Lisa Korteweg

The stories are the people and the land: three educators respond to environmental teachings in Indigenous children’s literature

This article explores how Indigenous Canadian children’s literature might challenge adult and child readers to consider different meanings and worldviews of the environment as a land‐based value system. As three teacher educators from elementary and university classrooms, we use reader‐response theory to explore a collection of rich alternative narratives of Indigenous land‐based knowledge systems available in the work of Indigenous authors and illustrators of children’s literature. Our study considers how Indigenous picture books might serve to decolonize environmental consciousness through offering accessible and immersive Indigenous stories of the land. As we respond to and analyze these picture books, we work from a prior commitment to decolonization as a critical self‐reflexive political process in which one’s colonized beliefs are explicitly pinpointed, challenged and countered by Indigenous worldviews and perspectives.

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.

Eco-heroes out of place and relations: decolonizing the narratives of Into the Wild and Grizzly Man through Land education

Eco-heroic quests for environmental communion continue to be represented, mediated, and glorified through film and media narratives. This paper examines two eco-heroic quests in the Alaskan ‘wilderness’ that have been portrayed in two Hollywood motion pictures: the movies Grizzly Man and Into the Wild. Both films vividly document and re-inscribe heroic status to the stories of Timothy Treadwell (Grizzly Man) and Christopher McCandless (Into the Wild), their tragic encounters with nature, and the pivotal experiences that gave them both eco-heroic identities in the American imagination. As is often the case for Greek and Shakespearean dramas, each hero met a tragic, unnecessary death in Alaskan ‘wilderness’, but in the process reiterated a settler colonial narrative. We argue that an Indigenous-focused Land education and its counter-narratives of holistic relations are sorely needed. It is Indigenous Land education that can break the cycle of Eurocentric celebrations of solitary heroism, rugged individualism, and ignorance of place. In order to forge Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations in our cultural imaginations and to address compounding environmental struggles, we need to turn to Indigenous stories and teachings that are already in place, in deep relation with the Land, water, animals and plants on Indigenous territory. We need to turn to Land education that is currently not in place or acknowledged in environmental education.

Representations 1.0, 2.0, 3.0

Digital media and online communication have become a pervasive part of the everyday lives of youth and most graduate students. Web 2.0 technologies such as social network sites, online video games, content-sharing sites, and YouTube are now well-established fixtures of communication and knowledge exchange. While wary of the claims that there is a digital or Web 2.0 generation that overthrows knowledge generation and representation as currently practiced in graduate programs, I argue that the current adoption of Web 2.0 social media is accelerating a unique period of knowledge exchange, content generation and digital representations in research. How are representations 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 being taken up by researchers and what opportunities do these new digital practices afford? And how do these representational practices change the dynamics of research and scholarly communication? The extent to which new digital technologies can mediate representations of research should call the educational research community, graduate departments and thesis committees to epistemological and methodological attention, creative responses, and serious inquiry. The chapter begins a critical study into issues of representations of educational research through new digital technologies and issues to ponder in digital research design decisions. The goal is to learn how to harness the opportunities that increasing digital fluency presents, and shape our research in ways that advance a more creative participatory culture in educational research.