As an educator with the Toronto District School Board, we have access to resources available through the Indigenous Education site.  One of which is the article Decolonizing our Schools: Indigenous Education in the Toronto District School Board; a research report on findings from the Talking Stick Project by the Urban Aboriginal Education Pilot Project (UAEPP) with data collected between April 2009 and September 2010. This open source document provides valuable information to educators about the impact of Aboriginal education in urban settings on Aboriginal and non- Aboriginal students and how various stakeholders including teachers, administrators and Board employees have a responsibility in decolonizing and indigenizing learning spaces to ensure success, or specifically, well-being of Aboriginal students (Dion, 2010).  The principal investigator, Susan Dion along with a group of esteemed researchers, offer an analysis through the assessment and evaluation on  the effectiveness of the UAEPP. For the purpose of this task, I focused on Chapter 1: Introduction Aboriginal Education in the TDSB. This chapter in the document provides data and statistics on the population of Aboriginal students in the TDSB, shedding light on student achievement in the formal school setting and moving towards a student well-being model of success. 

From a teacher professional development standpoint, my question is: how can educators use this document to reflect on and improve their current pedagogy and practices around Aborginal education? More specifically,  how might this article educate the educators in the history of Aborignal education and the specific data related to Aboriginal students in the TDSB? Some of the search terms that were provided in the example were not applicable to the current article, as it was written in the past decade and terms such as Indian are outdated and not used in the context of the project. However, you will notice that the term Aboriginal is prevalent to encompass the community and population of students in the urban, Toronto setting of First Nations, Metis and Inuit peoples. The additional search terms decolonize and indigenize hold significance in the article to describe roles and responsibilities of teachers. The emphasis on decolonization includes the recognition and discussion surrounding the history of colonialism in Canada. Wherehas indigenization involves teachers integrating Aboriginal perspectives and experiences into the curriculum. These terms hold value into the recommended strategies that are to be employed to alter teacher practices in Aboriginal education. Finally, the additional term Miigwetch was selected to incorporate Ojibwe terms. 

After reading the article and selecting these terms, a new question arose: Since the TDSB is the largest school board in Canada and one of the largest in North America, how can this research be applied to other settings, including rural areas or smaller districts? 

Note: The search for these terms was conducted  on a peer review of the original article by Dion (2010). The original article was not searchable for words. This is not an accurate representation of the terminology presented as the introduction itself had the words “decolonize” and “indigenize” over 5 times as I read through. Furthermore, in the acknowledgments, specific Indigenous groups were recognized, thus increasing the count for the number of words including First Nations, Metis and Inuit. 

Given the recent publishing date of this article and the team of dedicated researchers in Indigenous studies, it is apparent that the wording and terminology used is sensitive to the topic and there was various input from the Indigenous community. 

References: 

Bentley, S.  Decolonizing our Schools, Aboriginal Education in the Toronto District School Board. Retrieved from: https://www.academia.edu/21521734/Decolonizing_Our_Schools_Aboriginal_Education_in_the_Toronto_District_School_Board

Dion, Susan D.; Johnston, Krista; Rice, Carla, M (2010) Decolonizing Our Schools Indigenous Education in the Toronto District School Board. (Toronto)