| University
of Saskatchewan > College
of Education > Dr.
Marie Battiste |
Decolonizing
Education in Canadian Universities: An Interdisciplinary
Indigenous Research Project M.
Battiste, Primary Investigator with Dr. Len Findlay and
Dr. Lynne Bell.
SSHRC Interdisciplinary Grant. 2001-2004
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World
Indigenous People's Conference in Education
(2002) Morley, Alberta
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"Displacing
systemic discrimination against Indigenous peoples created
and legitimized by the cognitive frameworks of imperialism
and colonialism remains the single most crucial cultural challenge
facing humanity. Meeting this responsibility is not just a
problem for the colonized and the oppressed, but rather the
defining challenge for all peoples. It is the path to a shared
and sustainable future for all peoples." (Erica
Irene Daes, United Nations Working Group on Indigenous
Peoples at the UNESCO Conference on Education, July 1999)
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Summary
of Proposed Research Despite
several decades of work on educational equity, building
cultural studies and courses, and bridging and access
projects, Aboriginal peoples’ achievements, knowledges,
histories, and perspectives remain virtually ignored,
rejected, suppressed, marginalized, or under-utilized
in the university. The experience of these projects reveals
deeper assumptions and practices which, in effect, reaffirm
Eurocentric and colonial encounters in the name of excellence,
integration, and modernity. Making post-secondary education
accessible to Aboriginal peoples through the decolonization
of the university’s assumptions, content, structures,
and processes and enabling post-secondary education to
be transformed by Indigenous peoples’ participation
and inclusion is the challenge of this research project.
The investigators are Dr. Marie Battiste, primary investigator
and professor in Indian and Northern Education Program
in the Department of Educational Foundations; Dr. Lynne
Bell, Professor of Art and Art History; and Dr. Len Findlay,
Director of the Humanities Research Unit and Professor
of English.
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This
project seeks to build Canadian capacity for valuing and
learning from the knowledges and educational practices of
diverse Aboriginal peoples; develop and refine strategies
for identifying and overcoming anti-Aboriginal, racist resistance
in academic teaching, research, and community service; develop
education, humanities, and visual culture as decolonizing
sites within Canadian universities for a subsequent, broader
investigation and improvement of Indigenizing across disciplines,
across Canada, and internationally; develop non-appropriative,
collaborative protocols and practices for ethical research,
learning, and teaching, especially where such research and
learning involve Aboriginal knowledges, languages, and cultures;
and support and enrich Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal graduate
students, and future faculty, in understanding their commitment
to decolonizing education in the university.
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Research
collaborators meet to discuss the decolonizing project.
Left
to right: J. Youngblood (Sakej) Henderson, Lynne Bell, and Len
Findlay
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The
project develops, records, and most effectively shares
successful decolonizing practices across disciplines,
institutions, and regions, pursuing the project via
archival and applied research, discourse analysis,
community dialogue, pedagogical innovation, and policy
formation. We recognize collaborative, interdisciplinary,
and intercultural in method and seek diverse research
outcomes: in curriculum design, teaching education,
capacity building, cultural theory, and modes of
dissemination.
Our
primary focus is on scholarship of teaching and education,
understood as a fundamentally interdisciplinary site reshaped
continuously by cultural theories, directive curricula and
teaching, institutional self-understandings and practices,
and training needs. In each of these areas, we use the research
data, testimony and recommendations of the Royal Commission
on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) as standards for evaluation
of the Canadian university education, analyzing responses
to RCAP since 1996 in its administrative efforts, curricula,
visual imagery, and mission statements. Our interpretation
and application of RCAP will include mapping new and necessary
capacities for postcolonial research, teaching, training,
and public education. We draw on our experience of working
together in a variety of combinations, formats, and fora,
such as Aboriginal talking circles, participation action
research (PAR), interdisciplinary dialogues developed by
Bohm (Nichols, 1996) and Isaacs (1999), and collaborative
archival projects.
Dr.
Marie Battiste, Professor
Educational Foundations
College of Education
University of Saskatchewan
28 Campus Dr.
Saskatoon, SK S7N 0X1
marie.battiste@usask.ca
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