Indigenous Ways of Knowing Course Design

Understand and identify how your personal values and beliefs influence curriculum.

• Where does your knowledge, either personal or disciplinary, come from?
• How do your values and beliefs shape your understandings about knowledge?
• What assumptions do you have about yourself that may be different from the assumptions you have about Indigenous people, culture, way of knowing?

Cultivate relational accountability in course design approaches.

• Who are you relationally accountable to?
• What is your comfort level in expanding your knowledge network?
• What do you know about Indigenous people and how did you learn it?

Offer identifiable benefits to the Indigenous community such as building up relational networks and contributing back to Indigenous communities.

• From your perspective, what does it mean to practice reciprocity and in what contexts?
• How are Indigenous perspectives being included?
• What has been offered in return for the knowledge, either conceptually or physically (through tobacco, etc.).

Validating the course design through a parallel process that recognizes the knowledge, authority, and expertise of Indigenous peoples as self-determining entities in the course design process.

• What are the processes for validating your own knowledge, for validating disciplinary knowledge?
• How is knowledge validated via a Western paradigm?
•  How do you envision processes for Indigenous-centered course design?

• Encompasses an understanding of and practicing community protocols.
• Honours Indigenous knowledges and ways of being.

• Is inclusive of students, the institution and Indigenous communities; also recognizes one’s own connections to various communities.
• Continually seeks to develop and sustain credible relationships with Indigenous communities.

• Involves Indigenous communities in the designing of academic curriculum to ensure Indigenous knowledge is valued and that the curriculum has culturally appropriate outcomes and assessments.
• Centres meaningful and sustainable community engagement.

• Means Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are both learning in the process together.
• Results in all involved within the institution, including the broader Indigenous communities, gain experience in sharing knowledge in a respectful way.

A decolonized curriculum is not only more inclusive, it also problematizes established paradigms; engages with issues of power, hierarchy and equity; traces ideas’ origins; and shows how key concepts have been used for good and ill.

Decolonizing the syllabus involves exposing students to a wide variety of voices, perspectives and analytical frameworks; foster debate and discussion; and construct their own understanding of the subject matter.

A decolonization approach begins with a recognition that classrooms are sites of power, privilege, hierarchy, inclusion, exclusion and implicit norms about appropriate forms of argumentation and behavior that themselves reflect certain cultural presumptions about gender, race and other variables.

Pedagogy should reflect that the instructor is not the sole holder of knowledge. The learning process should allow for opportunities for students to engage in investigation, dialogue and critical reflection, ultimately leading students to become independent and critical thinkers.