This project, led by PI Dr. Tricia McGuire-Adams, with collaborators Dr. Cindy Gaudet, Ms. Jana-Rae Yerxa, and Dr. Lisa Howell seeks to understand how mandatory courses contribute to structural change and decolonial solidarity movements. We have found that while the courses serve to educate and raise awareness among Settler students, much of the labour falls on Indigenous professors to teach the courses that are often “settler colonialism 101”. Moreover, f the courses continue to stay at the “101” level, structural change and decolonial solidarity movements  will not occur .

One of my current research collaborations is with Dr. Dwayne Donald, who is a CRC Tier 1 at the University of Alberta. Our objectives are to collaborate with educators to conceptualize unlearning colonialism  as a recursive pedagogical process  by facilitating   opportunities for educators to learn from Indigenous wisdom insights and deliberate together on how best to enact these insights in their teaching practices. We work with  12 teachers from the Western Quebec School board, in partnership with Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg, 4 times a year until 2028.  Over the past two years, we have learned from community members, sat and listened in circles with Elders, paddled along the Desert river, learned to  skin moose legs and beavers, learned some of the Anishinaabemowin language, learned about the history of Kitigan Zibi, and participated in ceremony. We will continue to collaborate together in this way to understand how substantive time, immersive experiences, and learning from Indigenous peoples supports unlearning colonialism. We then hope to translate how the unlearning process can be applied to practice.

Co-PI’s: Dr. Lisa Howell and Dr. Linda Radford. Over ten years ago, the Urban Communities Cohort (UCC) was established at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Education to ensure teacher candidates were better prepared to work within urban priority schools. Our research seeks to understand the experiences of UCC members, and how it informed their experiences in teacher education and their current pedagogical practices as teachers. 

For a period that spanned nearly nine decades, children were forcibly removed by the Canadian state from their families, culture, land, and community of Kitigan Zibi Annishinabeg. These children, some as young as three years old, were put onto trains and taken to Indian residential schools, including St. Mary’s in Kenora Ontario, located 1,837 kilometres away from their home.  Many survivors urgently want to share, document, and record their lived experiences so that they are not forgotten and so others can learn from their experiences and wisdoms. This Community-led research will uplift the survivors with an opportunity to participate in research that takes place in their community, for their community, with a lasting impact for future generations.