Troubling Settler Education in Ontario: The Challenges of Policy, Curriculum and Teachers

Abstract

Despite growing awareness of some of the assimilative practices, dispossession, violence, poverty, and lack of health and education services facing Indigenous peoples in Canada, many Canadians remain deeply ignorant of Canada’s past and present colonial systems. Indigenous and non-Indigenous leaders have identified this ignorance as a significant barrier to building post-colonial relationships. Curricula, policy, teacher education, and the preparedness of teachers to disrupt and reduce settler ignorance among non-Indigenous students through K-12 public education in Ontario is the focus of this dissertation. I review the curricular and teacher education reforms instituted in Ontario in response to the 2015 TRC Final Report, and through 56 semi-structured interviews, speak with teachers and teacher candidates directly about their knowledge of Indigenous and colonial topics and their attitudes toward implementing reforms in their classrooms. Teacher education reform has resulted in significantly more teacher candidates graduating with at least some training in Indigenous topics. Revisions to social studies and history curricula provide the opportunity for non-Indigenous Ontario students to learn more about Indigenous peoples and their history than ever before. My research, however, reveals that they will not learn much about themselves, their settler privilege, or the benefits they enjoy as Canadians at the expense of Indigenous peoples. Nine years after the TRC Calls to Action on education, and notwithstanding the work of curriculum writers, teacher educators, and many dedicated teachers across the province, Ontario K-12 education remains a deeply colonial space underpinned by a singular Western worldview that reinforces colonial logics and settler ignorance. Many teachers and graduating teacher candidates are ill-prepared to disrupt this. A much more robust effort is needed at every level of the education system to address a lack of basic knowledge about Indigenous topics, entrenched colonial thinking, and epistemologies of ignorance underlying Ontario education so that future generations of settlers can imagine and be motivated to work toward a shared decolonial future with Indigenous peoples.