During our class, ‘Stolen Lives Indian Boarding Schools,’ we collaborated with Professor Laura Wyper’s class, the COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning) initiative at Algoma University. Through our collaboration, much insight into the importance of decolonizing education arose. This course and learning journey helped students reflect on the role of education, especially classrooms, as spaces that can impact and foster decolonization at various scales. Starting by acknowledging the colonial system of educational institutions are part of. We are faced with and immersed in classrooms that can become brave spaces to reflect and further step into dismantling colonial ways of thinking, the mind, body, academic institutions, and society. Many different paths can be taken for decolonizing a classroom and diverting from a typical Western education style focused on the outcome: grades, western academic material, and a hierarchical-based relationship between the professor and students. Those paths can range from introducing the unheard voices and stories by diverting from the professor’s knowledge to holding discussions on the role of people/students in recognizing and deconstructing power structures to introducing alternative ways of teaching, such as through creativity with arts and crafts workshops.
Working with Algoma University and listening to survivors and speakers was particularly moving. This university is situated in what is now called Ontario, Canada, on the former site of Shingwauk Residential School. The university acknowledges this site as a colonial space. However, we wanted to know more about how this is discussed and tackled inside classrooms.
We decided to ask someone who directly embraces decoloniality and indigenity of education. Laura Wyper, an assistant professor and department chair of Community Economic and Social Development, for a short interview. We wanted to learn more about her work and the specific projects in the classroom that can help us have a more concrete understanding of what ‘decolonizing a classroom’ entails. The brief interview recording can be found below.
Short Interview Summary:
Professor Wyper discusses a core principle of Algoma University: cross-cultural learning. She considers cross-cultural learning to be happening both outside and inside classrooms and Algoma University to be a space to honour Chief Shingwauk’s mission of cross-cultural understanding.
While diversity in the student body is promoted, the university collaborates with other universities and communities. The university stands by its unique mission, which integrates ancestral knowledge, the ‘7 grandfather mission’: Wisdom, Love, Respect, Bravery, Honesty, Humility, and Truth. Professor Wyper led the way in decolonizing the classroom in the’ COIL’ courses. First, she includes indigenous knowledge and voices by inviting guest speakers and creating reciprocity in exchanges. Second, students work on projects using materials historically set in the background and can give back to the community. In this year’s course, students have worked on presentations using the Algoma archives of the residential schools. Those can be later used for an exhibition and, thus, seen by people, unveiling the Canadian cultural genocide and bringing stories that have been ignored back into the light.
Stolen Lives 