Another Step Toward Reconciliation

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]  

First Nations language and culture programs have been added to British Columbia’s External Credentials Program (ECP). Courses and programs beyond the formal BC curriculum may be approved for credit toward graduation. To earn credit the courses and programs must meet or exceed the depth, breadth, and rigor of the Ministry authorized grade ten, eleven, and twelve courses required for graduation. For example, students who are athletes, coaches, or officials may earn credit if they meet the many conditions set out in policy. The same is true for students pursuing their interest in music by completing Conservatory of Music programs.  

The ECP gives formal recognition to the valuable learning that occurs outside of school. Such recognition helps – I hope – to inspire a lifelong desire to learn. Students engaged in programs designed to develop students’ knowledge of traditional medicine and food preparation, land-based learning, artistic development, language proficiency, and cultural practices may seek credit for the knowledge they acquire by the ECP.  

Schools in British Columbia and elsewhere in North America are deeply steeped in the knowledge and traditions that settlers brought with them. Formal recognition of First Nations language and culture programs makes it clear that the dominant ways of knowing and being are not the only ways.  ECP recognition is a complement to the recently mandated Indigenous-focused graduation requirement, another small step toward reconciliation. Four of the 80 credits required to earn the British Columbia Certificate of Graduation must include an Indigenous-focused course from the list provincially approved courses or Board approved, locally developed courses.  

There has been some (seemingly minor) opposition to the Indigenous-focused graduation requirement. There is a petition to the BC Ministry of Education opposing the Indigenous studies graduation requirement which at the time that I am writing this blog has 14 signatures. The basis of its opposition is the specious argument that “the more you force students to learn a particular subject, the more they hate it” and that by making the course mandatory it will intensify “hatred towards the indigenous community.”  

Another signatory to the petition questions how the addition of Indigenous-focused course work will benefit students. He writes “we need to stop using the school system to push political agendas” but paradoxically claims “that all the wrong doings towards Indigenous peoples in Canada’s dark colonial (very recent) past should definitely be truthfully and honestly recognized.” Both the petitioner and the signatory misunderstand one of the key purposes of becoming educated: expanding our horizons beyond the narrow confines of our own knowledge and experience.  

Both the ECP and the Indigenously focused graduation requirement are respectful of ways of being and knowing that are unfamiliar to most of us. Exposure to First Nations ways of knowing and being may help those of us who are unfamiliar with them acquire a deeper appreciation of and respect for First Nations and in the process take a small step toward reconciliation.

Reconciliation Requires Transformation

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

I am surprised at the number of Indigenous students whose families allow them to attend public schools in Canada. If I was a parent whose ancestors attended residential schools and was suffering from the inter-generational trauma that taking children from their families created, I would think twice about sending my children or grandchildren to schools established by settlers.

Most Canadians consider residential schooling as abhorrent, if not criminal. In fact, given their intent and the mistreatment of children and youth in their care, we should not call them schools. Although residential schools no longer exist, the public schools Indigenous children attend are settler institutions that do not reflect Indigenous epistemologies, language, or culture.  As recognized by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission:

Much of the current state of troubled relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians is attributable to educational institutions and what they have taught, or failed to teach, over many generations. Despite that history, or, perhaps more correctly, because of its potential, the Commission believes that education is also the key to reconciliation. (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future p. 234)

There are schools and school systems that are trying to shed the negative teachings of the past and incorporate Indigenous ways of knowing and being, but the efforts are nascent and sporadic.

Even if curricula reflecting Indigenous perspectives were widely available (which they are not), most non-Indigenous teachers do not understand Indigenous epistemologies sufficiently well to be able to adapt to new pedagogies and curricula to include them

An increasing number of schools are trying to incorporate Indigenous symbols, but I suspect that most Indigenous learners do not see themselves reflected in schools because the symbolism is not complemented by Indigenous content. My hunch is that there are Indigenous learners whose parents conceal the identities of their children because they are fearful of mistreatment.

Although the intentions are different, in rural and remote communities without a secondary school, there are students who must live away from their families and communities to attend school. I would not be comfortable sending my children away to school. But, if I did not send them, a social service agency would likely threaten to take them from me and make them Crown wards.

These are but a few of the impediments facing Indigenous learners that schools and the broader society must remove. But, unless they are removed, Indigenous parents are justified to distrust settler schools and only reluctantly allow their children to attend. Addressing the historic mistreatment of Indigenous people by settlers and the part that residential schools played in attempting to systematically eradicate Indigenous language and culture is a necessary step but one that is not sufficient.

Schools must acknowledge and value the knowledge that Indigenous children and youth bring to school. Instead of disregarding such knowledge, and in the process disparaging it, schools must use that knowledge as a foundation upon which to build. Children and youth, Indigenous and non-Indigenous are more likely to succeed when the knowledge they possess and the competencies they have are incorporated in the fabric of schools.

If Indigenous elders and knowledge-keepers were formally invited to participate in schools, they could help educate both students and the professional staff. That would be another step toward reconciliation. Land and nature play important parts in the lives of Indigenous people. Using land-based learning as the staging point for instruction rather than an extension to current approaches would recognize its value.

We need to fast-track the preparation and hiring of Indigenous teachers. Doing so won’t transform the curriculum and pedagogy but it will provide students with models of Indigenous leadership. There are examples of Indigenously focussed teacher education programs in existence for some time. While those continue, the registrars of teacher certification at the provincial level should authorize graduated certification to enable Indigenous people to combine employment with study to earn laddered certification.

The preparation of non-Indigenous teachers has improved in recent years in most faculties of education, but there is room for improvement. But improvements will remain limited until there are Indigenous faculty members who can help transform teacher preparation in more fundamental ways.

None of the suggestions I have made are new or radical. However, they are not part of the fabric of public schooling. Until they and other changes are incorporated, Indigenous parents will reluctantly allow their children to attend school, but they are unlikely to fully embrace schooling in settler institutions.

It shocks the conscience

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus of Education, The University of British Columbia

[permission granted to reproduce if authorship acknowledged]

The enduring police racism toward Black men shocks the conscience. “Shocks the conscience” is a legal judgment that a government’s agent has acted in a manner that is outside of the boundary of human decency. Such racism is systemic, by which I mean discriminatory values and practices are deeply imbedded in society’s laws and institutions, including the legal, political, economic and its education systems.

Let me illustrate another system in which racism operates in the United States, and then show how it works in Canada and show its connection to education. The forcible separation of a child from their asylum-seeking, immigrant parents in the United States was abhorrent. In a ruling requiring that children must be reunited with their families within 30 days, a judge said that the Government’s practice of separating children from their parents and failing to reunite them shocks the conscience.  

Family separation was a deliberate strategy of the U.S. government designed to deter migrants from attempting to enter the United States without authorization. The strategy provoked outrage around the world. One subtext to the outrage was that the cold-hearted policy was simply another manifestation of the contempt that the current US President has espoused toward immigrants and people of colour. A second subtext in this country was self-righteousness: “Canada would never do anything like that!”

Well, we did. Canada has systematically separated Canadian parents from their Canadian children. 

Aboriginal children were separated from their parents and sent to residential schools beginning in the last quarter of the 19^th century, a practice that continued for about 100 years but whose impact may be felt for generations to come. The education Indigenous children received in residential schools was a form of cultural genocide; Indigenous children were prevented from speaking their languages and their contact with families and communities was restricted in a conscious attempt to “take the Indian out of the Child.”  The children and grandchildren of residential school survivors have suffered from the impact of the trauma their parents experienced directly.

Just prior to the Judge’s ruling in the US family separation case, the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) issued a “statement of evidence” in which it documented the body of research showing that family separation has damaging psychological  and health consequences for children, their families and communities. According to the SRCD, the problems engendered by parent child separation do not end when parents and their children are reunited.

The research, to which the SRCD referred, dates to studies of the impact of family separation during the Second World War showing that the effects can be long-lasting – even when parents and children have been reunited.  The effects include increased risk of mental illness, poor inter-personal relations, reactivity to stress and even mortality. Both parents and children can be affected by the separation and separation can produce negative consequences across the lifespan of the children and their children’s children.

In Canada, even after the closure of most of the residential schools, removing Indigenous children from the homes of their parents and placing them in foster homes was a relatively common practice that was evident through the 1980s.  The practice was not confined to Indigenous parents and children. Children of Sons of Freedom Doukhobors and unwed mothers were also separated from their children (who were defined as ‘illegitimate’ children) and placed in foster or adoptive families.

The children and grandchildren from families that have been separated may suffer most but the entire community is affected by them as well. Schools, health, justice, and social welfare systems must address the cognitive, emotional, physical, and inter-personal effects of family separation.

The disgust we felt about the use of family separation as a method of social control signals greater empathy on our part. But we should not be so pious as to believe that it cannot happen again. The roots of such practices are built into the human calculus of the social system, suggesting that some lives are more valuable than others. Those roots must be completely removed from all systems.

Canadian public schools today are more likely to address the devastating impact of colonization on Indigenous people than in the past. But they still teach history as if the settlers are central to the stories and the Indigenous peoples are “other” and marginal to the dominant narrative. Canadian history begins with settler contact as if there was no story prior to the arrival of Europeans.

Because of their centrality in the social system and their influence on beliefs and behaviours, schools are pivotal to the elimination of racism. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has pointed the way toward reconciliation.[1] We must acknowledge the injustices done, recognize that they were part of the human calculus of the Canadian social system, commit to their elimination, and ensure that the values we profess – equality among all people – are built into our social system.

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[1] Many of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action address education, language, and culture. https://nctr.ca/reports.php.

Educational Discrimination: How far have we come?

Educational Discrimination: How far have we come?

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus of Education, The University of British Columbia

[permission granted to reproduce if authorship acknowledged]

 

Social justice has been a theme in UBC’s teacher education program for many years. The Faculty of Education has had an Indigenous Teacher Education Program for almost fifty years. The program was once called the Native Indian Teacher Education. Beginning in the late 1980s, one of the courses required of all pre-service teachers included a mandatory unit on what was referred to at the time as “Aboriginal Education.”

Cognizant that there is no simple correspondence between knowledge and behavior, one of my colleagues at UBC and I were curious to find out whether pre-service students would make discriminatory judgements about the performance of Aboriginal students. We created an experiment.[i] We asked 50 pre-service teachers to make placement decisions based on the records of 24 fictitious students. We constructed a record for each student that described each student’s prior academic performance from grade four through grade seven in language arts, mathematics, science, social studies, music and art. 

On one set of eight records, we indicated that the fictitious school board had received funding to provide Aboriginal programming for the students in that set. On a second set of records, identical to the first, we included information indicating that the school board had received funding to provide services for ESL students.  No such information was included on the third identical set, leading the pre-service teachers to infer that the students were neither of Aboriginal ancestry nor students for whom English was a second language. 

We randomized the order of presentation of all the records on a secure website to which pre-service teachers had access and invited them to volunteer for a study to examine and review the student records. 50 pre-service teachers volunteered to take part. The 50 students were enrolled in a course required of all teachers during the final term in the teacher preparation program. The first term of that program included a mandatory unit that addressed social and educational situations of females, "Aboriginal" people, persons with disabilities and persons for whom English was not a first language. 

In our on-line study the 50 pre-service teachers were told that they were taking part in a task designed to explore the kinds of decisions that beginning teachers make about the programs to which students should be assigned when they make the transition from elementary to secondary school.  The volunteers were asked to (a) review the 24 randomized fictitious student records, (b) consider the criteria for three program options (remedial, standard or advanced), and (c) use a scale from 1 to 10 [with one representing the remedial program (Supplementary Learning Assistance), five representing the standard program (Regular Grade Eight Program) and ten the advanced program (Rapid Advance Program)] to indicate their recommendation regarding the program best suited to each student.  The volunteers were encouraged to use the full range of numbers from one to ten to locate their recommendation for each student as close to the program to which they thought the student best suited. The volunteers were told to make their decision based on student marks, ignoring any other information on the record card.

Of course, if the pre-service teachers paid attention only to the prior achievement of students, students with high prior achievement should have received higher ratings and students whose achievement had been poor should have received lower ratings. However, when we compared the volunteers’ recommendations for “Aboriginal students” and “non-Aboriginal’ students, we found significant differences between some volunteers’ rating of supposedly Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students. Aboriginal students were assigned lower recommendations than their non-Aboriginal counterparts even though the fictional students in both groups had identical records of prior achievement. The decisions of some of the teachers were clearly discriminatory. Enough so that the differences in the scores assigned were significant.

We conducted our study a bit more than a dozen years ago. Since then reconciliation, de-colonization, and Indigenization have become prominent themes in education, including teacher education. One would hope that a replication of that study today would show a marked improvement in outcomes.  

Reconciliation is about creating understanding of the devastating impact of settler colonialism on Indigenous people and eliminating its continuing influence. In education, we can still see manifestations of the lingering effects of colonialism in the graduation rate gap between Indigenous learners and their non-Indigenous peers, the enrollment gap in academically challenging courses, and in higher rates of early school leaving. Lower expectations on the part of some educators and administrators can be an important contributing factor.

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[i] Riley, T. & C. Ungerleider (2008) Preservice Teachers’ Discriminatory Judgments. The Alberta Journal of Educational Research. 54(4) 378-387.