What Do Indigenous Education Policy Frameworks Reveal about Commitments to Reconciliation in Canadian School Systems?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18584/iipj.2020.11.1.10215Keywords:
education policy, Indigenous education, reconciliation, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of CanadaAbstract
The national Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has challenged governments and school boards across Canada to acknowledge and address the damaging legacies of residential schooling while ensuring that all students gain an adequate understanding of relations between Indigenous Peoples and non-Indigenous peoples. This article explores the dynamics and prospects for effective change associated with reforms in elementary and secondary education systems since the release of the Commission’s Calls to Action, focusing on the policy frameworks employed by provincial and territorial governments to guide these actions. The analysis examines critically the overt and hidden messages conveyed through discourses within policy documents and statements. The key questions we address include: What do current education policy frameworks and actions regarding Indigenous Peoples reveal about government approaches to education and settler–Indigenous relationships in Canada? To what extent is effective reconciliation possible, and how can it be accomplished in the context of institutional structures and discourses within a White settler colonial society? The findings reveal that substantial movement towards greater acknowledgement of Indigenous knowledge systems and incorporation of Indigenous content continues to be subordinated to or embedded within Western assumptions, norms, and standards.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2020 Terry Wotherspoon, Emily Milne
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
In keeping with IIPJ's Open Access policy, IIPJ has a shared approach to copyright. A shared approach means that authors do not have to waive all of their rights to the work published in IIPJ. By submitting to IIPJ, the author(s) grant(s) IIPJ the right to:
- Copy edit the article,
- Display the article in perpetuity, and
- Enforce the conditions of the Creative Commons license associated with the article.
All articles published in IIPJ carry the Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivatives license (click here for the human-readable summary and here for the legal code).
This means that the article can be copied or redistributed without written permission from the author(s) or IIPJ if the following conditions are met:
- IIPJ is appropriately credited as the original source. The reference should include the article's DOI (Digital Object Identifier), which helps us track the dissemination of articles published in IIPJ.
- The article is not being used for a commercial purpose. Users must be able to access the reprinted or republished article without paying any fee.
- The article is not altered from its original form. This means it cannot be edited, transformed, remixed, or truncated in any way. This policy protects our authors from having their work or intent misrepresented.
Any reprints, republications, or distributions that do not meet all of these conditions must be approved in writing by the author(s) of the article and IIPJ.
IIPJ will not grant permission to any publisher that requires authors or IIPJ to waive any of their rights to the article.
Authors who wish to reprint, republish, or distribute their article published in IIPJ for any commercial purpose must obtain written permission from IIPJ and provide appropriate attribution.
IIPJ will consider accepting articles that have been previously published. However, authors submitting articles of this nature must:
- Indicate that the article was previously published,
- Provide details of all previous publications (that is, source, publication date, format, etc.),
- Describe how their IIPJ submission differs from the original publication, and
- Provide written permission to republish the article from the copyright holder(s) if applicable.