Abstract
Over the past decade, land-based education has become increasingly popular across First Nations and other school systems in Canada. The shift from classroom-based teaching to land-based approaches has supported Indigenous cultural revitalization. It has also provided an opportunity for educators to “queer” both pedagogy and essentialist understandings of nature and cosmology. This chapter focuses on the philosophical and pedagogical praxis of queering land-based education, learning from our experiences designing and teaching the graduate level course Queering Indigenous Land-Based Education. We focus on aspects of the course that demonstrate the importance of our relationships with water, land, and place in relation to the process of disrupting and reorienting our education and knowledge systems. These themes are presented alongside students’ (K-12 teachers or administrators) reflections on the course’s impacts on their own practice as land-based educators.
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Notes
- 1.
Story shared with permission.
- 2.
In this discussion, the concept of land encompasses the land itself, the waters, the air, the plants, animals, forces and other beings that, in their reciprocal relationships, form and sustain all life.
- 3.
Ecopedagogy, influenced by Freire, is a revolutionary teaching and learning movement that “opposes the globalization of neoliberalism and imperialism … and attempts to foment collective ecoliteracy and realize culturally relevant forms of knowledge grounded in normative concepts such as sustainability, planetarity, and biophilia ” (Kahn 2010, p. 18, cited in Pollocks 2010).
- 4.
Sara Loutitt, Cree/Metis, is an instructor at Keyano College. She completed her MEd with a concentration in Indigenous land-based education in 2018.
- 5.
Giiwedinong Aanang Richelle Scott, Anishnaabe, is a teacher in Winnipeg, MB. She graduated with an MEd with a concentration Indigenous land-based education in 2018.
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Wilson, A., Murray, J., Loutitt, S., Scott, R.N.S. (2021). Queering Indigenous Land-Based Education. In: Russell, J. (eds) Queer Ecopedagogies. International Explorations in Outdoor and Environmental Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65368-2_11
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