Guiding Principles, and Rationale

To help meet the College of Arts and Sciences Program Goal #5—Cultivate an understanding of and appreciation for the unique socio-cultural position of Aboriginal peoples in Canada—we are proposing a suite of four (4) new 3 cu courses relating to Indigenous peoples and issues from which each student in the College of Arts and Science in programmes A through D will be required to select 3cus in order to qualify to graduate. In addition to all the complex scholarly and pedagogical rationales for these class (outlined below), we feel confident that these classes will further the University of Saskatchewan’s articulated commitment to meeting the spirit and the intent of the recent 'calls to action' issued by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And as such, they will contribute to the larger process of Indigenizing the University.

The proposed classes transcend the pedagogy and curricular strategy that was prominent a generation ago (ie. emphasizing cultural awareness). The new courses are aimed less at teaching content about Indigenous people than they are about providing each student within the College of Arts and Science with the intellectual tools to begin facilitating a paradigm shift whereby students will be able to acquire a deeper understanding of the current conditions and relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians. Students will be prepared critically engage the intellectual and cultural underpinnings of the historical racist and negative stereotypes that have informed Canadian attitudes, public discourse, and policies concerning Indigenous people in this country.

These courses are intended to be transformative. The attitudes these courses seek to address go beyond the racism that Indigenous people experience (and that are most urgently reflected in such contemporary matters as Missing and Murdered Women, Indigenous over-representation in the correction system, racial profiling, chronic under-employment, etc…). To be clear, these classes aim to expose students to the ways in which racism and colonialism have become structurally integrated into Canadian society such that Treat Rights and Aboriginal Rights and Title (despite being entrenched in the Canadian Constitution) have yet to be adequately recognized and operationalized.

But this suite of classes is not merely designed to highlight problems within Canadian society. Rather, the courses have as their learning outcomes the objective of working in a positive way to give students the tools to begin building genuine reconciliation and respectful positive relationships between Indigenous and settler society. We are seeking to remind students that we are all Treaty people; that Aboriginal rights are imbedded in the Canadian Constitution; and that all Canadian citizens have an active role to play to help ensure that individuals as well as governments fulfill their Treaty obligations so that they can benefit from their Treaty rights.

We envision these classes providing all students with an intellectually and emotionally positive learning environment within which Indigenous people and their allies can begin to find healthy and respectful ways to live up to Canada’s potential.

We do not believe that any one discipline, any one department, let alone any single instructor, can provide a single class that will achieve the learning outcomes associated with this proposed suite of classes. However, after taking one of the classes from this proposed suite, students will be better prepared to take classes featuring Indigenous content from throughout the rest of the college where they can begin to work with a variety of content experts to develop particular competencies and expertise. Moreover, the proposed courses would be ideally taken within the 1st year of a program of study and so would help others to see this as a foundational piece benefiting all.

The proposed collaboratively taught suite of modular courses also seeks to highlight the diverse disciplines within the college of Arts and Science. They will showcase the way different disciplinary perspectives can individually and collectively help students appreciate that colonialism is not just something that occurred in the past; that it has ongoing consequences for Indigenous people and Canadian society as a whole. An added benefit of the approach presented here is that participating faculty will be able to use these courses to highlight for students the benefits of taking additional classes from their own specific departments and programs.

The courses are designed for non-Indigenous and Indigenous students alike, but they will additionally aspire to help build confidence among Indigenous students and capacity in Indigenous communities. As such—within the inherent restrictions associated with large classes that do not include intimate learning environments, fieldtrips, or written assignments—these classes will model best pedagogical practices in terms of creating emotionally safe, and intellectually rigorous, learning environments for students.

We are seeking to meet these goals in a fashion that takes advantage of, and contributes to, the vision that inspired our new “division-less” College of Arts and Science. As such, this proposal is inherently inclusive of faculty from departments throughout the college. Indeed, it is predicated on creating and sustaining inter-departmental cooperation and collegiality. As such it will help to build research and teaching synergies across disciplinary and administrative boundaries. Such a collective undertaking is also desirable as it promises to promote ongoing collaboration as we move to address Indigenization in a systematic and cooperative manner.

There will be four thematically organized interdisciplinary classes with a capacity of 500 students each. Each of the classes will be divided into a series of weekly modules. Individual modules will be taught by participating faculty from throughout the College.

While each class will have its own thematic focus, all four classes will engage with the central issues of Indigenous cultures, ways of knowing, histories, colonialism, identities, rights, and ally-building. Each class will deal with both contemporary and historical issues relating to the thematic subject matter. In this way all students, regardless of which class they select, will be introduced to a common set of core topics and learning objectives pertaining to the historical and contemporary situations within which Indigenous people find themselves.

We proposed to offer one class as a pilot in 2016-17. The other three classes would be constructed throughout the 2016-17 academic year so that the full suite could be offered in 2017-18. For the first offering of the pilot course we will focus directly on the central issues listed above.

The four proposed modular classes will all fall under the following broad course theme of “Challenging Perspective: Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Identities”

1. Introduction to Indigenous Cultures, Ways of Knowing, Histories, Colonialism, Identities, Rights, and Ally-building (pilot course)
2. Introduction to Indigenous Governance, Colonialism, Politics, Economics, and Rights
3. Introduction to Indigenous Voice, Colonialism, Music, Literature, Performance, Art
4. Introduction to Indigenous Health, Colonialism, Body, Science, and Education 

All four classes will be coordinated by the new faculty hire (Academic Programming designation) in the Department of Indigenous Studies (appointment starts July 1, 2016).

The Coordinator from Indigenous Studies will teach the first and last week modules in each of the courses. He/she will also attend the modules that are delivered by other participating faculty members from throughout the college. This ensures a sense of continuity for students, and also provides the Department of Indigenous Studies with enhanced, but not exclusive, oversight of messaging in the course, and modular curricula.

Other faculty from the Department of Indigenous Studies, together with contributing faculty from other departments, will teach individual modules beyond the introductory and capstone weeks.

To teach the modules, preference will be given to Indigenous faculty members and non-Indigenous faculty members who have established records in Indigenous scholarship, curriculum/pedagogy, and community-engagement. But participation will be opened to any faculty member who embraces the spirit of this suite of classes and who wishes to be part of this collaborative curriculum.

Once all four courses have been developed, three of them will be taught as 50 minute lectures three times per week, and the other course will be offered as a once per week 3 hour evening class so as to accommodate students who have commitments and obligations during regular work hours.

There will be no tutorials or seminars. However, there will be one experiential fieldtrip (likely on a Saturday) to a site with appropriate cultural facilities such as Wanuskewin.

To help ensure that the course is beneficial to Indigenous students and does not create an excessively stressful situation through their exposure to potentially uncooperative and intellectually hostile students within the lecture hall, there will be opportunities for Indigenous students to meet safely in groups outside of regular class time. We envision this being facilitated through the Gordon Oakes Red Bear Student Centre. These non-mandatory out-of-class-gatherings will be somewhat similar to the College’s learning communities.

There will be two equally weighted multiple-choice midterm exams, as well as a cumulative multiple choice final exam. Participating faculty members must provide their exam questions to the class coordinator within one week of delivering their lectures.

Participating faculty must provide a list of readings to the class coordinator three months prior to the starting date of the class so they can be included in the class syllabus. Faculty are encouraged to use open access digital readings.

Faculty cannot be expected to teach modules in this suite of classes as overload or simply out of the goodness of their hearts. To ensure due credit is given to contributing instructors and departments, we could envision the College approving an arrangement such as this, for example:

Faculty who participate in teaching modules in these classes will generate TABBS credits for their home department. A single week-long module will result in 1/12 of the TABBS credits going to the participating faculty’s home department. Department Heads are asked to consider these contributions when assigning teaching. In this way, we are not prescribing a particular way to compensate participating faculty, but rather are creating a situation where participating faculty and departments can adjust to their academic unit’s particular circumstances. For example, in recognition of the TABBS resources generated by contributing one or more modules to the suite of classes, a department head might reduce the participating faculty member’s teaching load or committee responsibilities.

With 2,000 students per year registering in the suite of classes (500 per class), a single module from a single class would bring the equivalent RAM resources of an undergraduate class with 42 registered students.

What we are proposing her is both innovative and complicated. It has implications beyond those who will be immediately involved in delivering the course and it will be of interest to people from other colleges on campus as well as to faculty and administrators at other campuses. As such, its important to get this right and its important to recognize the original research relating to the scholarship of teaching and learning that is involved. We therefore are requesting that a resource commitment be made by the College for three years to support research and evaluation of the process. These resources will be used to hire a research assistant, for example, and to ensure that we are providing faculty with ongoing evaluations throughout the process. These resources will be deployed in such a way so as to ensure a publication at the end of the process.

In late December, 2015, Dean Gordon DesBrisay invited us to join a working group tasked with devising criteria for identifying classes throughout the college from which students would select 3cu to meet the College’s new Aboriginal distribution requirement. When we met in late January several of the committee members (including myself) expressed strong reservations over whether the proposed model would meet the learning objectives that inspired the proposal. Other reservations also emerged. These can be summarized as:

• The approach was reminiscent of a dated pedagogy that regarded increasing “Aboriginal awareness” as the key goal. Such a pedagogy had been shown to be inadequate in terms of significantly altering people’s attitudes towards Indigenous people and about Indigenous issues, especially in areas beyond what was formerly referred to as “Native arts, crafts, and culture.” We did not want to replicate this.
• We were concerned that regardless of what criteria we came up with, the process would not be able to ensure that a given course was being delivered in a way that met the original criteria. This is because courses necessarily and organically change over time. A class the had been originally proposed and approved in one year could not be expected to have the same syllabus and readings and assignments over time. The committee felt that it would be impossible for the College to monitor developments in classes once they had been approved so as to ensure that they consistently met the criteria each time they were offered.
• We also were concerned that even if class content (readings and assignments etc) could be kept consistent, that the people who teach the classes in any given year (despite individual faculty competencies in terms of course content and subject matter) might not have adequate training in, and familiarity with, Indigenous protocols and culture sensitivity so as to ensure that the class was offered in a manner that consistently created a welcoming and fully safe environment for Indigenous and other students.
• We also felt that no one class, and no one instructor, could offer a class that would fully meet the spirit and intent of the vision behind the Aboriginal distribution requirement. Its not that we felt that certain classes or certain instructors were inadequate and others were not, but rather that we felt that ALL classes and all instructors were inherently inadequate on their own.
• We were also concerned that the process of identifying and certifying particular classes would create competitions within the College for tuition revenues under the Resource Allocation Model. With roughly 2,000 students entering the college each year departments that did not offer one or more approved classes would be disadvantaged. This might cause some departments to devise and offer classes with Indigenous content not because it reflected faculty expertise and interest or departmental curricular priorities, but because it provided a way to generate tuition revenues and to stave off losses of potential majors to other departments who “caught the students first.” We did not see this as in the interests of Indigenous or non-Indigenous students and we did not want to participate in setting up a process that fostered competition rather than cooperation between departments. 

Given our reservations with the originally proposed Aboriginal distribution requirement model we next worked to try and identify alternatives. We were informed that alternative option that had apparently been floated earlier was to place responsibility for the mandatory 3 cu classes in the hands of a single department. After some discussion we came to a consensus that this approach also had serious weaknesses. For one thing, it would place a huge service-teaching load on a particular department – and even with increased TABBS resources this seemed unfair to a single academic unit. Second, we agreed that such an approach would suffer from some of the same weaknesses that plagued the original proposal (class content and instructors would change and be beyond the purview of colleagues from other departments to monitor etc…). Finally, we felt that by placing the full responsibility for meeting this requirement in a single department we were placing unreasonable expectation on the faculty in that department. As mentioned above, we had already come to a consensus that no one faculty member and no one class would be able to adequately meet the spirit and intent behind the Aboriginal distribution requirement initiative.

As a result, we have proposed a new model. We do not regard this as a compromise between the two earlier proposed positions. Indeed, we see it as having pedagogical and curricular merit that transcends either of the other two proposals. That does not mean that it is perfect. It has certain weaknesses and shortcomings that we fully acknowledge. But it is poised to accomplish more than the other options, and it holds within it seeds for building cooperation and collaborations that we hope and expect will go beyond teaching to shape and inform our collective scholarly and artistic work.