Author: Michaela

Eurocentrism values one way of doing things. There is always a right way to do something. I certainly experienced this in mathematics growing up. I started out with a fascination and love for math. I enjoyed the rules and patterns. However as I experimented and found new ways to manipulate numbers I was frequently punished…

My schooling and upbringing created many lenses in me, most of which I am now actively trying to rid myself of. I was directly taught that the signing of the treaties was a happy affair, where the Indigenous people welcomed the colonists with open arms and everyone was pleased with the outcome. I learned from…

My citizenship education in K-12 started with “reduce, reuse, recycle.” This was repeated so frequently that I honestly don’t know how old I was when I actually understood what it meant. All that I really took from it as a child was that I should recycle paper products and cans. We never really spoke about…

In my opinion, the importance of teaching Treaty Education to students in a primarily heterogeneously white classroom can be boiled down to this: it is how we will rid our province of racism against Indigenous people. Donald says “Canadian Canadians (settlers who have removed themselves from their European ancestry) see themselves as having no culture.”…

According to the Levin article, school curricula are developed and implemented by government bodies, specifically the ministry of education. They seek input by subject area experts, but not much by parents, teachers, or students. As a result, much of the curriculum’s content is not teachable by the average teacher, as it is designed at an…

In Restoule’s Learning from Place: A Return to Traditional Mushkegowuk Ways of Knowing, there are many way in which reinhabitation and decolonization take place throughout the narrative. Youth and Elders walked together and built up their intergenerational community, Youth learned to be connected to the land, Youth learned more about their cultural identity and traditional…

What does it mean to be a good student according to the “commonsense” of Canada? A good student is always eager to learn and pays excellent attention in classes by maintaining eye contact with the lecturer and raising their hand when they wish to contribute to the conversation. When they contribute they say exactly what…

Attending K-12 from 1998-2011 the Tyler rationale, in addition to the curriculum-as-syllabus model, dictated most if not all of my schooling experiences. When I started to attend a few classes in University that operate on a discussion format, I was taken aback and didn’t know how to cope with such a starkly different form of…

Kumashiro defines common sense as “what everyone should know” (2009, p. XXIX). As he learned, it is a thing that is common to a group of people, not to all of humanity. However we as Westerners can often, if not most of the time, treat our own “common sense” as if it were the basis…