Rosiek, JerrySnyder, James2022-10-042022-10-042022-10-04https://hdl.handle.net/1794/27607DISSERTATION ABSTRACT James Snyder Doctor of Philosophy Department of Education Studies June 2022 Title: Teaching with Indigenous Commonsense: Indigenizing Teacher Practice Teaching topics on Indigenous people and culture can be challenging for educators in K-12 classrooms for a multitude of reasons. This dissertation examines the epistemological complexities that teaching Indigenous identity, cultural teachings, and futurities are met with in mainstream classrooms. In the early chapters, I spend time describing what I mean by using the phrase Indigenous commonsense. The core of this idea is that teaching and learning only occurs in relation to others, otherwise it has no context, and without context it has no meaning or significance. Learning in a good way requires ensuring the health of those relationships (Merculieff & Roderick, 2013; Wilson, 2008). However, even the most well-intentioned educators who do provide Indigenous standpoints in their teaching (authors, invited guest, contemporary perspectives) seldom account for how the processes through which Western epistemology filter and constrain how Indigenous people and teachings can be “known” by learners. In this study I was compelled to provide an analysis’ for how challenging teaching Indigenous topics are when attempting to be answerable to the goal of unsettling the influences of colonialism. To do this, I offered stories of classroom experiences shared by Indigenous educators. In chapter IV I looked at what some basic inclusion of Indigenous perspectives would mean in a middle school English Language Arts curriculum. This chapter analyzes the ways in which curriculum can be answerable to interrupting the multiple colonial epistemic maneuvers that attempt to confine Indigenous people’s identities and cultural memories. In chapter V I examined the process for how, in many cases, Indigenous epistemologies come to be “known” through Western epistemological reading habits. This research was prompted by an interview with an Indigenous educator who shared the story of their experience of reading Indigenous philosophical texts in a graduate course with majority non-Native students. The primary purpose of this analysis was to invite educators to contemplate, through the acts of remembering or forgetting, who’s or what futurity their chosen curriculum and teaching method is manifesting.en-USAll Rights Reserved.IndigenizationIndigenous educationSettler colonialismTeacher educationElectronic Thesis or Dissertation