I just noticed that it’s 2 years since my first posts in this space.
I was reflecting with my partner the other night about how this project is such a good summative thing to do, bringing together all of the learning we’ve been doing throughout the program. The work is causing me to draw on many of the pieces that I learned in the first year and pushing me to fill gaps in that learning at the same time.
Throughout all of this, the Plate Spinner post keeps coming to mind, too.
This phase of the DLRCP has been really challenging in that I expected it to be easier to access the people who I would like information sharing from. Between the provincial mandates and changes around COVID19 protocols in schools and the overlap of both districts’ Spring Breaks, getting responses from teachers has been challenging. Many are dealing with the day-to-day shifts that are expected of them, on top of what are already demanding jobs. My heart goes out to them.
I’ve spent a good portion of this time reading. A friend introduced me to a paper Speaking back to Manifest Destinies: a land education-based approach to critical curriculum inquiry (2014) and the work of Dolores Calderón. This particular paper is relevant to my project in that it discusses the differences between land-based and place-based pedagogies in the context of social studies curricula, and how the current curricular materials (primarily textbooks) are worded to perpetuate settler colonial land ethics. I had (previous to reading this) thought that place-based learning as a framework would naturally take into account the land-based histories, but this is not always the case. The main readings I’ve done around place-based learning have come from Greunewald’s work, primarily Place-based education in the global age: Local diversity (2014) which is a compilation of several authors and experiences throughout the US in their work in place-based education. His work goes much deeper, though, and I was somewhat gratified to see his work mentioned in a positive light in Calerón’s article, recognizing that “pairing critical pedagogy with place-based education and promoting place-conscious education is a step in the right direction” (p.26).
The other big awareness that I’m not quite sure yet how to incorporate into the project comes from Chatterjee’s (2019) work in trying to reconcile the seemingly opposing worlds of Indigenous land rights and ongoing immigration. The model she has outlined seeks to reconcile these two opposing spaces. . .in all honesty, I will need to read this a third time. Her work is thicker into the language of critical anti-race scholarship than I am well versed in, but it has been enlightening (and made much more sense on the second read through).
While these two pieces (Calderón’s and Chatterjee’s articles) are not central to the project itself, I think that they each inform the DLRCP in different ways – both of which are particularly relevant in today’s social-justice climate. I’ll be spending a bit more time understanding the depth to which they can influence the project.
References:
Calderón, D. (2014). Speaking back to manifest destinies: A land education-based approach to critical curriculum inquiry. Environmental Education Research, 20(1), 24-36.
Chatterjee, S. (2019). Immigration, anti-racism, and Indigenous self-determination: Towards a comprehensive analysis of the contemporary settler colonial. Social Identities, 25(5), 644-661
Gruenewald, D. A., & Smith, G. A. (2014). Place-based education in the global age: Local diversity. Routledge.