Constrained and Contested: Nova Scotia Teachers’ Experiences of Teaching Mi’kmaw Studies 11
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Date
2024-11
Authors
Legge, Susan
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
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Publisher
Mount Saint Vincent University
Abstract
The Truth and Reconciliation Report’s 94 Calls to Action requested that Canadian schools create mandatory, age-appropriate curriculum “on residential schools, Treaties, and Aboriginal peoples’ historical and contemporary contributions to Canada” (TRC, 2015, p. 7), with the outcome to be the “building [of] student capacity for intercultural understanding, empathy, and mutual respect” (TRC Truth, 2015, p. 7). Mi’kmaw Studies 11, a course offered to grade 11 students in Nova Scotia as an option for fulfilling the Canadian history component of the high school diploma, appears well positioned to respond to these specific Calls to Action, and this project explores the course through the experiences of the teachers leading the learning.
The overarching question of this research is “What is it like to teach Mi’kmaw Studies 11, a course that is purposively created as a tool for reconciliation in a settler colonial school system, in a public high school in Nova Scotia?” The methodology for the research is transcendental phenomenology, as described by Moustakas (1994) in his Phenomenological Research Methods. Phenomenology is a study of lived experiences that explore a recollected moment through the
descriptive telling of the person whose experience is being studied.
This study reflects the lived experiences of six teachers of Mi’kmaw Studies 11. They spoke about course material, pedagogical choices, students, the support (or lack thereof) from administrators, centres for education and the community, and the concepts and actions that come into play when one is teaching about a living culture from (mostly) the outside. Listening to the lived experiences of the six teachers is an opportunity for all the stakeholders involved with education working toward reconciliation to consider what is happening in those classrooms.