Unsettling Pedagogy: Co-designing Research in Place with Indigenous Educators

Abstract

This article argues that decolonizing educational research begins in attention to inherited colonial thinking and ways of being. Working with over 250 Indigenous educators, staff, students, faculty and administrators associated with 10 partner universities in Ontario, Canada, we co-designed a questionnaire assessing how Ontario post-secondary students are learning to think about colonialism and its relationship to Indigenous peoples and Canadian society. Situating ourselves as researchers and as participants, we theorize the questionnaire’s and our own methodological transformation through the lens of recent literature on epistemologies of ignorance, discussing humour, the relationship between language and imagination, and assumptions we held that presented significant opportunities to shift how we relate. In doing so we argue the social importance of attending to the limits of knowledge and the entrenchment of those limits in historically conditioned and socially sanctioned axes of dominance. We attest both to the depths of colonial misrecognition and to the power of Indigenous knowledge and ways of being to shift social worlds.

Keywords

• decolonization
• education
• settler colonialism
• indigenous peoples
• ignorance
• canada
• ontario