This week the SUNTEP student panel stood out to me most. It was really inspiring to hear how these students are engaged in immersive learning, and how connected they have become with eachother over their learning journey. This fit in nicely with this week’s textbook topic and creating relations among students. The discussions in the panel paired with the readings this week provided me insight into fostering environments for promoting these relationships, however, this panel discussion also brought to light a feeling that I have felt and feared myself. This is the fear of appearing as disingenuous in my efforts to incorporate Indigenous pedagogies.

This came up in the panel discussion when Jaxx said something along the lines of there being too many white people leading classrooms trying to teach this material. This is not a direct quote, but captures the point of what was said. To their credit, the co-panellists were quick to give examples of white educators who are respected and properly incorporate Indigenous ways of knowing, to which Jaxx agreed. However, the points initially raised in this conversation is something I fear to be said about me one day. I will not let that discourage my attempts to learn about Indigenous pedagogies and implement them into my practice, but it does make me fear that Indigenous learners will see my attempts as tokenism, when that is not the case.

I’ve been reflecting on how this made me feel, and what it means for me. I’ve been trying to think about how I can build relationships, and not let this feeling get in the way of that. Upon my reflection, I came across a term that resonated with me, it was “Epistemic Humility”. I hadn’t heard this term before, but came to learn that it essentially means recognizing the limits of my own knowledge, and improving myself with this in mind means encouraging new information to come in to help form my knowledge base. This concept can help me cope with this fear. If I embrace that I am not an expert, and encourage open dialog about how I can improve, I believe that I can both build relationships, as well as gradually grow and improve my knowledge. I found a short video resource that talks about Epistemic and Intellectual Humility which describes these concepts quite well in only 3 minutes:

As I continued to reflect on this and think about the chapter as well, I found more and more ways that the idea of epistemic humility fit with this weeks readings. Examples in this chapter include respecting Indigenous culture by including community members, parents and grandparents as curriculum resources. This example is a perfectly demonstrates humility and self awareness of limitation in action by inviting others to contribute to the process and learning from them. Practices such as this will help solidify the relationships among learners as they will feel open to sharing their knowledge and ideas among each other and with me. Overall, this week was more reflective for me than I imagined, but was very useful in giving me a path forward to try my best while addressing my own knowledge limitations, embrace them, and enabling others to help me improve the experience for everyone!