Marc Higgins

De/colonizing Pedagogy and Pedagogue: Science Education Through Participatory and Reflexive Videography

Within Canadian science classrooms, Indigenous ways-of-knowing and ways-of-being continue to be underrepresented and undervalued. For Indigenous students, this often results in negative experiences and disparate achievement rates when compared to their non-Indigenous classmates. Recent decolonizing science education literature suggests critical examination of Eurocentric systems and modes of thought that uphold and reproduce (neo)colonialism within classrooms alongside the integration of Indigenous perspectives into curriculum. Extending Belczewski’s (2009) conception of decolonizing science education and educator, I illuminate the partial and complex failure in translation that occurs between decolonizing theories (i.e., border crossing and reflexivity for decolonial purposes) and associated pedagogical practices of decolonizing science education.RésuméDans les cours de sciences des écoles canadiennes, les modes de connaissances et les identités autochtones continuent d’être sous-représentées et sous-évaluées. Pour les étudiants autochtones, cela se traduit souvent par des expériences négatives et des résultats disparates comparativement à leurs pairs non autochtones. La littérature récente dans le domaine de la décolonization de l’enseignement des sciences propose de faire une analyse critique des systèmes et des modes de pensée eurocentriques qui soutiennent et reproduisent une culture (néo)coloniale dans les classes, malgré l’intégration de perspectives autochtones dans les curriculums. Partant de la décolonisation de l’enseignement des sciences proposée par Belczewski (2009), j’explique l’échec partiel et complexe qui se produit lorsqu’il s’agit de traduire les théories de décolonisation (par exemple le passage de frontières et la réflexivité appliquées à la décolonisation) en différentes pratiques pédagogiques pour décoloniser effectivement l’enseignement des sciences.

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.

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.

Decolonizing School Science: Pedagogically Enacting Agential Literacy and Ecologies of Relationships

Within science education, the oft-included mandate of scientific literacy continues to problematically (re)produce humanism’s Eurocentric legacies through the implicit message that its ontology, Cartesianism, is the only ontology. Working within and against this mandate for decolonizing purposes, this chapter asks: How might scientific literacy be enacted otherwise if it is configured with/in other-than-Cartesian ontologies while still privileging knowing nature (i.e. space, time, and matter) through empirical observation? Drawing from and putting into conversation alternatives to scientific literacy, Karen Barad’s agential literacy and Gregory Cajete’s ecologies of relationships, a pedagogy of relationally storying nature is developed and discussed herein. The relational stories produced by youth participants are then read through and with these alternatives literacies to discuss consequences and possibilities for decolonizing science education.

Placing photovoice under erasure: a critical and complicit engagement with what it theoretically is (not)

Abstract While there have been multiple breaks, shifts and developments within the theories that shape photovoice (i.e. praxis and feminist standpoint theory), they are rarely accounted for in the ways in which photovoice is (re)constituted. In this paper, I ask and engage with the questions: what might it mean to reconceptualise photovoice through a substitution of these similar yet different iterations of these theories? What is produceable in turn? By placing these (mis)readings of theory in conversation with concepts key to photovoice, empowerment and voice, I provide not what photovoice should be but rather possible possibilities for what it could be.

(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.

Wandering within, against, and beyond the pathways of science education : towards heeding the call of Indigenous science

............................................................................................................................................... ii Preface ................................................................................................................................................. iii Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................... iv List of Tables ..................................................................................................................................... xii List of Abbreviations ....................................................................................................................... xiii Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................................ xiv Chapter 1: Wandering the Pathways of Science Education: Response-ability Towards Indigenous Science To-Come ............................................................................................................. 1 1.1 “Blackfoot Metaphysics is Waiting in the Wings”: My Relation to Indigenous Metaphysics, the Metaphysics of Modernity, and Science Education .................................................................... 2 1.2 First Orientation: An Introduction to Decolonizing and Postcolonial Science Education and their Relationships to Metaphysics ................................................................................................... 7 1.2.1 Understanding school science and its relation to Indigenous science to-come. ............... 9 1.2.2 Decolonizing and post-colonial responses in science education. ................................... 13 1.2.3 Towards wandering the pathways of science education anew. ....................................... 17 1.3 Second Orientation: (Re)opening Science Education to Indigenous Science To-Come through Deconstruction and Reconstruction ................................................................................... 19 1.3.1 Common approaches to cross-cultural methodologies in science education. ................. 20 1.3.2 Deconstruction and/in cross-cultural science education. ................................................ 21 1.3.2.1 Deconstructing Self/Other in decolonizing and postcolonial science education. .... 22 1.3.2.2 Deconstructing Nature/Culture in decolonizing and postcolonial science education. . .................................................................................................................................. 24 1.3.2.3 Deconstructing ethical possibility/impossibility in decolonizing and postcolonial science education. ................................................................................................................... 24