[Indigsol] Anti-colonial Workshop: Thursday, February 5th at 7:00pm

[mattm-b at resist.ca]

Anti-colonial Workshop:
Social Position and Indigenous Issues

Thursday, February 5th at 7:00pm
Carleton University, Azraeli Theatre
Room 101

What I Learned in Class Today:
Aboriginal Issues in the Classroom
http://www.whatilearnedinclasstoday.com/

Classroom discussions of Aboriginal issues often leave students feeling
alienated and angry. Though troubling, these situations often go
unreported and unresolved, affecting students' abilities to function in
classes and in their coursework. To make these situations visible and to
find ways to have more professional and productive classroom discussions,
two undergraduate students in the First Nations Studies Program at the
University of British Columbia, Karrmen Crey and Amy Perreault, developed
What I Learned in Class Today: Aboriginal Issues in the Classroom. This
project asks students, instructors, and administrators at UBC, both
Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, to share in videotaped interviews their
most memorable classroom experiences where the discussion of Aboriginal
issues became difficult, and to share their reflections on the dynamics
underpinning these situations.

Social Position Module

As a facilitator, it is crucial to understand who you are and what your
social location is, and how your social location is perceived by others.
Acknowledging your social position defines the parameters of your
experience and the specificity of your position in a discussion.
Clarifying social positions can help many conflicts that happen in
discussions of politically and culturally sensitive material. When you
state your social position, you define the scope of your ability and
authority to speak to certain social, cultural, and historical experiences
for students and others. It can assist to minimize conflicts that are
based on assumptions of authority or expertise in relation to the subject
matter being discussed. By acknowledging your social position, you model a
way of entering into discussions of politically and culturally sensitive
material for others, who may feel that they do not have a right to speak,
or that they don't have anything to contribute to such a discussion.

What I Learned in Class Today –Background

Karrmen Crey and Amy Perreault are graduates of the First Nations Studies
Program (FNSP) at the University of British Columbia. FNSP is an
interdisciplinary program, which means that in addition to FNSP's core
courses, students take courses from many different departments and
programs within the Faculty of Arts and across the university. One day in
a senior FNSP class, a group of us sat around and compared ignorant and
racist comments that had been made by students about Aboriginal content in
our other classes. For most of us who were there, these situations were
familiar, even typical, and by telling each other about them, we were
doing something we'd done many times before: trade stories and then laugh
at how ridiculous they were as a way for us to deal with the pain that
they caused.

In this particular class meeting, someone suggested that we should record
our stories, pointing out that our experiences were identifying serious
issues around the level of discussion of Aboriginal content in classrooms
at UBC. While we may have been laughing about ignorant and racist comments
when we told them to each other, at the time we experienced them, these
comments were alienating, and in some cases, traumatic enough to prevent
us from being able to attend class or do our coursework. We discussed
creating a public record of these experiences in the form of videotaped
interviews would make these situations visible, and help identify the
dynamics underpinning them. These records could also form the basis of
discussions about how to best address these situations across
postsecondary institutional levels.

More About Social Position Module

Students have discussed being in a Aboriginal-focused class where the
instructor, a non-Aboriginal man, did not discuss how he entered his field
of study, and how his background informed his research, his curriculum,
and how he teaches Aboriginal content as a non-Aboriginal person. By not
stating his position in relation to his field of study or the course
content, students looked to him as an "expert" on Aboriginal subject
matter and did not question his authority to speak freely about Aboriginal
issues. He would frequently be asked to speak about specific Aboriginal
cultures and histories that he did not have the experience or knowledge to
answer. In order to respond to students' inquiries, he would call on
Aboriginal students in the class to answer those questions, not
recognizing that their own social positions did not necessarily qualify
them to respond; in fact, because he did not perceive or respect the
specificity of those students' social positions, he created an alienating
classroom environment for students.

By contrast, other students discussed an instructor teaching a course with
an Aboriginal focus who consistently discussed her social position in
relation to the course curriculum in terms of how she approached readings
and interpretations of the material, and what limitations her social
position placed on her engagement. By acknowledging her social position,
she took responsibility for her perspective of Aboriginal issues, and
modeled for students a way of engage with the course material in a way
that encouraged critical and in-depth discussions. For example, she would
discuss experiencing "white guilt" when she began learning about the
history of colonization in Canada and it's impact on Aboriginal peoples.
However, her critical self-awareness about her social position allowed her
to interrogate what "white guilt" is and how it functions. She would
question who benefits from white guilt, and would ask ironically if
Aboriginal people benefit from white guilt, or if white guilt only serves
the person feeling it. She would note that while experiencing white guilt
is a common reaction to learning about the history of Aboriginal people,
it is a limit to a person's ability to engage with the issues in a
meaningful way that does justice to the material being discussed. In this
way, she created an environment where students could move beyond the
limits of white guilt in order to engage with the course content with the
critical attention that it deserves.

In 5,44, this student discusses an incident where she was challenged by
another Aboriginal student about her authority to speak about
discrimination towards Aboriginal people because of the privilege she
experiences as a result of having whiter skin. In this situation, a
contributing factor to the conflict between herself and another Aboriginal
student was predicated on how he perceived her social position based on
the social realities of privilege that comes with having lighter skin.
This is not to say that she has not experienced discrimination in her
life, or that she is in a position to speak to a certain Aboriginal
reality. However, it is crucial to acknowledge the ways in which color
functions socially and it's relationship to a person's social position,
and one way that it functions acutely is in a person's experience of
discrimination. In this situation, the discussion around Aboriginal issues
was shut down because the discussion had not been initiated with an
acknowledgement of a person's skin color and how that affects his or her
social position. This situation illustrates how important it is for
instructors to articulate the significance of social positions when
discussing culturally sensitive material, since the ways that instructors
and students engage with course material - and with each other - is based
on the specificity of their social realities.



-- 
"All oppression is relative.
All oppression is specific."

- Albert Memmi