from our lived experience in the classroom seemed like a limited worldview of curriculum. My reflection instigated a lively and interesting debate between us. One of my colleagues responded by exclaiming, “this is why I would never want to teach in the humanities.” Confused by this connection, I asked, “What does this have to do with teaching in the humanities?” My colleague explained, “My subject areas are not worldviews, they are facts.” In some ways I was surprised that my colleagues were not considering worldview in their teaching at that time; at the same time, I could relate since my tendency to connect worldview with the redesigned curriculum had only recently been sparked at the professional learning offered in 2015. I also felt a sense of hopefulness. I was hopeful that this conversation, and the opportunity for us to share our beliefs and explore our differences, would influence our understandings of each other moving forward. I hoped that this conversation would spark future conversations of its kind for us and for our students. We were not a group of educators complaining about a learning task, we were invested in a conversation where we were sharing our passions and our curricular beliefs. I was encouraged by thinking that it did not matter that we had different views, instead it was useful that we did. We were learning to understand each other. We were shaping and changing our viewpoints through dialogue and, in this way, we were dipping our toes into the possibility of walking in multiple worlds. 96 I found this conversation refreshing. I had been growing frustrated with the tendency to emphasize how the redesigned curriculum was the same as past curricula, and that we should all feel confident moving forward in the directions for learning that we had already established through our prior teaching experiences. Debating the influence of worldview across subject matter took us away from the normative stance of approaching curriculum as we always had. We were moving towards a more disruptive inquiry that asked us to be self-reflective and to open up to new perspectives. It seemed that the exploration of worldview opened up a new terrain for professional dialogue in ways that I had not often experience. How might I explore reflexivity through story? The FPPL describe learning as holistic, reflexive, reflective, experiential, and relational. I considered reflexivity in relationship to worldview and the understanding that we all see the world through our unique stances and perspectives. Exploring my data with the theme of worldview in mind, I wondered how storytelling might welcome the exploration of reflexivity and the capacity to reflect on worldviews with my students. When I was teaching in a community of grade 6/7 students and following the lead of FPPL I had been looking for ways to engage students to learn through exploration of memory, history and story. At the time, I was making sense of my worldview and the role of worldview in teaching and learning. I also started to notice ways that my students were also trying to make sense of worldview by asking questions about the nature of truth. I noticed that students were feeling confronted by the diversity of different ways to describe the world around them and they wanted to cut through the contradictions they were noticing to find the ‘truth.’ In my journal I describe being struck by the “number of students who would ask me if stories were true or not” and in the side margins of my journal, near this documentation of student thinking I transcribed a 97 quote by King (2003), that “the truth about stories is that is all we are” (p.2) (teaching journal, March 2, 2016). In my teaching journal, alongside my notes on King, I also noted the following quote by Palmer (1998) on fearful ways of knowing in classrooms: If we regard truth as something handed down from authorities on high, the classroom will look like a dictatorship. If we regard truth as a fiction determined by personal whim, the classroom will look like an anarchy. If we regard truth as emerging from a complex process of mutual inquiry, the classroom will look like a resourceful and interdependent community (p. 51). As my students turned to me for yes or no answers about the nature of truth, they were compelling me to inquire more deeply and to think about how I might support them through pedagogy built on the FPPL. I set the intention for them to engage in developing their reflexivity. While my students wanted me to evaluate truthfulness of stories for them and be the authority on learning, I began to look for ways to turn the responsibility for determining what makes something truthful to them. By turning the question back on them I hoped to disrupt the idea of singular truths and lead students to question the concept of perspective and identity in learning. In setting this direction for our learning I was acting on the FPPL that learning requires the exploration of identity and I wondered what personal truths we might discover when we experience that we all have different interpretations of the same experience. To create experiences for us to explore, I looked for stories that would support our learning. I created a provocation for my students that intended to challenge them to consider their beliefs about truth, worldview and perspective taking. I invited the students to explore and consider a picture book called, A Coyote Columbus Story (King, 1992). The story depicts the creation of the world with Coyote as the creator. In the text, Coyote is always summoning new 98 people to play with, including Christopher Columbus. When Columbus arrives, he is pictured in the story book with a blaze of receding orange hair and a bulbous red nose. This caricature of Christopher Columbus, illustrated by Monkman, elicited many of the student’s attention. The picture portrayed Columbus with a blaze of orange receding hair, a bulbous red nose, and wearing a ruff, and high heeled boots. In this picture Columbus is also pictured holding a scroll upside down. The scroll reads, the new route to India. The same picture shows the sneering faces of other silly dressed European men, one carrying a machine gun. The students’ attention to the picture created an opportunity for further inquiry: Why does Columbus look like a clown? Why are there machine guns in the picture? These were generative questions. In a separate review of the story, Bradford (2007) describes the impact the art had on her describing, “The cumulative effect of these details, together with Monkman’s palette of lurid, even fluorescent hues, is to construct Columbus and his men as cultural artifacts, inventions of the dominant” (p. 27). Typically, we see Indigenous peoples constructed in a fixed cultural way, often with a headdress. King’s story provoked students to think through the significance of retelling Christopher Columbus’s story from the perspective of Coyote. I invited the students to consider these questions: Is there always one truth? How do we know when we know something? What does knowing sound, feel, look like? Why do our beliefs about truth matter? The students considered and theorized their interpretations of the picture book carefully. They gathered evidence by documenting what they noticed, why aspects seem important and what surprised them. The students shared their ideas with each other in small groups, and then as a whole class. As they shared, the differences in their perspectives, informed by background information, emotions and intuition created conversations wherein the students learned more from the differences between 99 their ideas than from the story. It seemed that our interpretations of the text, just like the text itself, blurred boundaries between cultures, mixing creation stories and settlement stories. The students noticed that the text created confusion between time periods, and I questioned why they thought this occurred. Over some time we discussed relationships and connections across time and space until one student shared that while the first settlers did not bring the Mercedes cars, jelly beans, surf boards that are portrayed in the story pictures, they started a chain reaction of trade that eventuated into these products and this has an impact on the First Peoples and settlers today. The Columbus provocation was an exciting memory of learning for me and I shared this experience with Living Circle members, April and John. I described that I was eager to share the picture book with other educators, but they wondered to what end. John shared that he had experienced teachers and students reject the text because of its ambiguity, and he wondered what would change this stance. This led to us unpack the value of confusion and uncertainty that such texts offer educators as well as the challenges of such a text. Of course, I cannot speak for why a teacher would or would not want to bring the text into the classroom, but King (2003) offers a possibility. He shares a critique of his book that was offered by an annoyed reader who, complained that, while imagination was a good thing in children’s literature, I should not be inventing history in order to make a political point. She was, it turned out, angry about my suggesting that Columbus had enslaved Indians. And when I told her that this was the only part of my story that was accurate, she refused to believe me (p. 72). This led me to explore the idea that we are all lost in our own social imaginaries that lead us to believe what is true and what is not. If we can be open to the possibility that we are mistaken, we have the opportunity to learn. This was a lesson in non-attachment. It reminded me of the power 100 of holding our ideas gently. The experience also surfaced a memory of the challenges that I had experienced earlier on in my teaching career in being aware of my bias. It was my second year of teaching and I was intent on sharing news accounts from all around the world with my students. I wanted to keep them informed of the world they were growing into. A particular instance of this was my decision to retell the events of 9-11 to my students. The event had only happened two years prior and it felt relevant and important to signify the anniversary. Following what I thought was a factual discussion of what had happened, I received a phone call from a concerned parent. The parent expressed that there was a great deal of bias in my sharing of that experience with my students, and he was concerned that my bias would impact his Muslim daughter. At the time, I genuinely did not understand why the parent was upset. I was uncomfortable because, from my perspective, I was telling stories as they happened so that my students would be aware of the world around us. I worried that this parent wanted me to censor my students from the atrocities of our world. As I reflected back, this memory haunted me. And it also helped me to recognize how much I have grown as I have learned to question how I tell stories. The more I understood worldview, the more I changed how I told stories and why I told them. I moved away from linear tales with cause and effect in favour of how FPPL describes learning that is always embedded in memory, history, and story. That these three concepts were part of the same phrase, was significant to my learning. All too often I had separated them as if memory, history, story were entirely different constructs. Experimenting with the FPPL, I learned to mix historical time periods, fact, and fiction, through texts such as King’s, to invite students into a disruptive experience that might create a sense of uncertainty about how to read the world. King’s text was 101 a vehicle in my classroom for focusing our attention on the gaps and cracks in stories, and to consider all perspectives, including missing perspectives. I noticed that when we attend to knowledge as fragile and incomplete that there is an opportunity to interrogate seamless narratives, and to draw attention to different ways of seeing/being. What kinds of learning conditions support multiple worldviews? As much as I loved King’s story, it was just one possible way to engage in conversations that welcomed multiple worldviews and fostered the awareness of worldviews. Reflecting within Living in Circle helped me to draw my attention away from the specificities of that text to the conditions of learning that supported our inquiry. Conditions such as risk taking, curiosity, open-mindedness, time together, all supported our engagement with the concept of worldview: Andrea: Fresh eyes and curiosity is the thing that is missing when you have been in a setting for a long time. You just start to glaze over and everything becomes normal and invisible. Me: Yes, and I need provocations that help me investigate and share who I am. I am learning how hearing about what sparks others can also influence and spark my curiosity. In my experience hearing the personal stories of others influences a gut reaction in me and once my body realizes these new truths… I can’t go back. I am changed. April: That’s a beautiful thing and the power of the time we have spent together. Hearing each other in this way needs to be developed into other staff practices, like staff meetings and then this practice will facilitate how we can listen with our kids. Keith: I am already listening to kids in this way. To welcome Indigenous worldview into classrooms, I do an activity with students where we send them home with a list of questions to ask their families about ancestry, place, and time and then they come back 102 and share. It has been is really powerful in our community because parents are like what why are you asking me that? Because a thirteen-year-old do not usually go, ‘Mom, where is Grandma from?’ So once those conversations start happening at the home, we can begin to make amazing changes in the classroom because maybe students didn’t know their history but after talking to their parents, they are like wait a minute, I am Indigenous from here. Then you can start making connections that kids didn’t even know that they have. (audio recording, February 19th, 2018) Sharing our own stories and listening to the stories of others is one way to ignite an understanding of worldview that is accessible to everyone. Again, I think of the quote from Seidel and Jardine (2014) who describe: “Each of us is a miracle of our ancestors’ survival, whoever they were, wherever they lived. Here we are together today, and that is all” (p. 9). Perhaps this common thread, that each of us is a miracle of our ancestors’ survival, whoever they were, wherever they lived, is a pathway to embrace and then stretch the role of worldview in learning. Reflecting on our experiences critically, and at the same time lovingly, was something my Living in Circle colleagues taught me through conversations such as the following: Me: I think it is important for settlers to have their worldview at the forefront of their minds—recognizing that our presence here is not neutral, there is a story here and in educational settings there is an opportunity to start interrogating that. Susan: As a settler, I often feel like I don’t have a story. I know that I do have a story but I don’t feel like it has as much meaning, in my eyes, as someone who is Indigenous. Like my husband is Metis, from the Winnipeg area and I am envious of that, but I also think that is because I do have settler baggage and guilt. 103 Keith: Justice St. Clair- one of his suggestions is that everyone needs to honour where everyone is from and that way, I will listen to your stories and you also have to listen to mine. Susan: That’s interesting, because I don’t have any stories. Keith: You do. Susan: And that is like an aha for me. April: So now I am thinking back to my time as your camp counselor and you do have stories Susan. You are baby Susan too. So here is the thing, of course you have stories because I have heard stories of your parents and how good and caring they are and it’s no wonder that Susan turned out the way that she did because look at how much her parents loved her. You have stories, they may not look the same as someone else’s story but appreciate those stories and use that, those gifts that you have to, create for our children and future children so that they are growing and honouring and loving and caring for themselves. It’s not about feeling guilt; it is about recognition and taking action to remove systems of oppression. Susan: Totally but I think that guilt is what a lot of white settlers do feel when they are asked about their stories—they might say, I don’t have a story. I am not Indigenous. Andrea: You don’t have an Indigenous story, but you have a story. (audio recording, May 24th, 2018) The way that April made space for Susan in our conversation was transformative for me, because it was loving, appreciative, and transformative. Susan was awaking to the invisibility of her settler perspective and April was encouraging her to recognize the strengths of her upbringing as part of her story. This act of the encouragement of self-love, also made me uncomfortable—I 104 wondered how looking lovingly at our settler identities was going to lead to dismantling settler privilege. I was conflicted because I had always believed that to love others requires self-love, and so in this moment that belief was present. Was it possible that to critically unpack my settler history a kind of love would have a role in re-storying that history in a way that could create the most service for others moving forward? April guided Susan to find her strengths as she looked back at herself. This seemed to empower her to change her thinking. Might this tension between love and critique also be what it means to walk in two worlds? Is that how learning ultimately supports the wellbeing of the self, the family, the community, the land, the spirits, and the ancestors as described in the FPPL? This conversation leads into the theme of wellbeing, but first I offer some final thoughts on the relationships between what I have learned about worldview and the First Peoples Principles of Learning. What might a holistic understanding of worldview involve? Early on in my research, I created this visual of the First Peoples Principles of Learning as a distinct, alternative worldview to a western worldview. I shared these thoughts on the differences between the dominant approach to learning and FPPL in Living in Circle in October 2017. Dominant Approach to Learning First Peoples Principles of Learning Learning is competitive, individualistic Goal of learning is to get a job Learning ultimately supports the well-being of the self, the family, the community, the land, the spirits, and the ancestors. Table 2: Contrasting Approaches to Learning 105 Dominant Approach to Learning (continued) First Peoples Principles of Learning (continued) Knowledge is transmitted Students work independently Teaching and assessment are separate Learning is holistic, reflexive, reflective, experiential, and relational (focused on connectedness, on reciprocal relationships, and a sense of place). Learning is teacher to student focused Teacher chooses what student learn Learning involves recognizing the consequences of one’s actions. Learning involves generational roles and responsibilities. Euro-American knowledge focus Learning recognizes the role of Indigenous knowledge. Focus is on a single discipline, in a linear fashion Learning is embedded in memory, history, and story. Students are ranked according to predetermined criteria Learning involves patience and time. Learning requires exploration of one’s identity. Teacher is the expert and all knowing Learning involves recognizing that some knowledge is sacred and only shared with permission and/or in certain situations. Table 2: Contrasting Approaches to Learning When I created this table, I was contemplating an idea of theorizing by Sanford, Williams, Hopper and McGregor (2012) who made a similar comparison between the two worldviews. They described the value of such a comparison is through educators beginning to 106 think differently about “ways of connecting with learners, valuing their knowledge, and helping them to move forward successfully into the world” (p. 21). A primary difference that they noted is how “Euro-American conventions, increasingly shaped by neoliberals whose focus on the singular truth and the right way, has stunted the growth of not only Aboriginal students, but of all students, and in this paper we will suggest that teacher education can learn from Aboriginal principles that will improve education of all students” (p. 21). Building on this stance, I was more firmly rooted in the notion that the FPPL offered a unique perspective on learning when contrasted with the dominant Western approach that I outlined in my chart. After sharing the chart with Living in Circle, I felt unfulfilled by the comparisons I was making. I reflected that they felt like a binary, and that I was concerned that thinking in this way did not invite nuances of curriculum as contested, situated and relational. I was seeking a way of exploring worldview that held up the possibilities of multiplicity, contradiction, and relationships, even kinship, between perspectives. I shared this longing for a more robust thinking about the differences between the two perspectives with my Living in Circle colleagues. April reflected on my question and suggested I look into the scholarship of Meyer (2013). She sent me an article by Meyer on holographic epistemology with a note that read, “I think this is what you are looking for in your worldview inquiry.” She was right. In her article, Meyer (2013) describes three ways to view and experience all knowledge—objective, subjective and quantum knowledge. She argues that we need to see the interconnections between all of these approaches or worldviews to form a more robust or holographic version of reality (p. 94). She explains that there are different ways to approach and know the world but there are also more clear ways of knowing when we consider all perspectives at once. She likens this holistic approach to worldview as holographic because “each beam in the 107 hologram is necessary to bring forth the fullness of its essence, form, and purpose” (p. 96). This description brought me back to Archibald’s (2008) story of Coyote and her offering that “to be a be whole human being (a complete Coyote), one must learn to switch back and forth between the eyes of not only Mouse and Buffalo but all of the other animals of legend” (Tafoya 1982, p. 24 as cited in Archibald, p. 10). It seems that embracing multiple ways of seeing is part of understanding our humanness. According to Meyer (2013) all of our human ways of knowing are inextricably linked. She marvels at the relationships between parts and the whole, and the ways that all the parts of our ways of knowing contain the whole of knowing. According to Meyer, in everything we experience there are aspects of physical, subjective, and spiritual ways of knowing. The following chart offers some of the distinctions between ways of knowing that make up a whole as described by Meyer. Physical Subjective Spiritual Perception Conceptualization Remembering Instinct Intelligence Intuition Seeing Subjective Convergence Hearing Reflection Awareness Emotion Thought Wholeness Table 3. Meyer's Dimensions of Knowing The physical, subjective, and spiritual dimensions of knowing are not separate parts. For example, when we perceive a sensation in the body, we have a subjective interpretation and conception of what that sensation might be linked to. Further we might have a memory that is triggered by the experiences. Sensing all of these aspects at once is more familiar to Indigenous 108 ways of knowing. Dominant thought has often privileged physical knowing—associated with fundamental objectivity, scientific regime—but a physical world that can be measured and predicted is also found in Indigenous thought. The difference is that in Indigenous thought the physical is accompanied by the other dimensions of knowing as well. According to Meyer, “Indigenous scholarship is simply asking for an evolution of this idea with the heightened rigor of a just-as-real subjective and spiritual/quantum reality” (p. 96). This way of thinking helped me to replace my binary worldview chart. My thinking about knowing grew into something that I am still considering and navigating, but that seems to hold space for multiple ways of thinking at once. I took this understanding forward and I made many new connections to my understanding of wholeness, which is also encouraged by Four Arrows (2008). Four Arrows describes the importance of seeking to interpret the world through the lens of wholeness which will “lead us toward a different way to approach literary, research, energy, ideas, data collection, sustainability, and all collaborations” (p. 17). Through this process I also had the opportunity to contemplate how a more multidimensional worldview might address a current inequity and bias in schools regarding recognizing spirit in knowing. Through conversations with Keith, I reflected that the avoidance of the concepts of spirit by teachers has been a rationale for avoiding engagement with documents such as the FPPL. As Keith explained: Keith: Spirituality is one of the barriers to Indigenizing. It’s a loaded statement because teachers will say that we don’t teach religion in schools. I get this all the time when I talk about any medicine wheel teaching or anything like that. As soon as I get to the spiritual part it’s—'oh sorry but we don’t teach about religion’. So, my response is that spirit is part of a whole and it is not a religious practice. Spirituality is a connection- particularly 109 the connections that touch your heart. This is so important to be connected to because in your heart is where your passion lays. Spirit is about connecting to and bringing out the best of you and allowing that to be shared. It’s not just about a creator or a god but any connection. (audio recording, June 15, 2018) Questioning my worldview for what might be missing, and seeing it as partial and in need of greater consideration of subjectivity and spirit, I also made connections to living the curriculum as described by Aoki (2004d). It seemed that the over-emphasis of physical ways of knowing has been critiqued by Aoki as well. In his theorizing he offers the term ‘inspirited’ to describe how curriculum involves the ‘fullness of body and soul’ and unmasks the ‘texture’ of the ‘lived meanings of teachers and students’ (pp. 357–365). Greene describes the need for wide-awake attention beyond habits and tradition in order for teachers to begin to understand their own identity landscape and the landscapes of others. For Greene (1978), a landscape represented a person’s perspective which included their sense of reason and awareness of relations and was influenced by kinship within a culture. For example, Western landscapes often included a self-image derived from the 18th Century where faith in human reasoning was reinforced by the family and appeared naturally as a path to freedom and dignity. There was a deeply held assumption that everything could be logically known and that humans prosper under such conditions of knowingness. Through interrogating the relationship between rationality and progress, Greene (1978) pushed her reader to consider the joy of grappling with complex problems that do not make sense to the rationality of the inquirer. This process can challenge and transform thinking and she reminded that it is under the conditions of struggle and uncertainty the humans flourish (Greene, 1978). 110 As I reflected on my learning through the reflective process of paying attention to the themes that emerged in my data, I noticed that my thinking shifted from paying little attention to worldview, to seeing the concept as a description of individualist constraint or bias, to wondering how I might understand worldview as unifying concept that involves the ongoing welcoming and seeking of more diversity through valuing connections and relationships. 4.3 Expanding Wellbeing At the first gathering with the Living in Circle community I articulated that my commitment to contributing to the ongoing wellbeing of all was my compass point. I wrote: I hope this community (Living in Circle) that will help me to learn practices that support the wellbeing of all community members by prioritizing First Peoples Principles of Learning. (teaching journal, September 27th, 2017) This sense that I could support the wellbeing of others through the First Peoples Principles of Learning emerged throughout the stories I collected in my journals and through the audio recordings. In the next section I describe experiences that seemed to influence my understanding of wellbeing as a conception of learning. What supports wellbeing during times of change? At the same time as the redesigned curriculum was being introduced, I started to reflect on another common parallel narrative about teacher stress and burn out. It seemed to me that everyone, including teachers, were noting how stressed teachers were, and I wondered how this assumption about chronic stress influenced the ways in which teachers were invited into learning. Was the desire to minimize teachers’ stress becoming the focus above their learning and a reason to maintain the status quo? There also seemed to be an assumption that change would cause more stress, and so the redesigned curriculum was presented to teachers in ways that minimized change (and stress). 111 I formed this perspective based on a lot of different experiences. The BCTF (2017) described the toll that curriculum change takes on teachers through increased workload. They reported how teachers’ perspective included the idea that “Changing every curricular area at the same time with absolutely no resources being provided put a burden on teachers that in my opinion almost broke them” (p. 20). I heard colleagues using similar language to describe how they were coping with the curriculum change. At the same time, I was continually hearing phrases like “good teaching is still good teaching,” and “its new language, that’s all,” and “just keep doing what you are doing.” It seemed to me that our learning about wellbeing was being facilitated through a hope of minimizing teacher stress by encouraging us that we were already aligned with the new curriculum and so we had less to change then we thought. I recognized this was my interpretation of what I was experiencing, however I was concerned with this approach to change. The Association of Canadian Deans of Education (ACDE) (2010) stated, “The time is right for a concerted and cooperative effort that creates transformational education by rejecting the “status quo,” moving beyond “closing the gap” discourse, and contributing to the well-being of Indigenous peoples and their communities” (p. 2). Importantly, this statement seemed to distinguish wellbeing from success in the dominant school experience. Taking together my interpretations of all of these experiences led me to wonder about the costs of underestimating the process of change on wellbeing. What do children need to be well? Every teacher has an image of the child that involves what she thinks the child is capable of and what she imagines the child’s role in the world to be. These beliefs create the contours within which children have the opportunity to learning and grow. Over the course of my research, I learned about Indian Residential Schools and how the 112 Canadian government partnered with religious organizations to assimilate Indigenous children through the lens of Christianity. The TRC (2015b) explains that the, decision to invest in residential schools was based on a belief that the cultural and spiritual transformation that the government and churches sought to bring about in Aboriginal people could be most effectively accomplished in institutions that broke the bonds between parent and child. (p. v) As part of my process for understanding why and how the FPPL are so significant, I read the section of the TRC report called Survivors Speak. Across this challenging experience, I listened closely for the relationships with learning that were fostered at those schools. The survivors offered many reflections on what learning meant to them in that environment. Victoria McIntosh explained that life at the Fort Alexander, Manitoba, residential school taught her not to trust saying, “you learn not to cry anymore. You just get harder. And yeah, you learn to shut down. And you know those feelings are there, and but they’re, they’re so deep down inside” (TRC, 2015b, p.134). Margaret Simpson, who attended the Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, school, described how she learned to lie as a survival technique: I learned how to lie, to lie so that I will get away with whatever Sister wanted me to do and that whatever she wanted to hear, that’s what I told her even if it was a lie. So it got easier and I got pretty good at lying and I had a real time to get out of that lying as I got older in life to be able to tell the truth and to know the difference of what was happening because of that lie that it became such a habit for me. I had a real hard time even after I left the residential school. (TRC, 2015b, p.126) These stories helped me to pay attention to how curricular enactment can encourage students to learn in unhealthy ways through practices such as denying their feelings, and identity, and 113 relinquishing their agency. These students’ experiences demonstrated the trauma that can result from extinguishing their feelings, identity and agency to be able to just get by, to survive. Understanding schooling in relationship to IRS contributed to a better understanding of how my social constructivist pedagogy supported my emphasis on the idea of knowledge building. I began to understand that knowledge building in a context where certain kinds of knowledges have been assimilated is complex and can ultimately privilege certain kinds of dominant knowledges at the expense of other knowledges and worldviews. I reflected that without ample and sufficient opportunities to engage in knowledge making, some students may not feel recognized and that students need different supports to make their possible thinking visible. Thinking about the impact of the loss of knowledge along with the consistent lack of consideration of Indigenous perspectives in schools, I started to consider that in order for knowledge building to be equitable, I would need to help build the epistemic agency of Indigenous perspectives by finding ways to bring this knowledge into the classroom through Indigenous stories, Elders, First Peoples Principles of Learning, and exploring the Land. I was growing to understand that Indigenous knowledge was central for learning in ways that grows wellbeing. In the autumn of 2016, I introduced my grade 6/7 students to The Seven Sacred Teachings. The Seven Sacred, or as they were sometimes called Grandfather, teachings are Indigenous knowledge teachings of wisdom, love, respect, bravery, honestly, humility, and truth (Styres, 2017, p. 14). They are not local teachings, however at that time my primary source for Indigenous knowledge was the internet. I had yet to start accessing more local knowledge through attendance at cultural experiences offered by Syilx community members. I learned through my online searches that the seven scared teachings are part of many different Indigenous organizations and communities. From coast to coast they are shared in a variety of adaptations, 114 as a moral steppingstone and cultural foundation for their communities. I wanted to introduce them to the students to become the values of our classroom community. The Seven Sacred teachings became a shared language in our classroom through our values, and as part of our ongoing reflecting on our learning. We sometimes looked at characters or events in novels, or current events or our classroom community through the lens of the teachings. We asked each other how does this experience reflect on the teachings? How does this character embody one of the teachings? Over time through our inquiry and discussions, we learned to understand how all of the teachings are interdependent and can influence positive or negative consequences—the absence of love, or courage, or truth can cause great suffering. Through our conversations it became understood that in order for the teachings to have the most positive impact there needs to be balance among all qualities. The growing complexity and student interest expressed through their understandings of the teachings led to an arts-based imaginative inquiry into deforestation. We created fictional stories wherein the Seven Sacred teachings could heal the world and the trees. The students illustrated their stories and created water colour paintings of the trees that artfully represented the teachings of the trees. At the same time, the students explored the natural landscape of the Okanagan, at first through a presentations of earth fiber and then through outdoor exploration. The stories that students told were deeply insightful and I learned a lot about the possibilities for children to move between Indigenous knowledge, Western scientific knowledge, to magical thinking and back again. I experienced how these crossings help children weave information, experience, and imagination together into new understandings. 115 What is the role of the Land in wellbeing? I shared the story of the Seven Grandfather Teachings inquiry with Living in Circle and my attention was turned to the role of Land in this inquiry, leading me to weave the role of Land into my theory of wellbeing: April: In my experience, insightful student conversations emerge from time spent outside, contemplating nature. The time outside and the dispositions we build together are capacity building pieces that help student learn to make connections and be more open hearted, open minded. Nature is a great teacher and role model. (audio recording, Tuesday, February 19th, 2018) At the time April was deeply exploring what happens when we observe nature. I was less experienced in this way, and so I was not attuned to how the Land teaches. Styres (2017) writes, “The Land is spiritual, emotional and relational; Land is experiential, Land is consciousness… each of us, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, exist within interconnected and interdependent relationships to Land” (p. 47). I wanted to be more intentional about creating more opportunities for my students to learn outside, and I was committed to learning in the same ways that we would invite our students into. This meant that I was also cultivating my own growth through attention and communion with the Land. Reflecting on my journal entries, I noticed that more reflections on the natural world were becoming prominent in my writing: The morning was bucketing down with snow, the snow was drifting down from the sky, the tree limbs heavier and heavier by the moment, my frosty breath, my boot prints, the crunch of the snow under foot- the limiting of visibility and I am thinking of a meditation written by Wagamese (2016) who wrote, “it occurs to me that the secret of fully being here, walking the skin of this planet, is to learn to see things as though I were looking at 116 them for the first time, or the last. Nothing is too small then, too mundane, too usual” (p. 170). (teaching journal, December 2017) If wellbeing is an indicator of learning then I believe that we need to invest in more equitable practices for knowledge building and learning on the Land, and listening to the land is part of that practice. During a time on the Land with the Living in Circle community Andrea shared her story of schooling in the Okanagan. It was the end of a day of learning and we practiced mindful walking towards a small forested creek as a way to settle our minds and attune to the present moment before our final reflection. Our walk took us around the grounds of the local high school where we had spent the day. Just beyond the creek was a majestic spruce tree and we formed a circle around it. As we were gathering around the tree someone questioned the tree’s possible age. In response, Andrea put her hand on the tree to feel its age (others followed). With her hand on the tree she proceeded to lead a discussion about the possible age of the tree, and at the same time she tenderly shared her own story as an Indigenous student at this high school many years before. She did not have a positive experience as a student at the school, because she did not feel a part of the community. Rather, she felt like an outsider. She had felt anxious returning to the school that day and our time together had calmed her fears. In sharing her Indigenous knowledge at that moment with that tree and our community she shared that she felt healing. I received her story in that moment with humility, honour, and respect. I was growing more and more aware that when learners’ voices are omitted from curricular conversations the quality of learning and what is possible in the future suffers for all. Contemporary Indigenous students need their teachers to have a better understanding of history 117 as interconnected with place in both through Indigenous Knowledge, and the past experiences of Indigenous students—if only someone had brought Andrea to that beautiful tree so many years before and invited her to explore and grow her deep wisdom. After that day, I reflected that “while I know I don’t hold Indigenous knowledge and stories, but I am trying to learn how to support the knowledge and I can infuse my support into my reading of the First Peoples Principles of Learning and what it means to be well” (teaching journal, December 2017). My understanding of wellbeing also started to include a sense of balance. Chrona (2014) explains that to honour a balanced understanding of wellbeing “what is learned by the individual needs to also be a benefit to his or her family and community” (para, 4). From my understanding, this idea can stand in opposition to an individualistic perspective where the individual is more important than the community. This understanding of wellbeing is also based on the premise that “we are all related,” a view of the world deeply held by most Aboriginal peoples in North America (Cajete, 1994; Greenwood & de Leeuw, 2007; Kirkness, 1998). Embedded in this concept is the belief that as human beings, we all share a commonality and what affects one person affects all others. I was learning that the kinds of stories we tell can help or hinder our ability to tune into a balanced understanding of wellbeing. For example, April shared and reflected on the story of Grandmother Spider. The story goes that in the beginning of time only two beings existed, a Sun God and Spider Woman. The Sun God imagined the creatures of the earth, and Spider Woman turned these thoughts into living plants, animals, and people. She attached a thread of her spider silk to each person to provide access to her wisdom and protection. April shared, “The story teaches me and the students that there is this common thread between the sky and the earth, between mother and child through the umbilical cord.” Her reflection helped me to articulate my 118 hunch that storytelling and connecting with the ancestors is an important way to access relational-self awareness. What is the value of struggle? I wanted to explore a tendency that I noticed in how we often move away from the complexity and diversity of our perspectives in teaching and learning when it comes to continuing teacher education. What I shared with Living in Circle was that I was curious about a general fear of stress in schools due to the amount of stress in schools. It seemed to me that learning was avoided in order to lessen teacher stress. In Living in Circle, we explored the tension between safety and compliance and diversity as we hiked a local mountain together on a cold, early, winter day. During the hike we made the decision to find our own way down from the apex of the mountain and re-gather at the bottom to explore finding our own edge, sense of adventure and comfort with risk: Russ: At times we should hike together, but we should also have opportunities to find our own way-together, both experiences build community. Kimmy: We were practicing community: togetherness, letting go, trust, and overcoming fear. Andrea: I liked the opportunity to non-comply- you are allowed to choose your own path April: we are here together; we are connected but we also have our own ways. In the audio recording a lot of different conversations broke out at this point. Voices sound excited. Keith: This is what we all need to learn if we want our students to learn… April (interrupting Keith): our hike that day was teachers learning that there are multiple ways of knowing- the path is not the same for everyone and as teachers we have to allow for the exploration as people find their own way. 119 Kimmy: it’s really important practice for people to feel valued for who they are. (audio recording, May 24th, 2018) This experience on the Land helped me make sense of my emotions and my feeling that how we had been learning as a staff in our staff meetings was aimed at minimizing stress even at the expense of exploring complexities that could really help students learn. During this time I was reflecting on Grumet’s (2010) description of the need for transformative teacher learning which is triggered through confronting unrest, and she asked a question that continued to nag at me: “how [can] teachers prepare to struggle within their classrooms without embracing struggle?” (p.74). It seemed to me that the avoidance of discussing the complexity of teaching sustains old traditions of hierarchy and privilege and presses them down upon teachers by (re)enforcing paternal relationships between teachers and school administration. When we avoid complexity we are moving away from the wellbeing of all and enacting what Grumet described as a common “romantic fiction that schools are shelters for innocent children and teachers, refuges for the problems of society; a myth that continues to flourish as we all shrink from the complexity of our lives” (p.68). Considering how we are in need of the perspectives of others when we learn also related to my expanding understanding of the ways in which wellbeing is so essential to learning. Defined by Ermine (2007), relational ethic refers to the “capacity to know what harms or enhances the wellbeing of sentient creatures” (p.195). Through my inquiry I was learning to articulate that learning must support this ethic through my understanding that First Peoples children and youth across Canada have experienced consistent lack of Indigenous pedagogy and knowledge, and this has had a significant, detrimental impact to wellbeing. Indigenous students’ experience with schooling has often involved chronic underachievement, high dropout rates and 120 for some, suicidal thoughts and suicide are part of their lived experience (Styres, 2017, p. 24). I am learning to understand more deeply that without the opportunity to be recognized and nurtured for the strengths and gifts that these youth bring, learning is stifled because wellbeing is not valued. I wonder how, in my work with Indigenous students, do I prioritize their wellbeing and in my work with settler children, what does it look like to prioritize the wellbeing of Indigenous children? 4.4 Embrace Decolonization Along with worldview and wellbeing, I noticed throughout my data that I also asked a lot of questions about decolonization as I explored the First Peoples Principles of Learning. For example, as I became more aware of the enduring impact of IRS on the psychological, cultural, and developmental dimensions of the school experience for Ingenious children and families, I started to consider how inequity has been maintained and naturalized in education through colonialism (Abdi, 2012, p. 2). Styres (2017) describes that decolonization involves “disrupt[ing] colonial relations and, in so doing, inform[ing] education, schooling, and possibilities for transformative teaching practices” (p. 15). She asserts that decolonization can serve as a “framework that acknowledges the complex web of colonial relations while not losing sight of the ways those relationships have informed and continue to inform how we do educate (p. 14). The Honourable Justice Murray Sinclair who was the chief commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation committee is often quoted as saying that “education has gotten us into this mess, and education will get us out.” I felt encouraged to imagine that I could be part of disrupting the colonial status quo by reimagining my relationship to the FPPL. Yet, I was uncertain of my settler teacher role in this weighty and important conversation. If I was less of a ‘perfect stranger’ (Dion, 2007) to my 121 Indigenous relationships by making connections that had been denied and marginalized as a result of colonization, was I in a process of decolonization? If not, what should I call my new relationality? Why might such identifications matter? In my experience, naming my work as decolonizing had been an ongoing experience of challenge and discomfort. Why, when I thought about decolonization, did I hesitate? How can I live with the fear of getting it all wrong? In May of 2016, I applied for a grant to support my plan to bring more outdoor experiences into my classroom. I was seeking funds to cover the rental cost of equipment for students such as mountain bikes and for the cost of busing students to remote settings to explore. I shared the following rationale for this project with colleagues: Having worked with middle school students for over a decade, I know that students often express feeling disconnected socially, emotionally, and intellectually with each other, their sense of self, and nature. I am concerned that the physical and conceptual boundaries of schools’ confine student’s holistic engagement with themselves and their communities and minimize student opportunity for authentic and meaningful growth. I see colonialism as a root cause of our disconnection. Specifically, colonialism has severed schools from Indigenous ways of knowing and I hope to centralize Indigenous understanding of land and place in our outdoor learning through community partnerships as they are essential for living well and being educated. I shared my proposal with a group of colleagues for feedback. My colleagues were in agreement that the term colonialism should be omitted from the grant request because the term was ‘off putting for people,’ because it sounded harsh and academic and both of these positionings evoke defensiveness in others. Rather than defending the importance of naming the need to decolonize 122 education, I felt out of touch and ashamed that my choice of words might alienate people rather than compel them into action. This was not the first time that I had heard colleagues express that they disliked or did not connect with language such as colonialism and decolonializing. Drawing upon the concept at another workshop, other colleagues also explained to me that they did not care for the term decolonization, because it sounded too much like an academic construct that was a theory and not a practice of teaching and learning. With these conversations in mind, I let the concepts go for a time. I rationalized this move away from the language of decolonization by thinking that, as a teaching profession, we could critically examine how our Eurocentric history is naturalized in classrooms without engaging in the language of decolonization. I though this stance was being more inclusive and meeting people where they are at. At the same time, I also considered critiques such as Tuck and Yang’s (2012) argument that decolonization is being turned into a metaphor by “the increasing number of calls to “decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods,” or, “decolonize student thinking” (p.1). They explain that the “metaphorization of decolonization makes possible a set of evasions, or “settler moves to innocence”, that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity” (p. 1). In other words, the co-opting of the language of decolonization is maintaining the status quo in education. I felt pushed out of discussions of decolonization from multiple perspectives and my instinct to avoid using the concept all together solidified. Instead, I looked for other ways to describe approaching learning in ways that honoured the significance of Indigenous perspectives in all curricular enactment, such as Indigenize. 123 This approach was also challenged. In January 2018, I shared some of my research perspectives to date about the First Peoples Principles of Learning with a group of Bachelor of Education students. One student asked why I was using the term Indigenizing and not decolonizing. The question brought up my uncertainty about the concept of decolonization, and rather than highlight how FPPL could be a decolonizing tool, I froze and didn’t really answer the question. Taken aback, I borrowed from Tuck and Yang’s argument that schools often only decolonize in a metaphorical sense and so I did not claim to do this work. I explained that decolonization is a process that first and foremost requires legal, political, action to restore land rights and protect and recognize Indigenous sovereignty. I shared that I was offering the term Indigenizing because of my reading of FPPL focused on knowledge processes in schools. I also said that the scholarship is too complex for the time limits of the current conversation that we were having and that the student should come and see me to discuss these ideas further. The student was visibly frustrated and disappointed by my answer, and she shared with me later that my response was not good enough and that I should have had a stronger answer. I should have been more frustrated with the current system and use the language of decolonization to describe the needed changes in schools. These experiences discouraged me, and I discussed these experiences on many different occasions with Living in Circle. I explained that I wanted to understand how I should have responded in these moments. What was the right way? I was letting the overwhelming sense of fear that I was doing something wrong, using the wrong words, speaking out of turn as a settler override my commitment to living the curriculum. I was afraid and I was recoiling from a sense my own inadequate stance regarding decolonization. 124 Living in Circle member, April asked me to examine if I was really showing up in these moments with an open heart that was ready to learn. She also reminded me to consider what kinds of conversations I was inviting through lecture-style pedagogy. April offered the following insight: April: It is one thing when a challenge or critique comes to surface in a circle setting or a small group, where the intention is set for open exchange. I am really not sure how learning can happen when it is in a lecture-style setting without that experience of communion with each other. (audio recording, March 28th, 2018) Further, Andrea’s thoughts on embracing the provisional nature of learning influenced my unpacking of this experience: Andrea: My students are always asking me: do I know all I need to know? I always tell them, ‘you can’t know all you need because I don’t know it all, no one does. Then I share what an Elder told me—that I can ask the same question on 10 different days and I am going to get 10 different answers because of where I am coming from, how I present my question, and what’s happening on that day for the Elder. I think the same can be said for Indigenizing. While we may wish for one, there is no black and white answer for what to do and no one can know it all. Nothing is written in stone—it can’t be because what knowledge we do have comes from an oral tradition of storytelling. (Living in Circle, February 20th, audio files) Reflecting on these conversations with Living in Circle regarding pedagogy and knowledge, my understanding of decolonization started to open up. Shultz (2012) describes that a decolonizing approach fosters ways of knowing that nurture, “understandings of the creativity of inclusiveness and the processes of generative complexity within dynamic, social systems. This understanding 125 should be contrasted to the rigid hierarchies that have historically determined our understandings” (p. 39). I was learning to recognize that there is no hierarchy in belief systems or social structures through the lens of decolonization These are foreign ways to view the world. Wilson (2008) also explains, If reality is based upon relationships, then judgment of another’s viewpoint is inconceivable. One person cannot possibly know all of the relationships that brought about another's ideas. Making judgment of others worth or values then is also impossible. (p. 92) When I viewed knowing through the lens of relationships, inclusion and egalitarianism were inevitable. Perhaps feeling like I was getting something wrong was not the problem. Perhaps the problem was when I believed that I had it all figured out, and that others should adapt my ways of thinking and speaking. What might accountability look like? As I attempted to understand my conflicts, I found myself connecting to Walker (2004) who describes that dominant Western problem-solving models are atomistic, focused on technique, emphasizing intellectual experiences and are bounded by a linear conception of time. According to Walker, what is needed to create change for the better is to decolonize conflict resolution through the incorporation of practices such as: seeking communion, consensus, talking circles, holistic consideration of mental, spiritual, and natural aspects of life, and justice and harmony ceremonies (p. 533). What these approaches have in common with the First Peoples Principles of Learning are an appreciation of interconnections, and an emphasis on process and relationships, holistic experience and expanded conceptualizations of time. 126 In September 2017, I read a web article written by Younging who describes the impact of Canada’s unknown history and his own learning about and denial of his family’s history. Younging describes, I now realize that I blocked out parts of this second-hand knowledge of our family history. On some level of my consciousness, I did not or do not want to know. Indeed, this realization has helped me understand why the generations before us blocked out the first-hand knowledge and did not want us to know. (Inherited History para 4) Younging is attending to the complexity of embracing that which is painful. To explore this premise further, he references a Tragically Hip song titled ‘Now the Struggle Has a Name’ The song comments on Stephen Harper’s 2008 apology to Indigenous Peoples across Canada. After reading the article, I was curious about the song. I searched for it online and watched a video of a performance of the song that had been filmed by an audience member at a live performance. The video showed the Tragically Hip beginning to sing the song. As the song begins everyone started clapping and cheering. Then the following lyrics are performed: Now the apology done applause can begin Now the apologies done applause begins If it bleeds it leads If it cries it flies ... Now the struggle has a name ... Some truth some reconciliation and gone with the wind (Tragically Hip, 2009) In relationship to the lyrics the audience members, who were at first clapping, become awkward and then they quiet. It seems that audience does not know how to react. I can relate to this. I also 127 wonder should the clapping continue to show approval of the message of the song? Should the clapping stop as a recognition of the ironic message of song and in agreement that there is no end to reconciliation? Maybe through our silence we hope to recognize that the Harper apology was not worthy of applause. There is so much meaning in this moment of a trepid smattering of applause and silences. Maybe we are all just waiting to see what everyone else does. Maybe it is easier to just follow along. Through their existence and role in the BC curriculum, The First Peoples Principles of Learning, led me down this unexpected path of inquiry. Part of my growing relationship with the FPPL involved embracing decolonization and moving beyond all the emotions of guilt and compliance that left me frozen in indecision. I could not applaud attempts and gestures towards reconciliation as if there was a final destination. I needed to ensure I was learning to become accountable to reimagining the relationship between decolonization and learning. Does my imagination need to be decolonized? Imagination has always been an important part of my pedagogy and sense of self. I have deeply enjoyed experiences of imaginative thinking, unorthodox solutions, and unstructured, divergent processes as some of my most fulfilling experiences as an educator. I associated a sense of freedom and playfulness with being imaginative. As I explored the FPPL, my relationship to my imagination began to change and for a while, I felt a loss of freedom of thought: As a setter educator, I seek the counsel of my Indigenous colleagues to direct me (this is good) but I am detaching from the creative inroads (literally the imaginative work) that has always fueled me to go deeper into my learning journeys as a free and responsive 128 learner—this does not feel good, it does not feel like me. (teaching journal, November 2016). Over time, I recognized that the sense of frustration I was articulating regarding a perceived limitation was a quality of my privilege. I had always experienced a freedom to explore the world in any way I had felt inclined to, and this was no longer the case. My privilege was being threatened by my feeling that I was accountable to others for insights and permissions. The imaginative pathways that I had constructed for myself were deeply individualistic, without consideration of my relationships with others. This self-reflection came into further focus after reading Niedzviecki’s (2017) opinion piece titled, Winning the Appropriation Prize. The article had resulted in public outcry and Niedzviecki’s resignation from the role of editor of the Writers’ Union of Canada magazine. In the article, Niedzviecki championed and encouraged imaginative endeavours that speak for other people. He declares, “Write what you don't know. Get outside your own head. Relentlessly explore the lives of people who aren't like you … Win the Appropriation Prize.” Niedzviecki’s ‘anything goes’ approach to imagination hurt and offended people. Reflecting on Niedzviecki’s Appropriation Prize, I wonder about the possible problematics of my own colonial imagination. I needed to make space, even in my imagination, for the recognition that my limitations and short-sightedness make me incapable of speaking for others. For me, part of decolonizing was learning to develop a more ecological approach to my imagination that honours relationships and compels me to listen to the perspectives of others to imagine more ethical ways of being in relationships. Imagination can be central to the change process in schools when the emphasis is on freeing the imagination of teachers and students. Phelan (2015) describes the need to tell stories 129 in schools in such a way that others have an opportunity to make sense for themselves, and in ways that do not limit what other stories will be told (p. 3). Imagination can be a tool through which we can become aware of the world around us and create space for children to tell their own stories and for making and remaking. This kind of imagination evolves hand in hand with listening. What do I hear when I listen? On a trip to Melbourne, Australia in 2016, I was captivated by a bridge that I happened across while I was out for a run. What was unique about this bridge was that it featured a soundscape art installation, titled ‘Proximities.’ Proximities came to life through fifty-six speakers placed along the perimeter of the bridge with a few meters between each speaker. The speakers were activated by movement and as I crossed each speaker, I could hear voices (some singing, some speaking) that represented various settlers and Indigenous peoples of Australia. Each individual voice contributed a distinctive sound through an accent and tone, and offered a melodic rhythm that sounded like poetry. But it was the whole—all of the voices together and their entanglements—that created this impact of the soundscape. In my journal I wrote: As I ran across the bridge I moved into proximity to the different voices. I was so moved by the mingling of the most beautiful, but distinct voices. It was really vibrant, to experience how powerful these voices were together. I have since learned that the artists who created the bridge Leber and Chesworth hope to invite the consideration of how we live with cultural difference, particularly in shared spaces and border cultures, where proximities test our capacity for ethical behaviour. (http://leberandchesworth.com/public-spaces/proximities/). (teaching journal, January 2017) 130 The joy of listening to the diversity of voices on that bridge became a story that helped me to reimagine my role as teacher to be one who seeks to listen to noisy conversations, where the connections between people and their influence on each other, while still remaining distinct and whole in themselves are honoured. This experience made me question how I might learn to be a better listener to not only to students, but to the cacophony of voices that create a school network. I wanted to be open to others and what others have to say. I wanted to be moved by the act of listening to colleagues and students as I had been on the bridge where I had been swept away by the languages and sounds. Even though I often didn’t have a literal translation of what I was hearing, by the intensity of my engagement, I committed to the importance of each vocalization. Haas and Langer (2014) describe this kind of attention as differentiation— “the capacity to notice more and more differences, or the variable nature of things and contexts” (p. 21). They note that attuning to diversity in this way can increase our human health and creativity, and I made a connection between the transformative nature of listening to decolonization and wanting to play with this theorizing more in practice. I had an opportunity to provide feedback on teacher education workshops that were being designed to support practicing teachers engage with the redesigned curriculum through the lens of First Peoples worldviews and perspectives. The feedback that I proposed was that all workshops that were being offered by settler educators would benefit by including Indigenous members of the community who share an interest in the workshop topic. The idea was to invite these community members into a conversation to share and contribute in ways that felt natural. I was excited about this idea and shared it with Living in Circle: 131 To me, this turns everything up on its head, imagine we did this more often for our professional learning—here is a topic, here is a group of people with interest, here are some diverse perspectives on the topic. Teacher need more experience listening to multiple knowledge perspectives (audio recording, June 15th, 2018) Underneath my suggestion was my understanding of the FPPL as a process that was actively constructed through human experiences and influenced by multiple relationships that require holistic attention through acts of listening. As I explored the First Peoples Principles of Learning, questions about decolonization continually surfaced and provoked my thinking in new directions. I am still finding my words and learning to bring forth what is often underneath my perceptions in ways that recognize that that all things are related. This will take time as knowledge is gained firsthand and involves self-knowledge and a creative process of living. 4.5 Building towards a ‘Good Enough Theory’ of Curriculum Whitehead (2018) describes that as teacher researchers make their way to create their living educational theories, they often spend time in a state of living in contradiction. By this he means that educators are “holding educational values whilst at the same time negating them” (p. 15). He argues that it is this contradiction that moves us to “imagine alternative ways of improving our situation” (p.15). I felt this sense of contradiction in the stories that I have shared, they are not ‘perfected stories of best practice’ they are full of contradictions between the teacher that I hoped to be and my actual practice. I was often frustrated by these gaps: Me: I want to speak to my frustration. I don’t want my passions to be tempered or to ignore the sense of urgency I am experiencing to change my teaching practice. With my 132 great commitment to Indigenous education, I want my practices in schools to match my beliefs, but this is not always the case. (audio recording, February 19th, 2018) Wang (2004) considers ambiguity and contradiction to be “openings for more understanding and further growth rather than something to be fully resolved because paradoxes provide opportunities for denaturalizing what appears natural” (p. 178). I was growing and changing as an educator through the re-imagining of my beliefs about learning. As I grew new beliefs, I would strive to live into them, but my beliefs seemed to be always ahead of my practices. The role of teacher beliefs and assumptions to enact curricular change is well documented (Broom, 2015; Chrona, 2014; Hobin, 2002; Priestley, Biesta & Robinson, 2015). Broom’s (2015) historical analysis of the effectiveness of past curricula implementation in British Columbia from 1920-2000 described that teachers resisted the last three curriculum revisions because teachers tended to take up school curricula by prior belief systems and practices regardless of what the curriculum stated (p.722). Likewise, Chrona (2014) addresses teachers’ success with the First Peoples Principles of Learning and she notes that “creating teaching and learning environments that reflect the FPPL has as much to do with an educator’s philosophy about education, and disposition, as it has to do with curricular content” (Chrona, Welcome section, para 4). My belief that the First Peoples Principles of Learning were a contested, situated, relational process, empowered me to focus my research on the relationship between my lived experience and the curriculum plan (Aoki, 2004c). To conclude this chapter, I will summarize the three themes that seemed to be guiding my beliefs about learning. I used these themes to inform the pedagogy for teacher education that I will outline in my final chapter. Again, I hope 133 to articulate this with the hope of it being a ‘good enough theory’ that will sustain conversations about what is best for our communities. Learning attends to worldview. The First Peoples Principles of Learning state that learning requires an exploration of one’s identity and that learning is embedded in memory, history, and story and that learning is holistic, reflexive, reflective, experiential, and relational (focused on connectedness, on reciprocal relationships, and a sense of place). Seeking these outcomes in my own learning, I began to more closely consider the role of worldview in teaching and learning. At first, I noticed an absence of attention and how I rarely had conversations about worldview with my colleagues, but how life-giving it felt when we did. I have come to believe that learning depends on attention to worldview, not just as a way to notice and describe differences, but as a need for learning to occur. I needed to attend to worldview to create a more whole understanding of curriculum. A holistic understanding involves multiple ways of knowing the world, and we need to develop the quality of our relationships with everything around us to access perspectives. Meyer (2013) aptly describes that “it is the quality of our relationships that will help us evolve” (p. 99). When I attended to worldview, I grew more connected with myself, those around me, and the Land. I learned, what interdependence really means by listening to others, by watching how those who have more experience do things, and by sharing ideas when asked. Then go out and watch the moon rise and swim in waters freshly seasoned with Spring rains. (Meyer, 2013, p.99) I believe that if we attend to worldview, we will learn by striving to attune to all dimensions of knowing at once and we will begin to see the world anew. 134 Learning expands wellbeing. The FPPL describes that learning ultimately supports the well-being of the self, the family, the community, the land, the spirits, and the ancestors and I found an expanded sense of wellbeing by recognizing the role of Indigenous knowledge. I had always recognized that wellbeing involved valuing and nurturing the strengths of others. However, for the most part I think that my conception of the term wellbeing had failed to consider all the complexities and nuances of what it means to be well in a truly equitable sense. Attention to individual wellbeing could be an inherently divisive concept that centralizes colonial relations rather than Indigenous knowledges. However, understanding ecology and relationality expanded my thinking about wellbeing through the lens of Indigenous knowledge wherein wellbeing is not an individual pursuit or measurement, but a fundamental aspect of human relation. Four Arrows (2016a) suggests that Indigenous perspectives are at the heart of all human consciousness—they are a point of departure from which we have continued to move away (p. 5). He claims that we can move toward survival and ultimate healing, “by showing that it is in our nature to live more sustainably and peacefully than the dominant worldview allows and reclaiming some specific Indigenous understanding about being in the world, we can rebalance our life systems” (p. 5). Moving away from seeing the separateness of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people is one way toward creating more significant connection to the earth and to humans (Four Arrows, 2016; Donald, 2012; Kelly, 2010; Kimmerer, 2013). To create balance, I believe that wellbeing involves leaning into the hard work of ensuring the wellbeing of Indigenous communities first and foremost. For me, this involved a willingness to change and to accept discomfort based on my understanding that any individual is only as well 135 as the relationships that are all around them. I believe that for learning to occur in schools we need to expand our understanding of wellbeing and prioritize support Indigenous children. Learning embraces decolonization. I believe that when learning embraces decolonization fear is set aside and ways to reimagine our world through restoring Indigenous worldview and perspectives come to life. In taking this stance, I am hopeful that this kind of Indigeneity will involve all of us coming to understand our “relationship to our place and our interconnectedness with our environmental ecology [which can leave] a qualitative signature deep within our physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual identities” (Kelly, 2015, p. 83). When I imagined what such an imprint might offer all humans in terms of living together in greater health and peace, I pictured a decolonized way of being that recognized that we are related to each other, and our place. Further we would embrace that it is our relationships themselves that actually make us who we are. Wilson (2008) explains that, “rather than viewing ourselves as being in relationship with other people or things, we are the relationships that we hold and are a part of” (p. 80). To me, these imprints of relationality were important benefits that were offered to me through decolonization. What I noticed about teaching and learning through self-study pushed me beyond inherited or technical rational approaches to curriculum to embrace the contested, situated, relational nature of my FPPL curricular experiences. As I reflected on what I was learning, I also recognized that there was still so much to learn and explore, which led me to consider what had I learned about pedagogy that might sustain my teacher education moving forward. I also wondered how this pedagogy might support the learning of others. In the final chapter I move from this discussion of my experiences and how they shaped my beliefs about learning to offer a pedagogy for teacher education. 136 137 Chapter Five 5.1 A Pedagogy for Settler Teacher Education Indigenous worldview holds that humans take many trips around the medicine wheel until experiential knowledge moves through self-reflection toward insight into deeper and deeper truth and transformation (Four Arrows 2016, p. 2). Armstrong (2007) describes that to create better, stronger communities it is the responsibility of settlers, not only Indigenous people, to understand and value Indigenous knowledge, culture, and community. She writes, “it's not a responsibility only of my people. It's a responsibility of everyone who lives on this land, and that has colonized it and benefited from it, to make that right” (p. 7). The whole of my research experience was guided by my desire to engage and live out my responsibility as a learner. As a result, I developed a deeper understanding of learning through the First Peoples Principles of Learning that I will continue to explore through my ongoing experiences as an educator. The themes that emerged from my self-study highlighted experiences and questions that were re-occurring. They are not based on a feeling of becoming an ‘expert’ of the principles, but rather the themes marked places of significant growth in my beliefs. These beliefs then supported my actions in teaching and learning. At the end of my research, in August 2018, I had the opportunity to co-create a day of reflection and dialogue for teacher learning in my district. The day was the final day of a three-day summit that had been offered to teachers across our school district who hoped to weave local Indigenous knowledge, perspectives, and teachings, such as the First Peoples Principles of Learning, into the teaching and learning fabric of their classrooms. The event was held on a small, private beach on Westbank First Nations Land. 138 In my planning for the day, I drew upon my theorizing of my experiences with FPPL to form a pedagogy that involved wisdom-seeking, truth-telling, relational-self listening, and loving community, the four qualities that I determined essential to teacher education. Taken as a whole these qualities, or practices, invited settler educators recognize that learning attends to worldview, expands what we know to be wellbeing, and embraces decolonization. From the experiences of my self-study, I determined that discernment about and contextualization of learning in these ways held great potential for embracing the FPPL. I was eager to create an experience that would support such learning. To that end, we invited Indigenous teachers, administrators, senior school leaders, advocates, scholars, artists, members of government, and community members to engage in conversations with the teachers, administrators, senior school leaders who had been participating in the summit. That day, more than 300 teachers at all phases of their career came together to explore, enrich, and transform their teaching practices through participation in a variety of community dialogues. Wisdom-seeking was a practice of reciprocal story telling that involved learning from local Indigenous community members directly. We asked everyone in attendance that day to come prepared to share a personal story that brought to light an aspect of Truth and Reconciliation. That day, people shared experiences, thoughts that they felt were important, or what they wanted to know more about. This was truth-telling, a pedagogical practice that involved the recognition that everyone had a story to share and a story to examine, shift, and grow. In these conversations we shared in words and in actions that attending our gathering and sharing a story is offering a tremendous gift to us all. At our gathering, by participating with an 139 open mind and heart, everyone was considered remarkable, courageous and worthy of deep love as a co-journeyer learning along the path, we all share responsibility. This invitation to belong and be seen was the practice of loving community. At the end of the day, April and I led a final reflection with the educators from the summit. We asked participants to share what they had learned about themselves through listening to the story of others. This was the practice of relational-self listening. In this chapter I describe the natural relationship between pedagogy and self-study that led to my Living in Circle pedagogy that is grounded in my provisional theorizing of the learning principles. 5.2 The Relationship Between Self-study and Pedagogy Pedagogy is an act of attending to the “relationship between teaching and learning and how they lead to growth in knowledge and understanding through meaningful practice” (Loughran, 2006, p. 2). Self-study supports the creation of new pedagogies since “through self-study, a teacher educator may become better informed about not only the nature of learning from a given pedagogic situation but also the possibilities for developing appropriate alternatives for future experiences” (Loughran, 2006; p.174). Loughran (2006; 2014) describes that teacher education would benefit from the development of more substantive pedagogies that go beyond the transmission of information about teaching. Though self-study there is an opportunity for an educator to, reconsider that which comprises their practice and to begin to focus more attention on the manner in which that practice might be purposefully shaped and conducted. In so doing, the manner in which individuals might conceptualize their teaching about teaching and, the way in which they create and construct possibilities for their students learning about teaching may be positively impacted. Hence, developing a pedagogy of teacher education 140 is a professional responsibility for all those teacher educators committed to deeper understandings of teaching, learning and teaching about teaching and learning. (Loughran, 2006, p. 176) Loughran is specifically describing a practice for teacher educators. While I am not a teacher educator in the traditional sense of being employed in a teacher education program as a course instructor, the attention that I gave to my own education through self-study created an opportunity to develop a pedagogy for ongoing teacher education. In the context of this research, I found that fresh pedagogy was needed to ensure that I, as a settler teacher, was empowered to embody the dispositions for inquiry needed to make decisions about how to live the FPPL in my contexts. In this chapter, I offer the pedagogy that I developed as an opportunity for other teachers to engage in their own education in ways that empower them, their colleagues, and their students to live curriculum through inquiry toward improving their practice and their lives, and the lives of others around them. 5.3 Living in Circle Pedagogy The Living in Circle pedagogy is a practice of knowledge building that positions all educators as researchers who can learn and develop new knowledge by attending to their practices and creating meaning within their communities. The starting point for this pedagogy is paying close attention to the relational complexities of the day to day lives of teachers and students. Most likely, this will involve various forms of documentation of these experiences for later reflection. The four pedagogical practices, wisdom-seeking, truth-telling, relational-self listening, and loving community offer ways of engaging with these experiences. Each of these practices calls for the building of relationships and moving away from the belief that there is only one way to make sense of the curriculum. To illustrate, here is an example of me and 141 Kimmy discussing the importance of valuing what it means to make knowledge in our teacher practice: Kimmy: When I first wanted to learn to Indigenize, I was looking for the thing. I was going to take my medicine wheel (she makes a gesture of her holding the medicine wheel in her hands) and I was going to bring it into my classroom on Monday morning and teach the wheel to my students. Learning with Living in Circle I was like ‘what’s going on here?’ We are mostly just talking, just talking in circles, telling stories from our lives and our teaching. I was like, ‘where is the thing to take and teach?’ Me: Yeah, it's all a really special practice. It’s comes down to connections. And when I am in my classroom, I feel like you folks are with me because I think of all of you and your perspectives and I feel like I can see clearer where the learning can go. (audio recording, June 5th, 2018) As opposed to teaching being about having a ‘thing’ to show or do, I understood the value of relationships as the site of learning. The pedagogies offered in this chapter support educators to re-story their understandings of the FPPL rather than seeing them as a thing to reinterpret for use with our students according to what we already know and do as teachers. By attending to a pedagogy of relationships, I moved way from various forms of cultural appropriation. Wilson describes how appropriation happens when someone comes along and uses knowledge out of its context and away from the special relationships that went into forming it. Wilson (2008) explains that we all have to build our own relationships with ideas or knowledge: There is a need for each person to develop his or her own relationship with ideas and to therefore form their own conclusions. One person cannot judge someone else’s 142 conclusions, or even attempt to make conclusions for someone else ... But only to make new connections to ideas. (p. 94) Living in Circle pedagogy is a process of currere, a way of attending to our relationships and to create our own theories. It is through this process of currere that teacher identity is formed and reformed (Wang, 2010). What I describe in this chapter is a pedagogy for teacher education that is contextualized and differentiated to support teachers to develop their own authentic understanding of the First Peoples Principles of Learning. This understanding happens at both an individual and collaborative level and is located within their conception of who they are and why they do what they do in their teaching. While I describe the four pedagogical practices separately, and in more detail, it is when they are taken all together that they form Living in Circle Pedagogy. It is also important to emphasise that each aspect of this pedagogical approach holds up the beliefs about learning that emerged from my experiences with FPPL. Figure 3: Representation of Theorizing my Experiences with FPPL SEEKING WISDOMTRUTH TELLINGRELATIONAL-SELF LISTENINGLOVING COMMUNITYATTEND TO WORLDVIEWEXPAND WELLBEINGEMBRACE DECOLONIZATIONCONTESTEDSITUATEDRELATIONAL 143 Through my experiences with FPPL, I attended to worldview, expanded my conception of wellbeing, and I embraced decolonization. In what follows I explain how pedagogy offers ways to pay attention to worldviews and to seek the perspectives of others and how these practices can nurture an ecological understanding of wellbeing that cares for the whole of the community. Lastly, I describe how my Living in Circle pedagogy prioritizes the agency of Indigenous people in ways that embrace equity and Indigenous sovereignty in order to imagine the world in new ways. Wisdom-seeking. Indigenous people will speak for themselves, convey their own community narratives, and make their own decisions regarding all aspects of their lives including education (Smith, 1999). They will set the direction for the educational changes that they see are needed such as the FPPL. It will be up to settlers to find ways to make sense of and support the efforts of such Indigenous leadership. In my research experience, I learned from Indigenous Knowledge and leadership in many ways. I attended local community gatherings that I learned about through social media and through invitations offered through the school board and local university. I learned from Syilx Elders who generously shared the knowledge and protocols that they believed all teachers require in order to benefit Indigenous students. I also went beyond these experiences and formed additional community relationships where I shared my research with others and where I had the opportunity to seek council. Seeking wisdom is a commitment to creating relationships with Indigenous knowledge without appropriating Indigenous knowledge. I believe that by practicing respectful and appropriate ways of building good relationships, settlers can develop ethical relationships with Indigenous knowledge. This does not have to happen in person. There are resources that have 144 been created by Indigenous groups for the purpose of educating the community. For example, I learned so much from the stories of IRS survivors that are shared by the TRC report (2015). For me, reading these critical stories felt like I was engaging in a personal and important conversation with the report. I continue to seek the voice of contemporary Indigenous youth in my ongoing consideration of what it means to be a settler teacher. In my research experience, voices of youth from our Okanagan community and beyond such as Tina Fontaine and Colten Boushie whose voices reached me through the media. During the year of reflecting with Living in Circle, I had the opportunity to have discussions about the systematic racism and barriers that prevented justice for these students and, as was the experience for Tina and Colten, resulted in the loss of their lives. Theirs are not easy stories to listen to, and I experienced a sense of how wisdom often comes with a profound discomfort, sorrow, and grief. As Deer (2013) described, sometimes, even when settler teachers have a greater understanding of First Peoples history, they still avoid discussing the perspectives with their students to prevent emotions of tension and guilt. While I did not talk with school-aged students about these particular examples of injustice, I did engage with teacher candidates and with my colleagues in an effort to learn from the experiences of these youths. Wisdom-seeking is a move away from the lack of connection and responsibility that Dion (2007; 2009) and others (Archibald & Hare, 2016; Armstrong, 1990; Donald, 2012) have explained is a stance taken by settler teachers that allows them to evade the complicated conversations that will happen as we engage with each other in discussing the injustices and inequities that are present in our world. Further, the act of seeking wisdom is an ongoing one, with each new learning signaling that there is always much more to learn. As Donald, Glanfield, 145 and Sterenberg (2016) so aptly write, “I note with humility that wisdom insights guide us to realize that we often have the most to learn at the very moment that we think we have it all figured out” (p. 8). Truth-telling. We all have a story to tell. The challenge is that we struggle to hear what our stories are telling us about ourselves. I have learned a lot about how stories can transform or maintain the status quo through what we believe our stories represent about our experiences and perspectives. Bohm (1996) aptly describes the limited nature of what we experience as our own truth, and this perspective was valuable for helping me to clarify what I refer to as truth-telling: It is important to see that the different opinions that you have are the result of past thought: all your experiences, what other people have said, and whatnot. That is all programmed into your memory.... Opinions thus tend to be experienced as 'truths,' even though they may only be your own assumptions and your own background. You got them from your teacher, your family, or by reading, or in yet some other way. Then for one reason or another you are identified with them, and you defend them. (p. 2) Sharing my personal truth was a way for me to return to particular aspects of life and to re-story my experiences through a broadened awareness of experiences and perspectives different than my own. Truth-telling as a pedagogical practice involves sharing our stories with others so we can actively seek multiple perspectives to help expand and grow our perspectives and add dimensions to our worldview. This involves continually asking questions of all stories. These questions should include consideration of whose voices are missing and how different stories are being valued. Keith, in particular, taught me a lot about sitting with truth, because he saw in me a desire to fix things. Through this lens of sitting with truth, he offered me the perspective that if I always 146 move quickly I might miss the fullness of the act of sitting with each other’s truths and seeking truth. He understood that my desire to fix things is a natural tendency of many teachers, because we often care so much and want to help. He described: Keith: The teacher in all of us wants everything to be perfect and problems to be solved. If you jump over the truth, you are jumping over the most important part of Truth and Reconciliation, and you are just going to be doing a lot of fluff. (audio recording, June 15th, 2018) He explained that in education we need to temper the impulse to move quickly to fix. If, and when, we do seek action, our first action should be to give more attention to telling truth for students and ourselves. Attuning to historical and contemporary stories of truth, such as through the stories from the IRS survivors, helped me to understand how violence against Indigenous peoples has been woven into the fabric of Canadian education. It is like there is an unbroken thread from past to present and listening to others’ stories of others helps me to see how we need to break the thread and learn to see our reality in different ways and perspectives through other peoples’ stories about their experiences of this reality. Understanding the truths of others can disrupt our stories of realities by illuminating relationships that were unknown to us. It is a privilege of colonialism for the dominant culture to ignore perspectives and stories that challenge the dominant narrative (Dion, 2009). Embracing truth-telling is one way to resist the imposition of colonial histories on our communities. Holding up truth-telling as a pedagogical practice, I will continue to learn in ways that are inclusive; not just of the perspectives of others, but I will continue to challenge my own truths. Relational-Self Listening. Without the practices of wisdom-seeking and truth-telling it would have been difficult for me to recognize how much I had to unlearn. Relational-self 147 listening is a practice that is sensitive to how we change in relationship to others, and to the patterns that connect us to others. Relational-self listening involves returning again and again to the self as a relational being who, through dialogue, is always in the process of becoming. Each iteration of my self-study research changed me, from the choice of my research questions through the self-study methods used, to this final sharing of my pedagogical implications. Understanding the curriculum as a process of learning and improving through my personal experiences, I shifted how I understand myself by no longer seeing myself as an isolated individual, but rather as a relational being in “continual becoming rather than an endpoint culminating in a singular identity construction” (Alsup, 2006, p. 7). Within the dominant culture, we learn that our personhood is framed with the understanding that we are all individual entities, bounded by our unique thoughts, emotions, and judgments. Along with the autonomous nature of the self comes the foreignness of the (distant) other. This self/other split also translates problematically to our relationship with nature wherein the natural world is a resource “evaluated in terms of its benefits (or threats) to me” (Gergen, 2015, p. 95). Through my self-study experiences, I learned to see the primacy of relationships and can now imagine myself as surrounded in what Tidwell and Fitzgerald (2004) described as a ‘permeable boundary’ (p. 85) that exists between the self and the self of others. I realize that to improve my teaching I am in need of others, and so my pedagogy of teacher education must be intentionally focused on relationships to be able to learn through connecting with and rubbing up against each other’s differences. As Rinaldi (2004) asserts, “We are not separated by our differences but connected by our differences.” And that, “it is because of my difference that I am useful to you because I offer another perspective” (p. 3). For me, it is within this need of the differences of others that 148 listening is embraced. I learned to crave the ongoing feedback offered to me through acts of listening within the many differences we shared in Living in Circle. Relational-self listening recognizes that there is a balance between the subjective nature of learning and the social nature of learning. April and I often reflected on the individual versus the collective nature of learning, and our shared interest in how to create stronger relationships between our personal learning and growth and the learning of the community. One reflection that was particularly important to my own thinking about truth-telling was when April explained that: April: Growth looks like a bunch of different people, doing a bunch of different things with all different language—but full system transformation will require us to also have shared understandings. In the pedagogy of Living in Circle, dialogue and listening can build a healthy collective learning identity that includes a shared language and a sense of belonging through a shared appreciation of others and the differences that they bring to our collective experiences. Relational-self listening also involves consideration of relationships across time and space. By time I refer to the past, present, and future, and by space, I contemplate relationships across the whole system. For example, I wonder how my personal relationships impact and are impacted by systems beyond my schools and my community. Hargreaves and Jefferess (2015) explain: Understanding requires a radical renegotiation of the frameworks by which non-Indigenous peoples imagine themselves and the nation. For instance, it involves understanding history not as a linear series of events but as a layered presence; what lies beneath rocks in our gardens may be hidden or ignored, but it is not gone. (p. 204) 149 In my experience, a pedagogy that nurtures relational-self listening required me to be not only aware of the day-to-day life of being an educator, but to continually listen for ways to explore the bigger picture of influences on myself and those around me through the perspectives of others. The more I considered relationships, the more my understanding of my life took on a layered presence that included memories of the stories and perspectives of others that changed my perspectives. Loving community. Love is a complex emotion that describes many different experiences and is used in many different contexts. In my experience with Living in Circle, loving was an approach to being in community that involved more than considerations, niceties, and friendliness. Loving each other was a stance of deep commitment, attachment, and caring towards each other without the risk of losing something fundamental—our commitment to justice. Loving community does not mean we will not be challenged or changed, as both challenge and change are central to community adaptation and flourishing (Cherkowski, Hanson, Walker, 2018). What love brings is the absence of a desire for domination, which reflects the spirit of walking together. For me, a loving community holds up substantial notions of justice by considering the nuances and complexities of community so that we can collectively learn what it truly means to care for and see each other. Palmer (1993) contended that knowledge emerges from love: The goal of knowledge arising from life is the unification and reconstruction of broken selves and worlds. A knowledge of compassion aims not at exploiting and manipulating creation but at reconciling the world to itself. The mind motivated by compassion reaches out to love. Hence, the act of knowing is an act of love, the act of entering and embracing 150 the reality of the other, of allowing the other to enter and embrace our own. In such knowing, we know and are known as members of one community. (p. 8) I related Palmer’s thinking about knowledge and love to my relationships in Living in Circle in that through these relationships I experienced how seeking to know someone and understanding them is a healing act of love. I experienced the relationship between love, knowledge and healing many times while gathering with Living in Circle. I look back at how moved I was to witness Andrea’s return to her old high school as a leader now as she shared with us her Indigenous Knowledge which was received with humility, honour, and respect. As Andrea spoke, I better understood her history as interconnected with this place in both positive ways through her Indigenous Knowledge, and negatively through her experience as a student. Standing in the circle I reflected on the need for healing within schooling—if only someone had brought Andrea to that beautiful tree so many years before and let her share her deep wisdom. Our loving community was a practice of enhancing our understanding and supporting critical exchange “without diminishing anyone's spirit” (hooks, 2010, p. 162). This kind of acknowledgement is not what I was used to experiencing, and it felt like it had a healing quality to it. I had reflected in my journal: Healing is a strengths-based approach to sharing our life stories that moves away from the deficit-based understandings of human experience without silencing the truth. (teaching journal, March 5, 2017) I was exploring how a loving community might offer the conditions to release love that is within us all to heal as we experience truth. We do not teach each other to love, but rather we create spaces that welcome the power to love by treating each other well, and by recognizing and accepting each other as fully as possible. 151 I believe that a loving community leads to a healthy learning community. I think it takes this kind of loving community to embrace wisdom-seeking, truth-telling and relational- self listening because all of these practices help us to engage in encounters that evoke uncertainty and disequilibrium, spaces where we can learn about ourselves and each other. Love helps us remain genuinely curious, generous, and open-minded. For example, my loving community of Living in Circle helped me to see how my deep worry about getting things wrong and my worry about the risks associated with engaging in learning with the FPPL if was getting something wrong. After a conversation with them about my fears I reflected in my journal what I had learned: Me: I can really connect to the fear and shame of not knowing or getting it wrong. I know that when I am in the headspace of fear-based thinking, I will move away from opportunities to express what I believe to be true and move towards the authority of others so as not to be vulnerable. (audio recording, June 5th) Without the support of a loving community I was inclined to distrust my experiences and to neglect my practical wisdom, spending a great deal of time feeling self-consciousness and second-guessing myself. The practice of love in my inquiry also involved self- acceptance and awareness of my need to be cared for. I realized that, for me, a big part of longing to ‘get things right’ was longing to be loved. Being loved unconditionally through Living in Circle helped me to be vulnerable so that I could engage in deep learning. This practice also helped me to be steadfast in the midst of critique which is important because as Donald (2011) writes, it is “remaining amidst, and engaging the messiness and difficulties of a situation or context that creates opportunities for new knowledge and understanding to arise” (p.120). Wisdom-seeking, truth-telling, relational-self listening, and loving community are four pedagogical practices that prioritise the importance of experience in teacher education. They are 152 self-transformative practices to support adaptive, strengths-oriented teaching. Engaging with the practices empowers the inquiring teacher to find her voice, align it with her heart, and create action in often unexpected ways as she learns to discern the “relations among school knowledge, life history, and intellectual development in ways that might function self-transformatively” (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery & Taubman, 1995, p. 515). 5.4 Looking Back and Looking Forward In the spring of 2018, I attended the self-study SIG at AERA. I listened to the ways the methodology had transformed the practices of others in the room, and I reflected on my self-study experience with the First Peoples Principles of Learning as I wrote the following haiku: Nearness for growing Encircle Self and Others All my relations (teaching journal, April 15, 2018) Each of the three lines represented an aspect of my research process. Nearness for growing referred to the personal nature of the everyday experiences within which I situated my research. The opportunity to learn from those experiences involved a practice of encircling self and others, and all my relations spoke to how I came to value the relational nature of experience. As I engaged in a final reflection of my self-study research, I considered the limitations of my research as well as the next possible steps. Limitations of my research. In order to follow my genuine path of inquiry, I did not begin my research with a pre-determined ideal of what it would look like to come to an understanding of the FPPL, or what it would like for me to embrace my work of teacher education through this self-study. There were many unknowns at the start and there continue to be unknowns and uncertainties about what I have provided in this account of my self-study. My 153 research evolved and grew as I learned and changed, connected with, and interacted with the larger education community beyond Living in Circle. Some experiences that came to feel important to my learning were not included in the description of my research given restraints around which voices were approved in my ethics applications to be able to share and which voices were not included. In some ways, this created for me the sense that as I was constructing a dissertation where some voices were missing. Missing voices. I learned so much from the perspectives of the Syilx community members who were part of my learning through the cultural experiences I attended and who helped me with the facilitation of our August day of learning on the Land. These voices, as well as the stories of the teachers who attended our day could have been a worthwhile addition to this research and reflect a limitation of the voices that are included and excluded. As a researcher, we do make choices about how we write and present our research and this comes with knowing that all voices will not be heard. Reflecting further on how the addition of more voices and perspectives could have improved my relational research process, I also contemplate the missing voice of my students. Loughran (2007) explains that “learning through self-study is strengthened by the use of data in which their students’ voices highlight alternative views that challenge what, under normal circumstances, might be described as a teacher educator’s taken- for-granted assumptions about practice” (p. 17). While ongoing feedback from students was considered in my journaling and discussions with Living in Circle, my students were not directly offered an opportunity to share their perspectives around my teaching within this self-study. Mockler and Groundwater-Smith (2015) argue that teachers often avoid student feedback because they offer disruptive perspectives that are unwelcomed truths. I can understand this 154 argument, but that is not why I did not include the voice of students in my research. The reason was that as an inexperienced researcher I was hesitant to include students when the purpose of this research was to prepare myself to work with students through a refined understanding of the FPPL. I made decisions to frame my research in a way that would serve my teacher education, and determined that student feedback was not going to be part of the process. Moving forward with self-study research I would include the voices of students, knowing how much they would benefit from a sense of agency and belonging when they are part of research (Mockler & Groundwater-Smith, 2015, p.10) and how much I would learn from their feedback. Students have so much to contribute to discussions on Indigenizing curriculum and I would suggest including students more actively in research processes as co-researchers. 5.5 The Circle Continues On the morning of our August day of learning, those of us who were part of facilitating the conversations for the day gathered early, before the arrival of the participants. To prepare our minds and hearts for a day we sat together in circle and listened to the Syilx creation story of How Food Was Given8. The story goes that before humans arrived in the Okanagan, the four food chiefs (Bear, Salmon, Bitterroot, and Siyaʔ Berry) all gave permission for their lives to be taken to support human existence through the food they each could offer. No one food on its own could have sustained the people, and so the food chiefs represented interdependence with each part offering the whole its own unique strengths in service of the greater good. After the story, we were each invited to think about the food chief that we most related to. There were t-shirts available for us to wear that depicted our chosen food chief. 8 How Food Was Given was published by the Okanagan Nation Alliance (2013) and by Theytus (1991) 155 I felt most connected to Chief Siyaʔ (Saskatoon Berry) who was responsible for the food above the ground. She had the unique ability to be innovative, and so she gifted all of the Syilx people with the ability to harvest fruit-bearing plants for medicine and food throughout the summer. Along with her creative thinking, Siyaʔ was also much like a child or a teenager in that she was a new learner who was transitioning and growing with a lot of enthusiasm although she would take many missteps along her journey. I saw myself in this description of Siyaʔ because I felt I was very much in the stages of adolescence as a learner as I continued along my research path to understand the First Peoples Principles of Learning. I was clumsy and awkward, but I also held space for the possibility for innovation, healing, changing, growing, and shifting as I learned. Smith (1999) writes, “the most basic purpose of going on a journey, then, is the ordinary one of learning to be at home in a more creative way, a good way, a healthy way, a way tuned to the deepest truth of things” (p. 2). Smith aptly characterizes learning as an ongoing journey of returning to home, returning to the self. The Living in Circle pedagogy that I offer is very much a process of returning to the self again and again through ongoing conversations—with each iteration involving the letting go of ideas, understandings, practices, and the letting come of new understandings of our relationships and therefore of ourselves. There is a vulnerability in offering these personal experiences to my colleagues, but as Kitchen (2019) describes, the power of vulnerability is a common quality of self-study research. He writes that “being vulnerable as a teacher educator helps to build trust and a willingness to grapple with important issues emotional and critically” (Kitchen, 2019, p. 2). I believe that it is through relationships that are both vulnerable and trusting that my journey as a life-long teacher-learner will continue, and that through these relationships I will 156 continue to grow a relational approach to teaching. Continuing to hold up self-study as an embodied practice is one way that I will keep my settler positionality at the forefront of my thoughts to ensure I continue to recognize my limited understanding as a new learner of Indigenous ways, trusting that with each iteration of inquiry the divided terrain between ways of knowing can continue transform who I am as a teacher. This inquiry will continue to change me, as I experience my way into new ways of thinking about teaching and learning through the FPPL. The First Peoples Principles of Learning also continue along a journey that involves being an important framework for anchoring educational policy in BC. In addition to framing the BC curricular plan, the FPPL are now also guiding principles of the Early Learning Framework (Ministry of Education, 2019) and the Continuity in Education Framework (Ministry of Education, 2020). In addition to the growing attention to the already widespread FPPL, in 2020 the British Columbia Teachers College (BCTF) introduced a new standard as part of their teacher certification program. In BC there are nine professional standards to become certified as a teacher in the province. The new standard carries with it the aspiration and expectation that BC educators strive towards truth, reconciliation and healing, acknowledge the history and contributions of First Nations, Inuit and Métis in Canada, and confirms educators’ commitment to the success of First Nations, Inuit and Métis students: Educators respect and value the history of First Nations, Inuit and Metis in Canada and the impact of the past on the present and the future. Educators contribute towards truth and reconciliation and healing. Educators foster a deeper understanding of ways of 157 knowing and being, histories and culture if First Nations, Inuit and Metis. (Professional Standard, 9, BCTC, p. 5) It seems that within the province of BC, the First Peoples Principles of Learning are a cornerstone for attempts to honour and value Indigenous ways of knowing across all aspects of education. As an educator who sees these principles as a gift, I am grateful that I had the opportunity to deeply consider, with a spirit of reciprocity and balance, what the principles can offer and what they might provoke in the lived experiences of teachers and students. Through my research I contribute to this conversation by highlighting the role of my experiences with the FPPL and how self-study methodology anchored my growth and change. The FPPL offered me a needed entry point to embody a curricular stance that held up Indigenous perspectives and educational priorities as integral to all aspects of education. However, the implications of my research move beyond this particular curricular document in this place, at this time. My self-study was not just about improving my own practice. By sharing what it looked like, felt like, and sounded like when I closely attended to my own learning through the habits of self-study, I contributed to educational research in a broad sense. The contributions of my research highlighting educators as collaborative changemakers who have the potential to empower transformative teacher education through my Living in Circle pedagogical framework are important beyond my context. Additionally, my research made visible important relationships between self-study and Indigeneity, and this has the potential to advance future possibilities for self-study methodology. Educators as Collaborative Changemakers One of the most significant contributions of my research is the importance I put on educators as capable of agents for significant transformation. I highlight how educators, through 158 the quality of their attention and collaborations, can be collaborative changemakers. Social justice work is complex and challenging and for me, it involved living in a great deal of uncertainty that drew me to seek the perspectives of others. Collaborating with Living in Circle, I embraced uncertainty as a necessary condition for my meaningful growth and change. This way of conceptualizing the role of an educator has been under-considered and under-theorized, but it is one that offers much promise for those in hopes of educational transformation through opportunities for improvements such as Indigenization. Looking back to February 2016 as I was just beginning my inquiry, I wrote a reflection in my journal that I titled: How can I teach what I don't know? I wrote: Out in the community last night, I went to a gathering where a panel of community members shared their thoughts on Indigenous and non-Indigenous relationships. I wish there had been an educator on the panel because I feel like our teaching community (Indigenous and non) have a special responsibility to consider this relationship because of our new curriculum. There are questions that I wanted to ask but I didn’t. How can I teach what I don’t know? Through the course of my self-study research I outgrew this question. I have outgrown the idea that teachers are expert knowers whose role is to deliver knowledge to others. Rather, I offer an example of teaching that highlights how teaching can be a practice of collectively creating knowledge in relationship to urgent calls to social justice in the context of many tensions. Kitchen (2019) explains that “educators who examine their practices through self-study are particularly well positioned to strike a balance between tensions and effectively teach teachers about social justice” (p. 12). My research illuminated how the habit of ongoing collaborative theorizing with Living in Circle enlarged and transformed the depth to which I could name and 159 describe my relationships. The ongoing attention that I paid to my practices and to the perspectives, both of my immediate learning community and the discourse communities of self-study and curriculum theory, empowered my capacity to express internalized understandings and to make new connections between my own thinking and experiences and with the theorizing of others. Through my self-study, I attended to the primacy of my experiences and this invited a more subtle intelligence in my teaching and learning; I translated that knowledge into a pedagogical framework to offer other educators. Framework for Educational Change My operative framework of pedagogies that involved wisdom-seeking, truth-telling, relational-self listening, and loving community are practices for other educators to draw upon for their own ongoing education, and this is another contribution of my research. The framework of Living in Circle offers a process of presence and attention that “throws everything that seems unquestionable to the approached group into question” (Phelan, 2015, p. 84). In turn, it creates space for making things anew and to recognize the depth of the injustices associated with a colonial education system. The pedagogy of Living in Circle is a limitless invitation to an entangled, social process of fusing of theory and practice, and learning to linger in the relationships between the self, history, agency, and curriculum. In my experiences, living this ongoing invitation to inquire was nurtured by the framework of wisdom-seeking, truth-telling, relational-self listening and loving community. I described how this pedagogical framework was the foundation for offering professional development for more than 300 educators across my district, and I think it is worthwhile to imagine how this framework might support contexts beyond my school district including other learning communities, whole school communities, and school districts. While the FPPL may not 160 be as relevant across all contexts, the four pedagogies I have described offer an opportunity to orient groups of educators to purposely attend to their own learning context in ways that support transformation. I can imagine that other educators and school leaders reading this work are currently encountering their own provocations that leave them uncertain and troubled by their current practices. These can be seen as opportunities to think differently that come from within their own contexts and from the world, and they are opportunities to sense the need to reorient their hopes and dreams for their educational stances in relationship to issues of justice and freedom. Within each of these unique contexts Living in Circle might be a way to value and respond to important questions by seeking the wisdom of others and interrogating personal beliefs, views, and habits through sharing stories. Attending to the act of listening and to how to honour a space of love in order to allow learning to change us might help to build the conditions for teachers to learn to trust themselves, engage with their colleagues more fully, and to develop agency for social justice. Through living this framework, I have come to believe that these practices hold great potential to embrace the challenges of our time as essential to what it means to honour wellbeing and thriving as educational aims. Teachers and students can thrive when they are positioned to support each other while they also stretch and encourage each other to see the world anew and to create positive change for all. Self-Study Methodology and Indigeneity Lastly, through my research I also illuminate how self-study, as a methodological tradition of continually recognizing relationships in order to situate the self in the world, holds a potential kinship with the aims of Indigeneity. My self-study was a practice of ongoing attention to relationships that seemed to compliment Donald’s (2012) description of ‘ecological 161 imagination.’ Self-study was a way of living my ecological imagination as I observed and described how new knowledge, meaning, and insight were rooted in my awareness of interconnection. Further, through self-study methods, observing and creating relationships allowed for a more equal and reciprocal relational dynamic where every relationship was important and valuable within the contested, situated, and relational process of curriculum. As I was learning more about the nature of teaching, learning, and pedagogy I was becoming more attentive and accountable to my relations through my self-study research. I suggest this model of research offers contributions to the wider community of discourse around teacher education as an example of how teachers can engage in deep and meaningful transformative learning through a self-study approach. I hope that the relationships that I have shared throughout this dissertation will resonate with other practitioners in K-12 settings who could also benefit from self-study as a way of being as an educator, and who might also have much to share and contribute through their own unique research questions, processes, and findings. It has been a great honor to share my learning with educators, the self-study discourse community, and others who might find themselves in conversation with these ideas. As we continue to circle one another through this interchange, and others like this, I will wonder how we can find out more about each other, our ideas, and experiences. As Wilson (2008) describes “the more relationships between yourself and the other, the more fully you can comprehend its form and the greater your understanding becomes” (p. 79). Perhaps as we continue to discover and uncover one another the stories we share will further coalesce, and we will again have the beautiful, tender, unexpected gift of imagining ourselves anew again and again. 162 References Abdi, A. (2012). Decolonizing philosophies of education: An introduction. In A. Abdi (Ed.), Decolonizing philosophies of education (pp. 1-13). Rotterdam, NL: Sense Publisher. Alsup, J. (2006). 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Study of Philosophy of Education, 30, 537-542. 183 Appendices Appendix A Timeline of Living in Circle Monthly Meetings Wednesday, September 27th, 2017 Keith, April, Andrea Third Space 3:30- 5:00 Wednesday, October 12th, 2017 Keith, April, Andrea, Kimmy, Russ, John Third Space 3:30- 5:00 Thursday, October 19th, 2017 Keith, April, Andrea Third Space 9:00 am- 1:00pm Friday, November 3rd, 2017 Keith, April, Andrea, Kimmy, Russ, John School All day Tuesday, December 5th, 2017 Keith, Andrea, April, Kimmy, Russ, John, Susan Third Space 9:00am- 1:00pm Tuesday, February 19th, 2018 Keith, Andrea April, Kimmy, Russ Third Space 9:00am- 1:00 pm Friday, February 23rd, 2018 Keith, April, Andrea, Kimmy, Russ, John Knox Mountain 184 All day Friday, March 2nd, 2018 Keith, Russ Third Space 9:00am- 12:00pm Wednesday, March 28th, 2018 April, John Third Space 9:00am- 11:00am Friday, April 20th, 2018 Keith UBCO 2:30-4:00 May 24th 2018 Keith, Andrea, April, Karen, Russ Third Space 9:00 am – 3:00 pm June 5th, 2018 Kimmy school 1:00-2:30 June 15th Keith, Russ UBCO 1:00-2:30 Friday, July 13th April, Kimmy Third Space 9:00am- 11:00am Friday, July 20th Russ 185 Third Space 9:00am- 11:00am 186 Appendix B Faculty of Education, Okanagan Campus 3333 University Way Kelowna BC Canada V1V 1V7 Tel: 250.807.9176 Fax: 250.807.8084 www.ubc.ca/okanagan/education Learning to Live Curriculum: A Settler Teacher Exploration of the First Peoples Principles of Learning Letter of Consent Principal Investigator: Dr. Sabre Cherkowski, Associate Professor, Faculty of Education, The University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus. Phone: (250) 807-9306, sabre.cherkowski@ubc.ca. Co-Investigator: Kelly Hanson, Ph.D. candidate. Phone: 250-575-2837, kelly.hanson@ubc.ca Dear Colleague: You have agreed to participate in a research study about a self-experience of exploring the curriculum document the First Peoples Principles of Learning (FNESC, 2014). This study is being conducted by Kelly Hanson for the completion of her Doctor of Philosophy degree through Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies at UBC Okanagan. This research emerges from a self-initiated intervention to improve an individual's teaching practice by integrating living curriculum theory and First Peoples Principles of Learning into a pedagogical understanding. The primary data for this research are teaching journal entries maintained throughout 2012 to the present, and reflective conversations with critical friends. The purpose of the research is to create new knowledge about how teachers may experience the First Peoples Principles of Learning, as well as a public account of one teacher’s learning and growth through this reflective process. The research explores how self-knowledge can be integral to curricular understanding and changing pedagogy. As a regular part of self-study methodology, critical friends are required to provide an external perspective on the interpretations of the data collected by the researcher. As a participant in this study, you will participate in a monthly critical friend group meeting that will last about 2 hours, at a location convenient to all participants over the timeframe of January 2018 - June 2018. There will be up to ten participants in this study. A critical friend is someone who listens, questions, and provides feedback to a presenter. The group will be led by 187 Kelly Hanson. The topics that will be discussed during the focus group emerge from the reflective journals of Kelly Hanson and her ongoing analysis of her data and how she is learning through the group feedback. The discussion will also focus on curriculum change and the First Peoples Principles of Learning in an Okanagan context. The critical friend group conversation will be audio-recorded in order to accurately capture what is said. If you participate in the study, you may request that the recording be paused at any time. You may choose how much or how little you want to speak during the group. You may also choose to leave the group at any time, with no penalty. All recordings will be transcribed by Kelly Hanson. Anonymity within the group cannot be assured, since participants will know who else is participating. As a participant, you will agree to keep the discussion in the session confidential, and to respect the need for anonymity of the other participants outside of the discussion group. Your confidentiality will be protected by choosing a pseudonym that will be used in all research reports and presentations. Your participation in this study is voluntary. There will be no formal follow-up scheduled after the critical friend discussions, but you will be given a copy of the chapters from my thesis that will reflect the themes from our discussion and will be welcome to read the entire thesis at your request. The dissertation will be publicly available on the internet via cIRcle. You may choose to withdraw from this study at any time, without penalty. Any data that you would have contributed to the point of withdrawal may be used in the writing up of the research. There are no risks in this study greater than what participants would experience in their normal professional experiences. The potential benefit of participating in the meeting is the opportunity for everyone present to be reflective. The dialogue may help participants gain insights into their own practice, as well as feel a sense of belonging to a learning community where their professional opinion is valued. If you have any questions about this study, please contact Kelly Hanson, kelly.hanson@ubc.ca or you can contact my graduate supervisor, Dr. Sabre Cherkowski at 250-807-9306 or sabre.cherkowski@ubc.ca If you have any concerns or complaints about your rights as a research participant and/or your experiences while participating in this study, contact the Research Participant Complaint Line in the UBC Office of Research Services at 1-877-822-8598 or the UBC Okanagan Research Services Office at 250-807-8832. It is also possible to contact the Research Participant Complaint Line by email (RSIL@ors.ubc.ca). Please reference the Ethics ID number H17-01715 when contacting the Complaint Line so staff can better assist you Participant Consent 188 I have read and understood this Informed Consent form. I have had the opportunity to ask questions, and I have received answers to any questions I had regarding the study. I understand that the group discussion will be recorded. I agree to participate in this study. I understand that I will receive a copy of this consent form. ____________________________________ _____________________ Participant’s Signature Date _____________________________________________ Printed name of the participant
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Interdisciplinary Studies
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Living in circle : an educator’s self-study of curricular experiences with the First Peoples principles of learning
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