At the start of every Centre for Teaching Excellence (CTE) meeting I begin with a personalized land acknowledgement. This acknowledgement has evolved over time as I found my footing in my role as the director of teaching and learning and I gained confidence in my ability to make appropriate land acknowledgements of the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəỷəm, Skwxwú7mesh, and SəỈílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh where I get to work and play every day in a personally meaningful way. Sometimes these acknowledgements evolve into lengthy (as I’m sure the team would attest to) reflections on activities at CapU, in teaching and learning, and the world in general (thinking about the meso-micro-macro-mega framework our work as a teaching and learning centre (Frake-Mistak, et al., 2023)).
(At a recent CTE meeting I joked that I should record myself and then post the reflections as blogs. Apparently, I was only half joking because that’s what I’ve now decided to do. This post is compiled from my memory of the land acknowledgement and reflection at our most recent CTE meeting.)
Today I was reflecting on what I’m learning by reading Colonized Classrooms: Racism, Trauma and Resistance in Post-Secondary Education by Sheila Cote-Meek in our book club and People Change by Vivek Shraya which I listened to on audio book over the weekend.
In one particular passage in People Change, Shraya talks about authenticity versus autonomy. What I learned from this passage in the book is that when we expect people to show up in an authentic way, we may have a biased expectation of what that looks like. Shraya describes always wearing a white dress-shirt to teach in and how this is perceived by her students as a political statement, where in fact she described it as an easy professional ‘uniform’. How often do we expect our students or colleagues to show up in particular ways or assign meaning to appearance when there is, in fact, none?
Connecting this to what I’m learning by reading Colonized Classrooms is that we likely have expectations for how Indigenous students show up in our classrooms and what their life experiences may or may not have been. Instead, if everyone is allowed autonomy for how they show up, they get to themselves decide what that looks like, without expectation, prejudice.
I then thought back to earlier that morning as I was getting my 3-year-old daughter ready for school at the CapU Children’s Centre and she says, “today I’m going to be shy, and then I’m going to be happy.” In the moment I thought, “oh okay” and yet when arrived that’s exactly what she did. She didn’t want to sit with her friends who welcomed her, she wanted time to warm up. By the time I left, about 10 minutes later, she was happily waving to me from the window. She knew how she wanted to show up, and her wonderful school allowed space for her to have the autonomy to do so.
So, to summarize, to me, in a decolonized classroom the student and instructor have the autonomy to ‘show up’ in ways that are authentic to them.
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