Parks Make Practice: Toward an Anticolonial Orientation of Social Studies Education

This thesis presents four papers, organized around four lenses, that address the following throughline research question: How might teachers’ relationships with Canada’s national parks contribute to decolonizing orientations of social studies education? Each paper focuses on one of four lenses, a) Artifact; b) Place; c) Knowledge; and d) Position, to take up this research question both conceptually and empirically. Together, these papers demonstrate the richness that can result from imagining possibilities for social studies pedagogy and practice by engaging with national parks as a place and space for decolonizing inquiry. Concerned with the material and discursive productions national parks alongside decolonizing orientations of teacher knowledge, this thesis elucidates the ways in which national parks are materially and discursively productive in how teachers understand their personal and teacher selves as practitioners oriented toward decolonizing social studies. The central empirical project of this thesis leans into a feminist post-structural framing of discourse to analyze walking interviews with teachers in national parks. The thesis begins with a prologue that positions the researcher and Canada’s national parks alongside settler colonial and possessive logics (Moreton-Robinson, 2015) and by theorizing how decolonizing orientations toward social studies education might disrupt, resist, and dismantle these logics. The first section, “Artifact,” features a manuscript that examines the material-discursive productions of national parks through Parks Canada’s red Adirondack chairs. The second section, “Place,” takes up how land and place are produced by de/colonizing (Madden, 2019) tensions in discourse and how recognizing these discursive tensions might inform decolonizing social studies practice. The third section, “Knowledge,” focuses directly on how teachers narrate their experiences visiting national parks and proposes that these narrations of experiences inform how teachers are produced as subjects in relation to parks and social studies pedagogies. The last section, “Position,” proposes that the cultural myths of teaching (Britzman, 1986, 2003), a product of Western models of schooling and education, can be discursively inflected and simultaneously resisted as teachers explain or imagine decolonizing pedagogies in their own contexts. An epilogue that offers further trajectories to imagine social studies otherwise concludes the thesis.

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