Brooke Madden

Witnessing (halted) deconstruction: white teachers’ ‘perfect stranger’ position within urban Indigenous education

This article extends upon Susan Dion’s theory of the ‘perfect stranger’ by exploring how this position is articulated and embodied by white teachers (N = 67) involved in urban Indigenous education reform. On the lookout for deconstruction, we think with Derrida around the interrelated self/other and familiar/strange binaries that uphold the perfect stranger. We argue that Eurocentrism simultaneously centres and obscures whiteness, resulting in teachers’ misconceptions about culture. We also demonstrate how stereotypical representations of the ‘imaginary Indian’ that these white teachers ‘know’ inhibits their ability to foster and build upon relationships with Indigenous students. We conclude by conceptualizing a model for teacher education that, through a variety of teaching practices and policies, intentionally disrupts and destabilizes the perfect stranger position.

Ex(er)cising Student Voice in Pedagogy for Decolonizing: Exploring Complexities Through Duoethnography

Engaging in pedagogy for decolonizing as a theoretical approach to Indigenous education with adults raises questions and tensions, particularly when individual student experience and structures embedded within colonial relations of power trouble one another in unpredictable ways. In this article we use duoethnography to explore experiences with pedagogy for decolonizing in a mandatory doctoral course in a Faculty of Education. As a student presenter, Brooke facilitated the pedagogical encounter that centered a sharing circle in which Heather participated as a student. Together, we explore four complexities that arose through this teaching and learning encounter: (1) student voices presenting numerous multifaceted experiences and locations, but without necessarily linking experiences to relations of power in critical ways; (2) the context of the learning community, activity, and dynamics between students erecting perceived constraints on what becomes ‘‘sayable and doable’’ (Orner 1992, 81); (3) predicating the activity on a binary (Indigenous=non-Indigenous) that may not adequately account for the identities of all students; and (4) recognizing the possible limitations of pedagogy, as well as accounting for the possibility of generative learning from those very limitations. Entering this pedagogical encounter as the facilitator and a participating student, we had shared intentions: to center the distinct positionality of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous educational strengths and needs, in ways that were ‘‘close to home’’ for participating students. However, from our perspectives, this pedagogical encounter did not facilitate the intended outcomes. Rather than take refuge in futility, our writing emerges from a desire to focus more closely on how the voices of graduate students exposed the impossibility of a stable, autonomous, unified, knowable individual=identity that can be revealed and transform(ed) through pedagogy for decolonizing, insofar as it relies on a call for student voice. We attempt to think pedagogy for decolonizing as possible, with an awareness of its inevitable limitations. Working toward promoting (more) ethical relations in and through Indigenous education (Donald, Glanfield, and The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 35:371–391, 2013 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1071-4413 print=1556-3022 online DOI: 10.1080/10714413.2013.842866

De/signing research in education: patchwork(ing) methodologies with theory

Abstract Four education scholars extend the methodological space inspired by Jackson and Mazzei’s Thinking with Theory through focusing on research design. The notion of de/sign is presented and employed to counter prescriptive method/ology that often sutures over pedagogical possibilities in research and educational settings. Key methodological themes (e.g. voice, agency, subjectivity, data) are (un)tailored in order to work within, against, and beyond conventional humanist qualitative methodology. Patchwork methodologies take shape as key theorists and theories pierce, (un)stitch, snag, embroider, patch, and mend the fabrics of distinct research contexts, components, and commitments. Previews of the productions that result from attending to the enacted and embodied relationship between theory and research de/sign are presented. A discussion of the ways in which patchwork(ing) methodologies provokes new questions, analytical frames, and types of findings concludes the article.

(Not Idling at) the Flâneur in Indigenous Education: Towards Being and Becoming Community

The flâneur, with its metaphoric image of bourgeois masculinity in Parisian arcades in the 19th century, emerges as a creative response to the situated practices of the time that continue to bear upon present enactments. Through loitering, idling, and walking, the (always classed, European male) flâneur enacted an emphatic way of being-in-the-world. In this chapter, we use and trouble this flaneurial opening to bring in Indigenous ways-of-knowing-in-being that begin from this assumption. In particular, we think with Gregory Cajete’s (2015) concept of becoming community which offers methodological insights into the processes and practices of being and becoming with/in an interconnected ecology of human, other-than-human, and more-than-human agents in relationship that come to (co-)constitute an Indigenous notion of place. Grounded in this ecology, creative and perceptive human-place relationships do not end with participatory observation. Rather, it gives rise to relational, reciprocal, and (re)generative place-making ethics.