Teaching as Trespass: Avoiding Places of Innocence

ABSTRACT

Teachers in Canadian public school contexts are attempting to teach about Indigenous knowledges and epistemologies. Given the present state of asymmetrical Indigenous-settler relations, the complexity of this work requires a large breadth of consideration. Our study provides insight into the nuances of teaching Indigenous perspectives and worldviews, and the barriers and motivations for its inclusion in elementary and secondary classrooms. We conceptualize that teachers are “always-already” trespassing on Indigenous Lands and illuminate the enactment of “trespass” by settler teachers as they move their settler teacher identities to a place of “innocence.” Teachers enacted trespass through acts of return, absorption, erasure, and the eliding of settler experiences. We offer important starting points for continued introspection about the roles and responsibilities of teachers working within settler-colonial education structures and ensuing complicity in the historic marginalization of Others. We highlight the possibilities of a curriculum that is treaty-based and enacted with Indigenous collaboration and consultation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [435-2016-1496].

Notes on contributors

Daniela Bascuñán

Daniela Bascuñán is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. As a teacher, she engages a practitioner inquiry stance with elementary students. Daniela’s classroom work sensitizes young children to consider their lived stories, learn about historical asymmetries found in colonial narratives of encounter, and explore contested current issues. She guides students to consider expanded notions of kinship as they explore their place in the world.

Shawna M. Carroll

Shawna M. Carroll identifies as a queer white settler woman, and was born and raised west of Toronto, with Irish and English ancestry. She graduated from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto in Curriculum Studies and Teacher Development. Shawna is currently working as a senior assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education at Okayama University in Japan, teaching anti-oppressive and anti-colonial English teaching and research methods.

Mark Sinke

Mark Sinke is an elementary school teacher who lives on the territory of Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee Nations in Hamilton, Ontario, and has his PhD in Curriculum Studies at the University of Toronto. Mark is a settler whose family moved onto Indigenous lands following the Second World War, and his research focuses on how students in public elementary schools figure the worlds of their school experience when they learn settler-Canadian and Indigenous histories in social studies classrooms.

Jean-Paul Restoule

Jean-Paul Restoule is a professor and chair of the Department of Indigenous Education at the University of Victoria on Lekwungen territory. Raised in Orangeville, Ontario, he is Anishinabe, and a member of the Dokis First Nation. Formerly a professor of Indigenous Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, his research includes bringing Indigenous knowledge to online learning and encouraging teachers to take up Indigenous education in their professional practice.