David A. Robertson’s 52 Ways to Reconcile: How to Walk with Indigenous Peoples on the Path to Healing provides a quick guidebook for how non-Indigenous people can begin to answer the collective call for reconciliation. Following Week #46 Don’t Ask Indigenous People to Do the Work, this series of conversations will be specifically geared towards how non-Indigenous educators can do the work of integrating reconciliation into their teaching practice.
As Robertson writes in Week #50 Be a Teacher, “Talk to friends. Talk to your colleagues. Talk to a stranger” (p. 191), the sessions emphasize conversation as a method of teaching and learning. We will begin each session with a facilitator-led overview of the section and share tangible takeaways on how we bring some of these prompts into practice. Participants will be invited to share their strategies and ideas on integrating indigenous content and pedagogies in their classrooms.
Running the sessions through a Talking Circle, we’ll see how different people, in different disciplinary contexts, have connected to the work of reconciliation, sharing resources and knowledge with each other depending on where we are each arriving from.
The following sections of 52 Ways to Reconcile will be discussed in each session:
1. February 3: Examples (#1 to 18)
2. February 10: Histories (#19 to 37)
3. February 24: Present and Futures (#38 to 52)
Participants can join all three sessions or sign up for a standalone session.