Interrogating Eurocentric Ideologies - Colonial Conundrums and Teaching Selves
Pondering on Lessons Learned in Canada’s Indigenous Classrooms
Abstract
Through autoethnography as qualitative research methodology, this article tries to capture my teaching experiences in two distinctly different places in my travels. While it bears witness, extrapolates, and uses direct content from a section in my master's thesis, titled The Educator's body and the performance of whiteness, this article further reflects my afterward - after the defence. After the M. Ed I had some time to go to the printed scraps of notes and contemplate why my experiences in Saskatchewan, Canada brought me full circle back to my teaching experiences in the Caribbean. And while my teaching experiences in the Caribbean were in Guyana, the structure of the education system in Guyana in greater parts mirrors that of the broader Caribbean region. Hence, while this article chronicles the complexities I endured in the classroom while teaching in Saskatchewan, it also focuses on the inherent struggles springing from a need for understanding the lived contradictions of belonging in one place while simultaneously exiled from that place. It tries to explore the torment of negotiating our positionalities in white ideological, educational spaces. Entangled spaces where our teaching selves are foreign, where the terror of losing our ancestral histories and narratives haunts us, where classrooms are sites of discomfort that strangely feel like home.
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