ABSTRACT
Many students in rural Saskatchewan ELA classrooms are accustomed to reading traditional curricular literature; stories that, while familiar, often perpetuate Eurocentric ways of thinking and forms of representation that distance students from social justice education. However, in one school, composed of primarily Indigenous students, a teacher’s experience subverting this traditional curriculum by utilizing postcolonial texts discovered that the stories within offered new language for an emotional practice of teaching. While this teacher was in the midst of her own pedagogy of discomfort, opting to risk curricular change, she discovered the students’ resistance to traditional curricular literature, what they had termed “colonizing stories,” was transformed by this shift to the postcolonial into a new kind of engagement and resonance. As she was expressing vulnerabilities teaching these texts, she invited students to respond in kind, creating new spaces to mobilize emotions for social justice education. This chapter explores the possibilities for decolonizing curriculum by examining the experiences of Indigenous readers who encounter postcolonial stories for the first time.
