Non-Indigenous Instructors Teaching about Indigenous Content: Reflections and Recommendations from Indigenous Ways of Knowing and Pedagogy

Authors

Manu Sharma, Thompson Rivers UniversityFollow
Peggy Shannon-Baker, Georgia Southern UniversityFollow

Abstract

This article takes a scholarship of teaching and learning approach to improve the authors teaching about Indige-nous content as non-Indigenous teacher educators. It explores how they attempted to incorporate Indigenous content and teaching practices into multicultural education classes and then reflect on how they could have improved their teaching practice. Both authors provide their unique positionality which provides context which is essential to consider when doing equity-based work such as teaching about/with Indigenous communities. The authors discuss their teaching experiences after they occurred with one another and then engage in an exploration via literature on teaching about Indigenous content. The outcomes of two years of co-reflection and analysis of the literature are shared in this article in hopes to help guide both the authors and other non-Indigenous instructors on how to improve their teaching and learning about Indigenous content in courses. The findings stress the importance of (1) acknowledging land as a conduit for domination, (2) recognizing all who teach us, and (3) Indigenous guest lecturers and intergenerational learning.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Recommended Citation

Sharma, Manu and Shannon-Baker, Peggy (2023) "Non-Indigenous Instructors Teaching about Indigenous Content: Reflections and Recommendations from Indigenous Ways of Knowing and Pedagogy," International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Vol. 17: No. 2, Article 5.
Available at: https://doi.org/10.20429/ijsotl.2023.17205