Enseignement

M19 - Workshop on Teaching the Everyday: Decolonization and Community Practice

Date: Jun 14 | Heure: 01:45pm to 03:15pm | Salle: 680 Sherbrooke St. West 1055

Centering Everyday Experiences through Photovoice in the Classroom and Beyond: Fiona MacDonald (UNBC), Vanda Fleury (UNBC)
Abstract: Photovoice is a powerful mechanism to centre the politics of everyday experiences in the classroom and community. In general, photovoice methodology describes a structured process using images to identify and analyze salient issues from standpoints often unheard and/or underrepresented in dominant narratives. This paper highlights the benefits of incorporating photovoice methodology in community-centered teaching and learning practices and showcases a particular example of this approach centred on Indigenous patient safety and health justice. As this example reveals, privileging experiential knowledge through story medicine via photovoice contributes to challenging Canada’s colonial narratives that typically ignore or devalue Indigenous women’s life experiences. Ultimately, this work challenges the medicalization of childbirth and reimagines health and wellness in an active present through community engagement and expertise.

Indigenizing Canadian Politics and decolonizing teaching through share sharing of my settler lived settler experience: Do these goals conflict in practice?: Julie Simmons (University of Guelph)
Abstract: This paper/panel participation is intended for the Teaching the Everyday workshop. I would like to share the way in which I have experienced teaching a Canadian Politics survey course, through the lens of Indigenous peoples, (as part of my university's commitment to Indigenization) despite my identity as a settler who lived among but apart from the Cowichan Tribes members on Vancouver Island for the first 22 years of my life. I work to reconcile my lived experience of privilege apart from the members of the Cowichan Tribes (living eight houses from the reserve boundary) all the while embedded among the members of these tribes (sharing friends, school, and our experience learning the language of Hul'q'umi'num, and living on their unseeded territory) through the decolonizing practices, content and perspectives I share in the classroom. These practices, the challenges, and what I have learned and continue to learn through this process would form the content of my contribution as a panelist. Teaching Canadian Politics is part of every department, and there are practical steps I have taken to "cover" traditional content, but in a way that is centred on Indigenous lived experiences. But aside from changing the orientation through which I expose student to content, I have also consciously adopted an Indigenous world view of the interconnectedness of the physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual, in my non-hierarchical interactions with students and in my willingness to expose to students my own vulnerabilities as a bereaved parent.

Diversifying the Discipline: Establishing a Baseline to Support the Evolution of Inclusive Syllabi Development in Political Scien: Griselda Asamoah-Gyadu (McMaster University), Beyza Hatun Kiziltepe (McMaster University), Szu-Yun Hsu (McMaster University)
Abstract: Diversifying course syllabi has been identified as one of the key initiatives to anti-racism and decolonizing higher education (Sawer and Curtin 2016; Andrews 2020). Several universities in Canada and abroad have highlighted syllabus redesign as a key component of diversifying the academy, and have carried out plans to promote more diverse and inclusive curricula. Over the last year, and in line with the conversations occurring across many similar departments in Canada, the Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Decolonization Committee in the Department of Political Science at McMaster University has been advancing an initiative to better understand the content of our courses through the lens of equity, diversity, and inclusion. With the support of a strategic grant from the university provost, our team of faculty members and graduate students have collected all undergraduate and graduate course outlines in our department for the 2021-2022 academic year, and well as PhD comprehensive exam reading lists. In this paper, we discuss the development of our methodology to code and account for diversity in the discipline of political science, and report on the findings of our analysis of course syllabi. We reflect on some of the challenges encountered to date in our research and in applying our methodology. As well, we discuss next steps and consider the opportunities and challenges associated with building our findings into a broader departmental conversation to facilitate change and advance more inclusive course designs.