ABSTRACT
For educators teaching in an era of apology, Canadian teachers must be both knowledgeable about the historical injustices that have transpired and pedagogically responsive to the day-to-day realities that may obfuscate bringing such conversations into the classroom. For Canadian educators, more teachers are responding to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s call to incorporate the histories of Indian residential schooling in K-12 classrooms, which, however necessary, requires attention to the ethical implications that surround such a responsibility. In this chapter, we consider how educators may listen to the lived experiences of others—particularly survivors of Indian residential schooling—through a pedagogy that attends to an ethics of listening. We begin by contextualizing the history of how Indian residential schooling came to be in Canada and frame the significance of truth-telling and oral histories in relation to our work in teacher education at the University of Ottawa. An overview of the Legacy of Hope’s website, Where Are the Children?, is also provided to guide educators to the educative possibilities of using the oral histories from survivors, available online, in their own classrooms. We frame this conversation in light of a turn towards the pedagogical possibilities of emotion—a pedagogy of emotion—wherein the emotional consequence of learning about historical injustices can be purposeful and mobilizing. We suggest that when using oral histories from residential school survivors, the intent should be less about studying and reconciling a past, and more about ethically engaging with counter-narratives to implicate oneself in relationship with the story, storyteller, and personal lived experience. The possibilities of such listening as ceremony, as we suggest, may in turn be helpful for educators to subtly but impactfully shift their thinking from the victimization of Indigenous experiences in Canada towards the resilience of Indigenous nationhood in relationship with ethically implicated citizens who bear a responsibility for a collective future.
