Decolonizing curriculum: Student resistances to anti-oppressive pedagogy

Introduction

Indigeneity and working within Indigenous contexts is first and foremost about reciprocity and relationships. ¹ These relationships involve an acknowledgement and understanding of cultural positionalities and relations of place. ² It is important that we, as authors, ³ locate ourselves in terms of recognizing both the traditional lands on which we stand and do this work and the backgrounds informing our individual and joint perspectives. The land on which this article was written is the shared territories of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nations and the Six Nations Confederacy (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora) on Turtle Island and, more specifically, on what is now known as Oniatari:io (Ontario). As an academic with Indigenous ancestry, Sandra Styres resides on Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, a First Nations community located in Oniatari:io. As an academic of Euro-Canadian ancestry, Dawn Zinga is a several-generations-removed immigrant to the ancestral lands on which she resides. Together, we have been collaboratively engaging in teaching and research for 15 years across varying contexts.

During those 15 years, we have developed specific decolonizing and anti-oppressive pedagogies that we use within our classrooms. In this article, we outline what our pedagogies are and how they are situated within relevant research, and offer examples that illustrate how we use these pedagogies, as well as how students experience and, at times, resist them. We argue that such approaches are critical for educators, particularly those teaching controversial and provocative topics, in two important ways: (1) educators must critically engage in their own self-reflection and examine the ways they are implicated in and informed by the very things that they are asking students to critically examine and (2) educators must then use that self-examination to effectively design opportunities to get students to critically engage with the provocative and challenging course content. Drawing from multiple courses that address Indigeneity and issues concerning power and privilege, we explore the various intersections and connections related to the ways students in mainstream programmes experience and express resistances to decolonizing and anti-oppressive pedagogies. ⁴ We focus on how aspects of curriculum can at once minimize and/or trigger various resistances provoked by student and instructor positionalities.

The term ‘positionality’ is used in this article to refer to an individual’s cultural location as well as their location within shifting and interconnected networks and relations of power and privilege. These relations of power and privilege provide the conditions that can both stabilize positionality and maintain its location within social relations, and can be disrupted by individual and group choices. While cultural location is fixed in some ways, the choices that individuals make in terms of how they enact that positionality within networks of power and privilege shift how that positionality is experienced by the self and by others. Thus, it is important to consider how the positionality of the instructor, together with purposeful and mindful choices in curriculum, course content and classroom practices, may assist students to reflect on their own positionality and the ways networks and relations of power and privilege are implicated in learning and teaching.

We have mindfully referred to our approaches within the classroom as being decolonizing and anti-oppressive pedagogies for some very specific reasons. While our work fits well within anti-oppressive frameworks, anti-oppression is not our primary orientation. Potts and Brown (2015) associate anti-oppressive research with a commitment to social justice. While we recognize that our work can be identified as social justice work, social justice as a broader concept is not our primary focus. We are particularly interested in decolonization, which is the primary focus of our work within the classroom. Smith’s (1999: 20) discussion of decolonization refers to it as being a process ‘which engages with imperialism and colonialism at multiple levels. One of those levels is concerned with having a more critical understanding of the underlying assumptions, motivations, and values which inform research practices’, and we argue that it is this process which informs our work. Moosa-Mitha (2015: 65) refers to anti-oppressive theories as being distinguishable from other social theories through their focus on ‘embracing both difference-centred as well as critical claims of social justice’.

Our approach to decolonizing and anti-oppressive pedagogies within the classroom has emerged out of our 15 years of collaboration and conversations about those collaborations as co-teachers and co-authors. Echoing the concerns raised in Tuck and Yang (2012), we resist being identified as primarily anti-oppressive due to our focus on decolonization. We have also noticed the trend within education of lightly using language associated with decolonization to put a new face on social justice issues. We agree with Tuck and Yang’s contention that decolonization is distinct from other ‘human rights-based and social justice projects’ (2), and argue that our work predominantly centres on decolonization and can be loosely seen to be fitting in the broader area of anti-oppression. In this article, we are focusing on scholarship that addresses the ways our understandings of decolonization and anti-oppression are practically engaged within classroom contexts, rather than directly within the analytical research schools of decolonization and anti-oppression. As such, we seek to draw on discussions within decolonization and anti-oppressive literatures in terms of how they might be applied to the work we do within the classroom (i.e. Battiste, 2013, 2017; Donald, 2009; Louie et al., 2017; Moosa-Mitha, 2015; Potts and Brown, 2015; Smith, 1999, 2012).

Before discussing resistance and counter-resistance, it is important to discuss the normative differences between these two terms and the ways we have conceptualized them in our work. Decolonizing and anti-oppressive pedagogies are, by their very nature, resisting mainstream approaches to teaching and learning, as well as challenging taken-for-granted assumptions embedded in the status quo. Resistance implies a very particular resistance to colonial and oppressive structures, whereas counter-resistance implies resistance to learning about or being taught decolonizing and anti-oppressive pedagogy. In the classroom, these pedagogies challenge the networks and relations of power and privilege that are systemically embedded in academia. As these pedagogies are introduced into the classroom context, they automatically generate discomfort and thereby trigger counter-resistances among students. There are multiple resistances and counter-resistances woven throughout decolonizing and anti-oppressive practices. Tuck and Yang (2012: 26) write that ‘resistances by settler-participants to the aspiration of decolonization illustrate the reluctance of some settlers to engage the prospect of decolonization beyond the metaphorical or figurative level’. For clarity of discussion, it is important that we define how we will discuss these various resistances within the context of this article. For our purposes, we are defining the initial resistance as the introduction of the decolonizing and anti-oppressive pedagogies that we bring into the classroom. These pedagogies actively engage with and disrupt mainstream approaches to teaching and learning, as well as colonial relations of power and privilege. As instructors, we take responsibility for mindfully introducing resistance into the classroom. In this way, we purposefully trigger counter-resistances on the part of the students who are resisting the pedagogies we introduce as instructors. In addition, we discuss the strategies we engage in response to student counter-resistance. Another element of counter-resistance we explore relates to the interactions between our positionality as individual instructors and the students’ positionality.

Theories of resistance

We developed a decolonizing and anti-oppressive praxis that disrupts and challenges mainstream, taken-for-granted assumptions and engages resistances on multiple levels. ⁵ This praxis grounds, privileges and positions diverse knowledges within course design, delivery, classroom interactions and assignments. Decolonizing and anti-oppressive approaches focus on challenging and disrupting the status quo of mainstream education – in other words, just because something is does not mean it should be. In many ways, our introduction of decolonizing and anti-oppressive pedagogies introduces disorder to the unexamined colonial myth of ‘Canada the good’. Fanon (1963: 2) argues that ‘decolonization, which set out to change the order of the world, is clearly an agenda for total disorder’. It is important to note here that decolonization is the driving force behind our work and while much of what we do within the classroom can be understood through anti-oppressive approaches, it is the decolonizing lens that gives meaning to our work. In this section, we will focus on our understandings of anti-oppressive theories as they relate to our pedagogies and practices, with a particular focus on how decolonization shifts how we use what some may identify as anti-oppressive approaches to actively challenge and engage colonial relations in the classroom. For us, decolonizing specifically focuses on colonial relations, while anti-oppressive work does not necessarily focus on colonial relations but instead focuses on oppression more broadly.

Drawing on some of the theories of anti-oppression that grew out of the early social justice movements, as well as some of the more current collaborative and integrated anti-oppression models, has informed our understanding of how our work might be seen as anti-oppressive. Many of these integrated anti-oppression models explore the ways various – and at times disparate – people might experience oppression and marginalization. They also address how the complex nuances of those social locations may intersect at various times and in diverse ways. However, as Tuck and Yang (2012: 2) so aptly pointed out ‘[d]ecolonization is not a swappable term for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools’, indicating that, while integrated anti-oppression models speak to social justice in a broad way, they do not necessarily speak to the specific and nuanced realities associated with decolonizing praxis.

According to Alexander (2008: 4–5), there are a number of principles associated with integrated anti-oppression approaches. These principles include the following: (1) society operates within a socially constructed hierarchy of difference based on relations of power and privilege; (2) identities are complex and fluid, rather than fixed; (3) dominant cultural values and beliefs become normalized as a standard of comparison by which everyone and everything is compared; (4) networks and relations of power and privilege exercise control over and access to resources, technological advances and information; (5) even within the same marginalized group there are nuances of marginalization and oppression expressed within individual lived experiences; and (6) integrated anti-oppression approaches require that any individual engaged in this work consider the ways they are implicated in and/or affected by networks and relations of power and privilege. At their core, integrated anti-oppression approaches require that people work together while examining existing systems and combining information and values taken from the lived experiences of a range of people and contexts. Collectively, this knowledge is then used to rebuild those existing systems in ways that support everyone in sharing and benefitting from the opportunities of the revised system. Integrated anti-oppression specifically addresses ways to begin to challenge the status quo with an embedded understanding that oppression can be applied horizontally and/or vertically, and that those experiences are often very unique to specific individuals and contexts.

We draw on anti-oppressive approaches to social justice in a theoretical way by focusing on how we might assist individuals in the classroom to critically examine these networks and relations of power and privilege. In our decolonizing and anti-oppressive praxis, we also build on theoretical approaches to critical and anti-oppressive pedagogies and educational practices that challenge and examine relations of power and privilege in the classroom, drawing on the ideas of several critical theorists (see Anzaldúa, 1999; Battiste, 2013, 2017; Donald, 2009; Foucault, 1977; Freire, 1974, 2003; Giroux, 2001, 2003; Greene, 2003; Louie et al., 2017; McLaren, 2003; Moosa-Mitha, 2005; Mutua and Swadener, 2004; Potts and Brown, 2005; Shere, 2003). More specifically, we explore how these ideas explain and connect to experiences we have in the classroom when teaching about social justice issues. These experiences cover the challenges we face as we teach about social justice issues and how those challenges might operate at multiple levels, given our positionalities, and inform our actions in the classroom and the interactions and intersections with student positionalities, as well as the assumptions embedded in academic hierarchies.

We are particularly interested in the work of disrupting and unsettling colonial relations of power and privilege that inform Indigeneity and decolonization. According to Laenui (2000), decolonization is a social process involving five distinct phases that are seen to be interconnected and fluid – namely, ‘(1) rediscovery and recovery, (2) mourning, (3) dreaming, (4) commitment, and (5) action’ (152). Further, Laenui writes that ‘the phase of rediscovering one’s history, culture, language, identity, and so on is fundamental to the process of decolonization’ (153). Likewise, the decolonizing pedagogies that we introduce into our classrooms involve setting the historical context of colonial relations of power and privilege for critically understanding where we are now – in present times – in order to understand how we might move forward together in healthy and respectful relationships. As a decolonizing framework for our pedagogies, we centre and privilege Indigenous voices within the course content. This does not mean, however, as Smith (2012: 39) points out, ‘a total rejection of all theory or research or western knowledge. Rather, it is about centring our concerns and worldviews and then coming to know and understand … from our own perspective and for our own purposes’. Within classroom contexts, it is about challenging biases and taken-for-granted assumptions – a questioning of the status quo and how that status quo is both informed by and serves to inform the ideologies embedded within educational contexts.

Smith (1999, 2012) writes that research is one of the ways ideologies embedded in institutionalized imperialism and colonialism become simultaneously perpetuated, maintained and normalized within networks and relations of power. We assert that this is also true of educational spaces and the institutions that house those spaces, where embedded assumptions that define and categorize majority and minority groups are also perpetuated and reinforced through everyday interactions that fail to question the enactment of those relations of power. In adopting decolonizing and anti-oppressive praxis within educational settings, we have taken it on ourselves to open up safe spaces within classrooms where students can question, within the context of their own positionalities, the ways they are implicated in and/or affected by the societal maintenance of assumptions, biases and relations of power. We agree with Battiste’s (2013: 186) contention that: ‘In order to effect change, educators must help students understand the Eurocentric assumptions of superiority within the context of history and to recognize the continued dominance of these assumptions in all forms of contemporary knowledge’. In her later work, Battiste (2017) has extended her claims about recognizing the continued dominance of Eurocentrism to include the understanding of cognitive imperialism and the importance of each individual decolonizing his/her mind and becoming critically aware of the biases and assumptions that have been embedded through Canadian education systems.

Such questioning can only take place when students are encouraged to engage in critical reflection and dialogue. According to Freire (1974), the role of individuals is not only to be in the world, but also to engage the world through critical dialogue. In his discussion of critical consciousness, he stressed the connection to causality and the understanding of shifting contexts. Freire suggests that causality should always be examined and understood such that what may be causal at one time and in one context cannot be universally applied across other times and contexts. He also talks about the essence of dialogue and its core two elements of reflection and action. Essentially, the act of speaking is a call to action and a way of transforming the world. According to Freire (2003: 99), dialogue can be seen as the essence of education and the practice of freedom in the struggle for equity and social justice. Thus, drawing on Freire’s work, we see the engagement in critical dialogue as being an essential element in assisting students to examine their multiple contexts, positionalities, and the ways they are implicated in various systems of power and oppression. As Tuck and Yang (2012) write, the unsettling nature of decolonization unsettles everyone involved, and, specifically, they called attention to the weight of settler guilt when confronted with how they have directly and indirectly benefitted from colonization. In the classroom, this results in students confronting an uncomfortable reality, which, we argue, triggers counter-resistances on the part of the students.

It is crucial to consider networks and relations of power and privilege when engaging elements of oppression and resistance. According to Foucault (1977), individuals are at once both vehicles and recipients of relations of power, and in this way at times often recreate the very networks of social power that control and oppress. In thinking about education, Giroux (2001) argues that theories of resistance cannot be reduced to just education, as what happens in classrooms has wider social, economic and political implications. One of the main challenges he identifies when considering how to change schools is the need to think about how oppression is influenced and informed by wider institutional and societal pressures. Like individuals, educational, social, economic and political institutions also act as both vehicles and recipients of power. Giroux writes that earlier theories of resistance failed to emphasize these institutional and societal pressures on the ways educators and students were and were not able to challenge and disrupt dominant teaching practices and systemic oppression.

Thus, it is essential that those educators and researchers engaged in challenging and disrupting dominant teaching practices and systemic oppression see what McLaren (2009: 72) terms the ‘cultural terrain’ of schools and that the terrain can be engaged to promote student empowerment and transformation. We agree with McLaren when he states that ‘knowledge acquired in school is never neutral or objective but deeply rooted in a nexus of power relations’, but further argue that when applying our decolonizing and anti-oppressive praxis, we expose students to how knowledge is embedded in the nexus of power relations, and encourage them to examine the ways they are informed by and implicated in the power relations. In this way, students become responsible for challenging and examining their own counter-resistances and transformation. As Freire (1974: 40) writes, it is important to take students from their ‘points of emergence’, or, in our case, the point at which they enter the course in relation to their own positionalities, and assist them in moving towards critical consciousness. Strobel (2016: 8) would argue that these points of emergence are grounded in ‘a state of marginal consciousness which lacks the critical awareness of the forces of domination and oppression that shape attitudes, values, and behavior in the colonized’, which she refers to as the ‘colonial mentality’. It is important to understand the implications of the colonial mentality and that it should not be seen as only influencing the colonized, but also is a state that influences the mainstream, who then fail to question the status quo and their own privilege.

Critical consciousness requires an awareness of the complex and nuanced networks and relations of power and privilege that include an understanding of colonial relations embedded within them. The failure to acknowledge and engage colonial relations often leads to what Mohante (2003) describes as a tendency to see groups as homogenous and overlook the subtle nuances of lived experiences. Bell et al. (2003: 466) address the complexities of lived experiences and variations in oppression in their contention that no one person can embody or experience the totality of oppression directed towards a group, nor can group oppression capture the ‘finer shadings’ offered by individual lived experiences. Lawrence and Dua (2011) state that international critical race and post-colonial theory fails in five key areas. The two that are important to our discussion are the tendency for native existence to be erased through theories of race and racism that exclude them and that decolonization politics are equated with anti-racist politics. They further argue that anti-racist theories are often grounded in Eurocentric thought, which erases the Indigenous context.

According to Styres (2017), colonization is the subjugation of and control over a people, their lands, resources and governance, thereby drawing those who are colonized into complex social, economic and political relationships with the colonizers. She writes that decolonizing is the active process of decolonization and further, by their very nature, decolonizing discourses serve to erase the complex nuanced stories and lived experiences of a people by continuously centring discourses and relations of power on the colonizers. Lawrence and Dua (2001) have issued a call for anti-racist theorists to take decolonization seriously, arguing that if they are progressive, they must begin to think about their personal stake in this struggle and situate themselves within the struggle for sovereignty and self-determination. This echoes Wilmer’s (1993: 5) contention that ‘the denial of Indigenous Peoples’ self-determination represents the unfinished business of decolonization’. ⁶ Smith (2012) expands on this theme when she writes about spaces of marginalization and spaces of resistance. Specifically, she writes that ‘the past, our stories local and global, the present, our communities, cultures, language and social practices – all may be spaces of marginalization but they have also become spaces of resistance and hope’ (4). Smith then goes on to describe how Indigenous academics within these spaces have begun to address social issues within a broader framework of ‘self-determination, decolonization, and social justice’ (4), which has important implications for our praxis. We argue that without this decolonizing lens, students cannot fully engage anti-oppressive approaches or critical consciousness. It is essential that students are able to use a decolonizing lens to work through important questions, such as in what ways can understandings related to Indigeneity frame and inform anti-oppressive and decolonizing approaches and, furthermore, why is it important in a Canadian context to centre Indigeneity? Our decolonizing and anti-oppressive praxis is an essential element, creating conditions in which students can engage these important questions.

Battiste (2013: 190) argues that ‘for educators, Aboriginal or not, it is not enough to rebel against injustices unless we also rebel against our own lack of imagination and caring’. When thinking about our work, we see anti-oppression as the broader social justice area within which our classroom practices can be situated and decolonization as the focal point that brings purpose and direction to our work. If we solely relied on anti-oppressive approaches, then we could fall into what Tuck and Yang (2012: 2) cautioned is a subsumed focus on the broader aspects of ‘civil and human rights-based social justice projects’. While anti-oppressive pedagogies seek to recognize and examine the oppression that exists within society, and to mitigate its effects and equalize power imbalances, we are more interested in colonial relations and how examining those relations confronts biases and taken-for-granted assumptions and stereotypes, as well as our own implications in those relations. Our pedagogies and classroom practices focus on actively and critically engaging colonialism on many levels, including the relations of power and privilege embedded in institutional structures, spaces and curricula. The core principles in our decolonizing and anti-oppressive praxis encourage instructors to create ethical spaces where assumptions can be explored and challenged, having implications for transformative practices.

Context: an ethic of space

Our use of praxis also involves the mindful creation of ethical space. Zinga et al. (2009) write that Ermine’s conceptualization of ethical space centres on the idea that ethical space is automatically created when two opposing world views are positioned to engage one another and opens up possibilities where the two world views intersect and clash with one another, and is ‘triggered by dialogue [that] sets the parameters for an agreement to interact modeled on ethical and honorable principles’ (Ermine, 2005: 2). This ethical space, while opening possibilities for a decolonizing space, is not necessarily an anti-oppressive space, as each individual engaged in the space brings into it their own positionalities and lived experiences. Each individual’s totality of being is brought into the space, but the individual chooses how much of their being they are willing to share and engage with in that space. Thus, the space may not be anti-oppressive, as individuals bring in and often recreate oppressive relations and practices. Furthermore, even within ethical space, decolonization is not to be assumed, as it remains a choice. Individuals engaged in ethical space choose their level of engagement and, while they may choose to confront and resist colonizing forces, they may also choose to perpetuate colonial agendas. When applying ethical space within classroom contexts and student engagement, it is important to be mindful that power relations continue to operate. While Ermine (2005) theorizes that ethical space eliminates power relations, in our experience this is not the case, as ethical space often actively engages relations of power and privilege. However, it does open up the possibility for individuals within the space to actively engage and deconstruct those relations if they choose to do so. As Styres (2017) states, there can never be a complete absence of power, as even resistance is an enactment of power. Zinga (forthcoming) has extended ethical space into classroom interactions and pedagogical practices, and argues that the act of teaching results in the creation of ethical space on a regular basis within classroom interactions. She stresses that it is important to consider not that the ethical space is created, but rather how it is engaged within classrooms.

In this context, we are referring to an ethic of space in that we are focusing on the pedagogical choices we make in relation to the ways we engage the ethics of the space both as individuals and instructors, rather than on the creation of ethical space itself. It is the principles and values framing our engagement of the space that make our approach pedagogically distinctive. Given our approach to teaching, the students in our courses enter into ethical space where they are continually challenged to negotiate their level of engagement. Our framing of the space opens up possibilities for the students to critically immerse themselves and experience the ethic of space through engagement with course content. In this way, students begin to move towards critical consciousness.

Given that we are asking students to engage in what is at times challenging and provocative course material, it is essential that the ethical space supports students in finding their own ways to engage and navigate the content. Students often face ‘truths’ that may be unexpected. As stated by Greene (2009: 86), ‘the idea of an officially defined “world” splitting open when a repressed truth is revealed holds all sorts of implications for those who see reality as opaque, bland, and burnished, resistant both to protest and to change’. Thus, instructors and students need to be situated in a space that opens up possibilities for resistance and transformation. In our classrooms, we create spaces where students can explore risky and tough questions that are triggered when they experience unexpected ‘truths’ and, in this way, can take up those truths and related taken-for-granted assumptions in order to disrupt and challenge the status quo.

Many of the issues discussed below arose out of our conversations concerning experiences that we had when teaching the courses. As stated earlier, one of us is an instructor with Indigenous ancestry and the other is a several-generations-removed immigrant. These identities frame our positionalities as instructors and the perspectives that each of us brings into the course. The students perceive our identities in important ways that trigger different counter-resistances and connections to our pedagogical approaches and course content.

We have mindfully chosen not to use racialized constructions of the self when referring to ourselves as instructors. Unlike James (2001), who writes about how students’ understandings and experiences of blackness are activated the moment he steps into a classroom, students may perceive both of us as mainstream instructors when we enter the classroom, even though that construct does not speak to our nuanced and complex realities, and is reductionistic. We use the terms ‘dominant’ and ‘mainstream’ when referring to Dawn, as she is continuously socialized as an individual who is recognized within Canadian society and its institutions as belonging to the dominant group, and who found much of her lived experiences reflected in mainstream schools and curriculum, even though her blue-collar background was not always affirmed in those places. Regardless of her own understandings of her identity, Dawn consciously and at times unconsciously brings with her into the classroom relationships of power, and that is rarely, if ever, challenged by students. In contrast, Sandra is often initially perceived by students in the same way, until she discloses her positionality, which includes acknowledging her Indigenous ancestry and connections to traditional territories, at which point students’ prior experiences informing their understandings of Indigeneity are activated. Students, in response to this activation, shift Sandra out of their previous associations into marginalized and racialized constructions of identity and positional.

Other instructors who have taught challenging and provocative course material that addresses relations of power and privilege have also reported similar experiences with students. James (2001) and Bell et al. (2003) are primarily focused on issues of racialization in teacher–student interactions, and therefore use terms such as ‘black’ and ‘white’ to deconstruct those experiences. James (2001) spoke about his experiences with dominantly positioned students as a black instructor. Bell et al. (2003) wrote a chapter that explores teacher and student interactions between minoritized and dominantly positioned individuals. They writes about the ways an instructor from a minoritized group and a white instructor will be perceived differently by minority and white students. Bell et al. specifically note that students may challenge the minoritized instructor in several ways, including challenging the instructor’s authority or perceiving that authority to be less than that of a mainstream instructor, as well as questioning or rejecting the legitimacy of the instructional content and potentially asserting that the instructor is pushing their own agenda.

Drawing on our understanding of our own positionalities and our previous experiences, we have come to expect particular patterns of counter-resistance and connection with students. For example, when we position students to engage anti-colonial and anti-oppressive critical thought, Sandra has come to expect more counter-resistance from dominantly positioned students. On the other hand, Dawn has concerns that minoritized students may challenge her ability to represent minoritized lived experiences or feel at risk during the engagement, due to what the dominantly positioned students may bring into that engagement. Whereas the counter-resistance experienced by Sandra is related to the entitlement embedded in relations of power and privilege of the dominantly positioned students, this is not the case for Dawn, who enters the classroom embedded in those relations of power and privilege, and is less likely to be challenged by any of the students. This is particularly true of the minoritized students, who will rarely openly challenge the dominant teacher and her ability to represent minoritized experiences back to them. It has become normalized within networks and relations of power to represent back to minoritized peoples a particular version of the ‘truth’ of their own lived experiences. Conversely, even though Sandra enters the classroom with a certain kind of power and privilege due to her credentials as a professor, she does not come into the classroom with the same power, privilege and entitlement as the dominant students hold because, as Styres (2017) says, you can have power without privilege but dominant privilege always comes with power.

Pedagogies of resistance

There are tensions and challenges associated with attempting to articulate the nuances of navigating relationships of power and privilege, particularly in classrooms. In developing our course curriculum, we are always mindful of these tensions and challenges, and their relationships to the resistances we introduce into the classroom. These challenges and tensions are embedded in networks and relations of power and privilege that are activated in different ways for each of us as instructors, and we take these into account in mindful and purposeful ways as we develop the course content and related pedagogical approaches. The choices that we make in the development and delivery of courses are intimately connected to our decolonizing and anti-oppressive praxis, and have resulted in pedagogies of resistance. We refer to pedagogies of resistance because, as stated earlier, the initial resistance is associated with pedagogies that we actively and mindfully bring into the classroom. In other words, our mindful choice of pedagogies is itself a resistance, particularly in the ways we get students to critically engage with the course content and associated ideas. These pedagogies challenge taken-for-granted assumptions and biases, as well as the ways students are implicated in and/or affected by relations of power and privilege. Our pedagogies of resistance provide the framework for students to experience what Greene (2009: 86) talks about as ‘an officially defined “world” splitting open’ and expose students to what we refer to as the plurality of unexpected truths.

The courses that we have both taught offer interesting examples of how this has been enacted in the classroom, and the related patterns of student engagement and counter-resistance. While these courses were taught independently, we had extensive conversations on their development, content and delivery. The courses were initially taught by Dawn, then subsequently by Sandra, and then taught by Dawn again. The first course, which we will refer to as the Racism course, provides students with a foundational understanding of racism and constructions of race as they apply to the Canadian context. The other course, which we will refer to as the Indigenous Context course, offers students an introductory understanding of the lived experiences of Indigenous children and youth in their communities.

It is important to note that, in the initial development of the courses, we worked very closely together. Having co-developed and co-taught a number of courses (see Zinga and Styres, 2011), it has become second nature for us to collaborate on course development and, in the case of the Indigenous Context course, the collaboration was particularly important. The courses remained remarkably similar, with some minor changes to update course readings and some pedagogical advances that we incorporated across offerings and instructors. We used the decolonizing and anti-oppressive praxis that we developed together during our co-teaching and further developed through our individual and joint experiences with these courses.

Decolonizing and anti-oppressive approaches push both instructors and students to confront their own positionalities and taken-for-granted assumptions, while offering up opportunities to resist colonial approaches to thinking about and doing education. It is critical for instructors to mindfully choose what ways to introduce pedagogies across various parts of the courses, as those pedagogies can position students to take up the plurality of unexpected truths in order to disrupt and challenge the status quo. The pedagogies that we chose to embed in the two courses reflected our own understandings of how to position students to do this work while students individually retained the choice to take up and engage that work. Our work as instructors is to create aspects of curriculum that can at once minimize, trigger and/or provoke various aspects of counter-resistances within the students.

This work is not easily accomplished, as instructors who choose to engage in this work are often teaching challenging and provocative course content that frequently has at its core key elements related to social justice issues. Bell et al. (2003) write about the challenges facing educators who are addressing social justice issues in classrooms, stressing how challenging it is for instructors at both the personal and intellectual level. One of the challenges for instructors is the need to bring their own social and cultural identities into classrooms and then manage the challenging and provocative course material. Another challenge that instructors face is confronting their own biases and assumptions. This includes being prepared to confront those biases, assumptions and prejudices that are both known and may be uncovered unexpectedly. Bell et al. (2003) also write about the ways instructors must face the risk of being labelled as racist, sexist or a number of other terms, as well as being challenged or corrected in the classroom. While simultaneously managing student counter-resistance and tensions in the classroom, instructors must also be aware of their own triggers and operate at multiple levels while monitoring the ‘process in the moment’ (Bell et al., 2003: 469). We note that, in addition to the challenges identified by Bell et al., addressing authority issues is another challenge, as we are consciously challenging traditional classroom and institutional hierarchal structures by acting more as facilitators than what is often known as the ‘sage on the stage’, and yet must also at times assert authority and engage particular relations of power in order to challenge the structures and entitlements embedded in networks and relations of power and privilege.

This raises the question of in what ways all of these challenges take shape in the classroom. Students who were enrolled in our courses experienced a lecture-light and heavily reflective approach to the course material. While there are differences in our approaches, given our positionalities and personalities, we share a common approach to setting up the course experience. Sharing that approach here will provide some insights into how we mindfully and purposefully introduce and provoke counter-resistances while actively shifting the responsibility for choosing how to address the counter-resistances to the individual student. For example, we introduce challenging topics and issues but have the students explore them through readings that they then discuss in small reading groups prior to any instructor-led discussion on the topic and related issues. This provides students with the space to critically engage with their thoughts and perspectives, as well as those of their peers, in their small reading groups. After opening the class session, we both start our classes in this way, so that the students come to class knowing they will have this period of critical reflection and engagement with peers before any large group discussion of the content. Prior to attending each class, students are required to post a critical reflection on one of the week’s readings, and they are provided with a series of questions that help guide critical thinking by prompting them to consider their own positionality, state of knowledge, taken-for-granted assumptions, and intellectual and affective responses. Thus, students are pushed to think about how they are thinking and learning, thereby engaging in metacognition. It is important to note that the grading of the reading reflections is based on the depth of reflection that the student engages in and not the content of that reflection. Students are provided with a grading rubric that explains how they have demonstrated their level of critical reflection and engagement with the reading. For example, while the readings are chosen to expose students to decolonizing content and provocative material, the students can take very different perspectives on the readings. They are not graded on their interpretation of the reading, but rather on how they connect the issues raised in the readings with their own lived experiences and prior knowledge, and the ways they are implicated in and/or affected by the topics at hand. Engaging the affective components helps students analyse their emotional responses to materials and then deconstruct why they are feeling that way, which adds another dimension to the metacognitive learning. In responding to the experience of reading reflections, students have said the following:

I am finding that these reflections are growing to be more and more personal as I learn to engage with the material in more meaningful ways. So thank you for the opportunity for self-reflection.

We take a similar approach in our design of assignments for the students, such that in all elements of the course students are challenged to engage metacognitively and affectively with the course materials. This dovetailing of assignments with the overall approach to the course and in-class activities creates a learning environment that scaffolds students through increasingly deeper critical reflection and engagement, facilitating students’ ability to articulate their learning journey throughout the course and what they are taking away from that experience. While the following paragraphs will provide some practical examples about what this might look like in classrooms, it is important to note that educators who wish to implement these practices must do so on a very individual basis. In other words, every educator and learner comes into the learning environment as a socioculturally located individual and, as such, the implementation must be context-specific. Before engaging in this work in their own classrooms, educators must deliberately challenge their own taken-for-granted assumptions and biases concerning the issues associated with their course content.

One of the broad types of assignment that we have both used in the classroom is what we refer to as a ‘challenge assignment’. A challenge assignment provides students with the opportunity to work together with other colleagues independently of the instructor. This scaffolds students to engage in critical thinking and consensus-building by taking initiatives and making decisions, such as how to organize their collective responses to the challenge assignment and assigning each other roles and responsibilities. The assignment is also designed to engage peer-to-peer learning and feedback. The challenge assignments that we have used always engage students at multiple levels of analysis. For example, one challenge assignment provides a group of students with controversial topics, which they research and then present a report or design a unit/lesson plan on that integrates their findings with the group’s collective response to the topic. Other challenge assignments have used a similar approach but focus on students analysing various forms of media (e.g. films or novels) to identify the themes, controversies, grand narratives, texts and subtexts present in the media and make connections to course content. The challenge assignments vary in their complexity and the depth to which students are engaged in the issues to be explored in the assignment. We create some challenge assignments in two parts to manage the depth and complexity, and to guide the students towards deeper critical reflection. For example, in one assignment, the first part had students analyse a film independently, while the second part had them work on additional analysis of the film collectively in small groups.

The students respond to these challenge assignments in a variety of ways, some of which are triggered consciously through our design of the assignment. In creating challenge assignments and openly naming them to the students as such, we are able to redirect some of their counter-resistance to the actual structure of the assignment rather than to the controversial nature of the subject matter. For example, if we were to introduce the subject matter as instructors in a lecture format that implies how they should think about the topic and why it should be important to them, it would immediately trigger counter-resistance. In the challenge assignment, students explore the controversial subject on their own without input from the instructor, which we have found makes them more open to exploring the subject matter without first moving directly into counter-resistance. This is made possible by our triggering of counter-resistance to the structure of the assignment, which redirects the focus of the counter-resistance from the provocative topic to the assignment structure. The students are more focused on their discomfort around not having direction from the instructor beyond the very basic assignment-guide instructions, making them more likely to openly and fully explore the topic. In the final stage of the assignment when they present to other students, they become more aware of their own counter-resistance and the counter-resistances of the other students, as they must predict and navigate these counter-resistances in the development of their presentation for their peers. In becoming teachers of the topic, they are more aware of their own assumptions and biases, and, in the case of student teachers, the way they themselves might bring this topic into various classroom contexts. Students have commented on the challenge assignments in the following ways:

As I truly began to understand, it is crucial that students be able to relate the content they are studying to their own personal experiences and thoughts in order for it to be internalized more powerfully. It is these moments that mark a student, that are truly exceptional.

We have noticed several patterns in how students respond to our approach to reading reflections. One of the most common patterns exhibited by students is the tendency for them to start off the course focused on their grade on the reflections and frequently speaking to us about how they might improve. In these cases, they are not yet open to examining their own counter-resistances, but remain more focused on the mechanics of how to give the instructor what he or she wants to achieve the coveted ‘A’ grade. Students frequently become frustrated with our response that there is nothing other than deep critical reflection that we are looking for in the reflection, and with our refusal to provide an example of the ‘A’ reflection. We stress to them that it is the depth of the reflection, and that such reflections are often personal explorations of the reader’s own thoughts and assumptions and, as such, can look markedly different from student to student. However, through the continued feedback, students frequently shift away from their focus on the mechanics to pushing aside their counter-resistance in order to more openly explore the topics and, at times, recognize and actively engage their own counter-resistance in their reflections. While this tends to be the pattern most students follow according to their own timeline of engagement, as students will vary as to when they shift their focus from the mechanics, there are some who exhibit different patterns. These other patterns include never shifting away from the mechanics of the reflections; shifting only when a topic or issue has connected with their own personal experiences or prior knowledge (or lack thereof); remaining entrenched in counter-resistance associated with colonial structures and practices; and, finally, showing some shifting only to repudiate everything towards the end of the course. As students bring these varied patterns and timelines into the classroom discussions, the facilitation of these discussions requires the instructor to have already done their own deep personal work so they can be present in the classroom and manage the counter-resistances effectively.

Clearly, students respond to these assignments and to the courses as a whole in varied and interesting ways. They engage the resistances that we purposefully introduce into the classroom through assignments and other course materials that open opportunities for them to examine their own counter-resistances. What we have implemented is unlikely to be the perfect fit for other contexts, as it is very specific to our own engagement with decolonization and anti-oppression. We have shared the lessons learned and the counter-resistances expressed by the students so that others may draw from these experiences. As we have written previously (Zinga and Styres, 2011), educators often seek prescribed or universal tools that can be implemented across diverse educational contexts. Universal approaches are not effective within decolonizing and anti-oppressive work due to the deeply personal work that must be done on the part of both the educator and the student. What we have done is provide some examples of how such work can be done and how the counter-resistances of the students were engaged, so that educators can begin to see how they might attempt such work themselves. While we have many quotes from students on their learning and responses to our decolonizing and anti-oppressive pedagogies, the quote below from one of our students really captures the essence expressed in multiple student responses to completing one or more of the courses:

Of all the courses I have taken at university, yours has challenged me the most, and I think because of that challenge, has been the most rewarding. I was overly concerned with grades and expressed anxiety over the likelihood of getting a 50–70% on my first assignment. I was so concerned with the end product I did not see that this 50–70% was an encouragement for us to look deeper and improve; it was merely a starting point for our learning journey. It is this developing ability to recognize my inherent settler privilege and challenge my unconscious use of it that I am taking away from this course, with great thanks. My assumptions have been the biggest hurdle I have tackled in this class. But really what I am trying to say is thank you for starting us on this journey.

Resistance and counter-resistance: relations of power and privilege

Students experience and express counter-resistances to our decolonizing and anti-oppressive pedagogies that may often be very contextualized and complicated, but we will discuss some shared response patterns that we anticipate as we implement our approaches to teaching and learning. Confronting counter-resistances that are triggered by such approaches fosters deeply thoughtful critical thinking and engagement within classrooms, while exposing students to various ways of knowing across diverse educational contexts. bell hooks (2009) writes, within a very particular context, about the resistances that she experienced when using alternative pedagogy in her classroom to disrupt and invert hierarchal structures. When she decentred the voices of the privileged students, she found that some of the students of colour resisted engaging in the space created for everybody. Their resistance seemed to be connected to fears that engaging in these new ways might alienate them from their familiar social relations. While hooks has labelled the students’ responses as resistance, we would argue that those responses are, in fact, forms of counter-resistances that were triggered by the resistance (alternative pedagogy) that she introduced into the classroom.

Similarly, McLaren (2009) explores resistance on multiple levels, from students who may not want to engage, as well as from teachers who have come into the learning environment with their own positionalities and associated issues, and teachers who may not be willing to engage content from a critical perspective. According to McLaren: ‘Teachers can do no better than to create agendas of possibility in their classrooms. Critical pedagogy does not guarantee that resistance will not take place. But it does provide the foundations for understanding resistance’ (80).

While McLaren conceptualizes resistance as occurring on multiple but distinct levels, and hooks considers resistance within the specific contexts related to minoritized socio-economic class differences, we conceptualize and engage resistances in some similar but distinct ways. For us, while we are always aware of the plurality of resistance, there may occasionally be a discussion of or engagement with a particular resistance, but even that singular incident exists within a complex and nuanced web of resistances. This is in keeping with McLaren’s implied plurality of resistance, but differs, as he fails to address the various shades of resistances within the resistance. Furthermore, unlike McLaren and hooks, we also deeply engage with the idea of counter-resistance within learning contexts. We are aware that, historically, the term ‘counter-resistance’ is a Freudian term used to describe resistance by a therapist to the patient’s resistance of psychotherapy processes, and has since been used in multiple ways and contexts, including education. We use the concept of counter-resistance in very specific ways. As instructors, we introduce resistance into the classroom, and the students’ responses to that initial resistance are a form of counter-resistance. It is also important to note that networks and relations of power and privilege are critical elements in the complex and nuanced web of resistances and counter-resistances occurring within the classroom.

Resistances and counter-resistances are complicated and messy. Often, the resistances that we introduce into the classroom are challenging existing networks and relations of power and privilege that are implicated in teaching and learning. When students engage in counter-resistance to what we have introduced, the networks and relations of power and privilege that are being resisted by us as instructors often form a key part of the counter-resistance. Students experience their ‘“world” splitting open’ (Greene, 2009: 86) when the status quo is resisted and frequently respond by trying to reinstate the status quo so that they do not have to critically engage in deconstructing their counter-resistance. This can take the form of biased statements and taken-for-granted assumptions that are introduced by students and that the instructors must challenge or address. Battiste (2017) talks about how students have been ‘marinated in eurocentrism’ and often have difficulty thinking past the assumptions and biases which they have learned through that process. Louie et al. (2017) have also shared various strategies that they have used to disrupt the power dynamics in the classroom and encourage students to engage in challenging content as a decolonizing approach to education. There is often unwillingness on the part of students to critically engage, as they are frantically trying to reinstate the illusion of the meritocracy, which provides them with a level of comfort not found in critical reflection. We also frequently experience students pushing for definitive answers or trying to push us as instructors back into a more traditional hierarchical role, wherein the students can use their training in giving the professor what she wants. One of the ways we address these counter-resistances is by exposing students to material such as the residential school apology and other speeches by Prime Minister Harper, so that they can see the discrepancies and analyse tone and content for themselves. Another example was an in-class activity that had students examine the controversy occurring in the Niagara community around the push to rename the Thorold Blackhawks due to the use of offensive imagery and the appropriation of Indigenous history. Students who reached a level of critical consciousness and wanted to engage in action were informed of the various ways (Facebook, letters to the city council, attending city council meetings) that they could become involved outside of the classroom, and several students did engage in this way. Both of these examples used proximal distance as a technique to assist students in engaging in challenging topics from some distance and make it more difficult for students to cling to their counter-resistances. Another classroom technique that we use extensively is how we use questions to address counter-resistances. We tend to use questions in two primary ways: either by turning questions that students direct to us as instructors back to the student (i.e. ‘Well, what do you think it means?’) or by asking questions that push them deeper in their critical reflection (i.e. ‘I can see by your reading reflection that you found aspects of the reading shocking. Why did these aspects shock you?’).

The previous examples address counter-resistances that spontaneously occur in the classroom or in other interactions between students and the instructor. The ways we design the course structure and assignments address students’ counter-resistances by making it difficult for students to have an individual or item to provide a focus for their counter-resistances. In other words, we try to avoid giving them a clear target (i.e. a particular group of people or an individual) or scapegoat (i.e. ‘society’ or ‘government’) for their counter-resistances, but instead provide materials for them to work through in multiple ways. This distributes the counter-resistances and provides less threatening opportunities for students to consider where their feelings of counter-resistance come from and how the course materials challenge them to think in different ways. One strategy that we have used is the WebQuest assignment, where controversial topics such as land claims and treaty rights are not presented in a lecture format but rather a group of students are assigned the topic and given several web links that offer different perspectives. The students must collectively explore all the links and find new links in order to create a presentation for the class on the topic. The class presentation must include a discussion of the positionalities of the various links and how the perspectives intersect, converge and challenge each other. Another strategy is to experiment with narratives that address issues of stereotypes, racism and constructions of difference. We then use guiding questions in individual reflections, small group discussions and large group discussions. The students are challenged to reflect on issues of power and privilege, their own taken-for-granted biases and assumptions, the ways they themselves are implicated in these tangled colonial relations, and how their thinking has shifted through the process. It is important to note here that we do not speak to the students about counter-resistances, as they do not enter the course with an understanding of the complex and messy nature of resistances and counter-resistances. Instead, we engage the affective side of learning to focus them on why they feel provoked and uncomfortable, and how they can bring themselves back into balance, by providing metacognitive strategies such as in-depth analysis and critical reflection to accomplish this goal. We never challenge any of the students’ counter-resistances directly or in a head-on confrontational manner, but rather use indirect strategies such as those discussed above to engage students in the kind of critical reflection that provides them with opportunities to challenge their own counter-resistances. This requires that we, as instructors, be able to consciously let go of control over students’ learning processes and not micromanage every aspect of the learning environment and classroom dynamics. We facilitate and guide the process to ensure a safe learning environment for students to be able to challenge their own counter-resistances while critically engaging in the course material, so that they can work through the tough and risky questions.

Conclusion

hooks writes that the ‘fear of losing control in the classroom often leads professors to fall into a conventional teaching pattern wherein power is used destructively’. She goes on to state that ‘this fear of losing control shapes and informs the professorial pedagogical process to the extent that it acts as a barrier preventing any constructive grappling with issues of class’ (hooks, 2009: 140). While we are not concerned with issues of class per se, we do agree that this fear of losing control can interfere with opportunities for critical reflection and engagement that can open up opportunities for challenging and disrupting colonial relations of power and privilege across a wide variety of contexts. We have developed a particular decolonizing and anti-oppressive praxis, but we are not advocating that instructors should adopt our particular approach.

Our praxis was developed through our own reflection on our teaching and our critical examination of our positionalities, and, as such, it is specific to us. Other instructors would need to engage in their own processes, which may be specific to their particular ways of relating within classrooms. The way we do things is not a model to be followed, but rather offers a particular way of doing things that works for how we function in educational contexts. What we are stressing is the importance of providing opportunities for critical reflection and engagement within educational contexts. This is particularly important when teaching controversial and provocative subject matter, but holds true across diverse subject matter. According to Freire (1974), ‘critical understanding leads to critical action’ (40) or, in the case of our praxis, critical reflection and engagement. Instructors would do well to embrace another of Freire’s maxims: ‘there is no such thing as absolute ignorance or absolute wisdom’ (39). Therefore, as instructors, we should be embracing opportunities to engage in critical reflection within ourselves and with our students, instead of fearing a loss of control.

Each of us has our own lifelong journey of learning. One of the important responsibilities we have as educators is to continually and actively pursue our own learning journey while simultaneously facilitating and challenging students in their learning journeys. Thus, the challenge that lies before educators is whether or not we have the courage to step outside the confines of how we have defined ourselves and been defined by others as educators to embrace the often messy and tangled realities of doing decolonizing and anti-oppressive work that leads to critical and transformative praxis. This requires that we be willing to face how we are implicated in relations of power and privilege, and journey forward by creating ethical spaces where we can critically examine those power relations, tensions and challenges in purposeful and meaningful ways. One of the many challenges in sharing our praxis is that we cannot tell you exactly how to develop your own praxis or predict what form it might take or what lessons you might draw from the process. You must choose for yourself whether or not you are willing to step outside your comfort zone in order to challenge your taken-for-granted assumptions and the ways you are implicated in relations of power and privilege, as well as how you will engage with what emerges from the process of reimagining yourself as a critical educator.