Selecting Readings and Course Themes

By Dr. Kimberly Richards

The syllabus is a focal point for you to apply your learning about inclusion, exclusion, diversity, privilege, power, and possibilities for transformative change. When making decisions about your syllabus, educational developers Carl S. Moore et al. (2017) offer these guiding questions:

• Who are the people that will be in your class? Who will not be there?
• Whose voice is heard? What perspective dominates? What is omitted?
• How is the content relevant in non-academic spaces and for the learners in your class? How can it be made relevant for those who may not recognize its relevance?

 

We need to be thoughtful in the choices in order to avoid the pitfalls of the “hidden curriculum,” an amorphous collection of “implicit academic, social, and cultural messages” that students are taught and at the same time indoctrinated about the dominant culture and its values through “unwritten rules and spoken expectations,” and “unofficial norms, behaviours and values” (“Hidden Curriculum”, 2015). Such choices relate to our own un/learning of colonial and supremacist ideas and epistemologies.
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We establish who is an “expert” on a particular subject through our selection of readings as much as in our own citational politics. In academic writing classes, we are uniquely positioned to interrogate the historically produced assumptions that undergird social relations of knowledge production. These questions pertain to colonial, anti-colonial, and decolonial ideas about who can produce authoritative knowledge; which languages are vehicles of intellectual and scientific activity; and where authoritative knowledge comes from (Swartz et al., 2020). When selecting readings, consider including:

• Readings from anti-racist writers to discuss the implications of research in this area;
• Readings by BIPOC scholars;
• Readings from scholars producing knowledge outside of the Western world/ Global North that challenge colonial imagined geographies;
• Readings responding to topics students identified as meaningful to them through survey.

 

Rethinking Where You Start

The order in which these ideas are presented is also meaningful. Consider the narrative of epistemic authority being (re-)produced if your syllabus tells the story of a white man establishing a field of research. Who else has been concerned with this issue but not recognized within academic discourse communities? How might these voices and perspectives be amplified?
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At the same time, be mindful of the ways syllabus design might replicate the harmful patterns of a politics of recognition, wherein marginalized perspectives are recognized as contributing to a field of study that is already established, but their ideas do not fundamentally transform or challenge the legitimacy of the field in the first place (Coulthard, 2014). It is not merely enough to include non-white and femme voices, as though one were slightly adjusting an already tried and tested recipe, “their inclusion must attend precisely to the effects of their prior exclusion” (Swartz et al., 2020, p. 172). This issue is particularly apparent in writing studies with inclusion of Indigenous perspectives. Although we have much to learn from Indigenous peoples and lifeways, it is important to note the inappositeness of writing as a way of sharing Indigenous learnings, given that translating oral traditions to written form can lead to their abstraction, annexation, and alienation (Gone, 2019; Kisner, 2020).

Rematriating Curriculum, or What Not to Include

While attending to the diversity of perspective in your syllabus, it is also important to be attuned to Eve Tuck’s (2011) critique of the ways spaces opened by responses to racism and colonization in curriculum, such as multiculturalism, critical race theory, and Indigenous studies, are “reoccupied” when non-Indigenous scholars absorb new-to-them knowledge, and once again displace Indigenous and other racialized bodies from academic spaces. Rematriation involves rethinking the aims of research so that Indigenous communities and other over-researched but individualized communities retain sovereignty over knowledge and knowledge production, so it is held in trust for their communities and their futurity, not used to protect settler futurity (Tuck, 2011). As students embark on research that engages Indigenous peoples, they must be directed to ensure Indigenous peoples are setting the agenda, and their research design is culturally-appropriate, so both participant and researcher will benefit.
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Ethical Engagement with Research

As students develop their own research questions, help them become more self-aware of the appropriation of Indigenous knowledge, and assumptions about the presumed beneficence of the academic gaze. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2014) point out that research is a dirty word among many Native communities and other communities of overstudied Others. Too often, still, stories of pain and humiliation are collected for commod-ification. Discuss with your students the often unquestioned limits of research with reference to these three axioms:

• the subaltern can speak, but is only invited to speak her/our pain;
• there are some forms of knowledge that the academy doesn’t
  deserve; and
• research may not be the intervention that is needed. (p. 224)

When you see students falling into colonial traps, try to direct them towards desire-based research (as determined by the community in question) as the antidote for damage-focused narratives (Tuck, 2009).

Resource: Research 101: A Manifesto for Ethical Research in the Downtown Eastside is a helpful summation of the problems and pitfalls of research with marginalized communities, and strategies to protect those communities from exploitive research.

Three Things to Try For Now

1. Become more familiar with the writers on your syllabus and their epistemic location. Who is included in the conversation? Who is excluded? Self-assess the narrative your syllabus tells about who produces knowledge, and how your field of study developed. Trouble narratives that mis-recognize the contributions from perspectives under-valued or dismissed by colonial patterns by starting in a different place, and incorporating diverse voices to re-narrate that story and transform the field. Update and expand your knowledge of the course subject by reading new (or new-to-you) material from some of the perspectives you are not familiar with.
2. Consider holding space in your syllabus for flexibility based on student interest. You could allow students to select some readings based on their interests that you determine through surveys or other forms of correspondence, like this Who’s In Class Form. You could also poll students at the end of your semester to see what should be kept and what should be released in another iteration of the course.
3. Expand your capacity to identify and direct students away from colonial traps in their research projects. Name these dynamics in your teaching so students become more aware of these patterns and their problems.

References & Recommended Readings

• Coulthard, G. S. (2014). Red skin, White masks. University of Minnesota Press.
• Gone, J. (2019). “Considering Indigenous research methodologies: Critical reflections by an
  Indigenous knower,” Qualitative Inquiry 25(1), 45-56. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800418787545
• Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth. New York: Grove Press.
• Hidden curriculum. (2015, September 13). The glossary of education reform. Hidden Curriculum Definition (edglossary.org)
• Kisner, W. (2020). The Indigenization of academia and ontological respect. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 16(2), 349–391.
• Moore, C. S., Brantmeir, E., & Brocheild, A. (September 2017). Inclusion by design: Tool helps faculty examine their teaching practices. Faculty focus. Inclusion by Design: Tool Helps Faculty Examine Their Teaching Practices (facultyfocus.com)
• Swartz, S., Nyamnjoh, A., & Mahali, A. (2020). Decolonising the social sciences curriculum in the university classroom: A pragmatic-realism approach. Alternation 36, 165-187. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11910/16035
• Tuck, E. (2009). Suspending damage: A letter to communities. Harvard Educational Review 79(3), 409-
  27. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.79.3.n0016675661t3n15
• Tuck, E. (2011). Rematriating curriculum studies. Journal of curriculum and pedagogy 8(1), 34-
  37. https://doi.org/10.1080/15505170.2011.572521
• Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2014). R-Words: Refusing research. In D. Paris & M. T. Winn (Eds.), Humanizing
  research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities (pp. 223-248). SAGE Publications. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781544329611.n12