ABSTRACT
Criminology and law are disciplines that have justified racism, the settler-state, and the cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples. In this chapter, we explore the strategies instructors who teach undergraduate legal courses in a criminology department use to meet the challenge of teaching about social inequities as they relate to law and how students were experiencing their instructors’ efforts. Five instructors who teach undergraduate law topics at a mid-sized Canadian criminology program told us about the strategies they used to incorporate anti-racist or decolonial ideas in their classes. Combined, these instructors taught 11 topics ranging from seminars with 30 students to lecture courses with over 200 students. We then surveyed students (n = 103) on the success of these strategies, and 73% (n = 75) indicated that their law courses helped them to understand social inequities as they relate to law. There was variability across courses where electives related to critical criminology and human rights met the social inequities goals to a higher degree (100% and 91%, respectively) than did their introductory and breadth law-related courses. According to student respondents, the most effective strategies that helped them appreciate social inequality in their law courses were textbook choices, including video clips and other media, through lectures, and by assigning academic articles that included different voices and perspectives. The authors share these findings to contribute data on the student experience that instructors can contemplate in developing their own anti-colonial and anti-racist pedagogical tools.
