Navigating education and (un)settling local teaching in La Tuque, Québec: « Y’a des p’tites brèches […] On a encore beaucoup de barrières à faire tomber »

Abstract

Persistent evidence of systemic anti-Indigenous racism in Québec and the rest of Canada has intensified calls to implement education-as-(re)conciliation across these contexts. In response to these calls, this case study research in the resource-dependent town of La Tuque, situated on Atikamekw Nehirowisiw territory, examines Québec’s educational approaches in conjunction with local elementary and secondary teachers’ experiences and perceptions of teaching and learning in a milieu where settler-Indigenous realities and relations influence everyday encounters. Using a pluralist interpretive lens, this study draws on semi-structured interviews with twenty educational professionals. These participants describe, reflect on, and share narratives of community life as educators and members of the local community. This place-sensitive interrogation into the dynamic, context-dependent realities and relationalities of teaching reveals systemic constraints to providing critical, locally informed, and culturally responsive education. Teachers’ own education, along with curricular and teaching frameworks that structure teaching in the province, pose significant challenges to responsive teaching within the socio-cultural context. These challenges expose ongoing issues about what and how teachers are trained to teach, how they interpret and apply this learning as practicing educators in their milieu, and the willingness and ability of teachers to learn, unlearn, and shift their stance towards Indigenous Peoples. Teachers’ responses reveal that settler familiarity, ignorance, and ways of relating to Indigenous Peoples feature importantly in the local educational landscape, revealing relational obstacles and challenges, while also pointing to opportunities for meaningful intervention in pursuit of responsive and justice-driven teaching. From the situated experiences of local teachers, this research contributes to discussions on how these barriers and challenges are identified and are being met, and the growing opportunities and efforts for place-based pathways to unsettling education. My findings make clear that systemic change must be understood in relation to the context of local struggles, particularly those that exist both within settler colonial discourses and practices in education and in resistance to them. By attending to the powerful confluence of place, educational structures, and dominant relational norms under settler colonial conditions, this research reaffirms the urgent need to unsettle normative understandings of people and place, both within and beyond this local context.