Locating Colonialism in Education (original) (raw)

Intro: Most people are completely unaware that the form and content of contemporary education, including Aboriginal studies, is rife with a complex interplay between racism and (neo)-colonialism. While some realize that racism towards visible minorities ‘may’ play a role in student success, very few realize that racism directed towards Indigenous Peoples has a distinct form. Aboriginal societies have an integrity that is separate from any Canadian identity, linked to Indigenous societies’ distinct philosophies and historic relationship to the land. Therefore insofar as education validates state authority, it tends to undermine the vested interests of Indigenous societies. Approved educational narratives preference the evolving Canadian narrative which, through selectively choosing stories which construct a dominant euro-Canadian and ‘multicultural’ construct, legitimizes Canadian and multicultural national identities at the expense of Indigenous Nations’ grounded sovereignties. This content, along with the structure and pedagogy of education systematically place Indigenous Peoples in a marginal position in the classroom and in wider society through partial and insignificant placement of their histories, geographies, knowledges, and contemporary realities in the educational environment. While considerable research focuses on curriculum as the focal point for anti-racist and anti-colonialist reform, it is the entirety of the structural frameworks and pedagogy of education (the philosophy of education, ideas of what constitutes teaching/learning, the presumption of neutrality in education, the role of the various actors in the educational environment, and the praxis of education), and how the curriculum is situated/embodied in these structural forms, that are deeply constitutive of the racist and colonialist construct. Together, these racist and colonial structures and habits within education, serve to delegitimize Indigenous past and present geographies and to produce a marginal position for Indigenous students and their cultures within the classroom and hence the larger society in ways that cannot be addresses by the simple correction of language in curricular documents.