Possibility not Difficulty: Difficult Knowledge in K-12 classrooms as Opportunities for Renegotiating Relationships with Indigenous Knowledge
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Indigenous perspectives and knowledges have been rendered “difficult” to teach and learn due to settler-colonial norms that are naturalized in Ontario’s public K-12 education system. We explore how we as educators and teachers with diverse populations of students critically engage pedagogy and knowledge to take up Indigenous perspectives and knowledges in classrooms in ethical ways. Using practitioner inquiry, we draw on our classroom experiences to explore how students engage with Indigenous perspectives and knowledges and our relationships as people who relate to this land in different ways—as settlers, newcomers, and original caretakers. Students perceive our pedagogical interventions not as difficult, but as a disruption from settler colonialism, that can be navigated through. We argue that not only is there nothing inherently difficult about Indigenous perspectives and knowledges, but also that students enter into difficulty as possibility. Although students experience disruptions, they seek out ways to renegotiate their relationships to settler colonialism and Indigenous perspectives and knowledges and come to new understandings about their contexts. We argue that examining these disruptions as teacher researchers in our classrooms adds nuance to conversations about revealing how settler colonialism functions and complexity to the task of taking up Indigenous perspectives and knowledges in K-12 classrooms. Keywords: Indigenous perspectives, settler colonialism, difficult knowledge, pedagogy, practitioner inquiry Les perspectives et les connaissances autochtones sont devenues des matières « difficiles » à enseigner en raison des normes des colonisateurs qui sont naturalisées au sein du système d’éducation publique de la maternelle à la 12e année en Ontario. Nous explorons dans quelle mesure nous, en tant qu’enseignantes qui travaillons avec des populations diverses d’élèves, adoptons une approche critique et réfléchie à la pédagogie et aux connaissances de sorte à intégrer les perspectives et les connaissances autochtones en classe de façon éthique. Reposant sur une enquête auprès de praticiens, nous puisons dans nos expériences en classe pour explorer la réaction des élèves aux perspectives et aux connaissances autochtones ainsi qu’à nos rapports en tant que personnes qui entretiennent des liens différents avec ce territoire—en tant que colonisateurs, nouveaux arrivés ou premiers gardiens. Les élèves ne perçoivent pas nos interventions pédagogiques comme étant difficiles, mais comme une perturbation du colonialisme de peuplement à travers laquelle il est possible de naviguer. Nous affirmons que non seulement les perspectives et les connaissances autochtones ne sont pas difficiles en soi, mais en plus, les élèves abordent la difficulté comme une possibilité. Les élèves vivent des perturbations, cherchent des façons de renégocier leurs rapports au colonialisme de peuplement et aux perspectives et connaissances autochtones, et ils acquièrent une nouvelle compréhension de leurs contextes. Nous affirmons qu’en examinant ces perturbations comme chercheurs-enseignants dans nos salles de classes, nous ajoutons une nuance aux conversations sur le fonctionnement du colonialisme de peuplement et rendons plus complexe la tâche d’adopter des perspectives et des connaissances dans les classes M-12. Mots clés : Perspectives autochtones, colonialisme de peuplement, connaissances difficiles, pédagogie, enquête auprès des praticiens
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".