Willinksy, J. (2006). High School Postcolonial: As the Students Ran Ahead with the Theory . In Yatta Kanu (Ed.), Curriculum as Cultural Practice (95-115). Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. 

This chapter reads as a narrative case study, by an academic who joined a Grade 12 English class in Vancouver as a guest teacher. The purpose was for the guest teacher to teach a postcolonial poetry unit that was an accurate reflection of the time and place that the students were learning in. One idea that stood out for me was that it is misleading for teachers to teach about colonialism as if it was over, if their curriculum still reinforces colonial or assimilative ideals.

The writer engaged the students in a collaborative poetry project wherein each student had to source a poem that reflected their cultural heritage, in its original language and in an English language translation. Each student created a section of their new postcolonial poetry anthology, including the bilingual poetry presentation, a poetry analysis, and discussion questions. The hope was that other teachers would choose to use this new anthology as well, rather than the previously used one which represented an older, Caucasian view of Canada. The students in the study “were engaged in nothing more than providing an additional sense of Canadian identity and landscape to the scope of their curriculum” (110).