Educators Doing the Deep, Unsettling Work of Treaty Education

The purpose of the research was to investigate how developing a community of educators to do the unsettling work of treaty education might have positively influenced their implementation of treaty education in their respective schools. By doing the unsettling work of treaty education, we meant revealing and unpacking settler identities through counter narratives (Tupper, 2011), disrupting dominant discourses of colonialism, and troubling common-sense understandings of Canadian history (Hildebrandt et al., 2016) to consider and reflect on our treaty responsibilities. 

Initial analysis identified several common themes:

• Reconciliation and treaty responsibilities, participant self-learning (growth);
• Relationships (connections with community), Indigenous ways of teaching; and
• Learning and experiential learning. 

Combining each of these recurrent themes, participants also identified ways in which they felt ready (or comfortable, or confident with) to apply their own learning in their context.