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A decolonial critique of metaphysics in counselling psychology education

University of British Columbia

How can we listen to Indigenous Knowledges about our relationships with land? This dissertation offers three examples of how Canadian counsellor education and counselling psychology programs can be truly open to the ecological and theoretical gifts that Indigenous Knowledges offer academia—open in ways that align with our core values of listening, respect, relationality, healing, and holistic well-being. Each of the three projects provokes our assumptions about the relationship between ourselves and the land. The first project challenges Western disciplinary histories and asks us to listen to the history of education that has had its being in this land for millennia. The second challenges our science of intelligence and invites us to listen to land-based, experiential realities of cognition. The third investigates nonindigenous counselling students' ways of being in places of schooling where their worldview does not match their institution's. It challenges the assumption that students' minds are simply broadened by coming to university, and opens us up to students' existing relationships to land through the lens of Indigenous Knowledges. This dissertation shows that there is room for, strategic places of insertion of, and student willingness to absorb decolonized curriculum and pedagogy in Canadian counsellor education and Canadian counselling psychology generally. Indigenous Knowledges benefit the field by broadening the conceptions of humanity we use to educate our students and clients, and by deepening our stories of what counselling education is and has been.

Text

2020-08-24

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/75669

Counselling Psychology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/