Index
Download a pdf booklet of the Symposium 
The IMAGINING Symposium & Guiding Prompt
The IMAGINING symposium seeks to document and learn from the innovative and emergent work on pedagogies of reconciliation happening in Canada, and to create new pedagogical spaces that recognize the processes of remembrance, forgiveness, and forgetting needed to take up The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s (TRC) Calls to Action for education. IMAGINING brings together a diverse group of scholars who are working in between the spaces of environmental justice/sustainability, law, education, social work, Indigeneity, art and narrative methods of representation in a two day virtual symposium on June 22 & 23/2020, hosted through McGill University (Montreal, QC) and supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. In addition to the scholars, artists, lawyers, community members, youth, teachers and others engaged in sharing their perspectives on the broad theme outlined above, the public and invited participants are encouraged to consider the following guiding questions as part of our collective IMAGINING.
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How have various pedagogies been used with students, teachers and communities to explore and learn about Indigenous perspectives, topics and histories, even without any reference specifically to working towards reconciliation? |
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What are our visions for interdisciplinary pedagogies of reconciliation that include reconciliation with the land, people and self? What elements or structures are currently missing for us to realize these visions? |
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With regard to reconciliation in a settler state, what tensions are generative and what tensions are incommensurable? What are our accountabilities to Indigenous sovereignty as central to reconciliation? OR How do we enact our responsibility to Indigenous sovereignty? |
A word from the Organizing Committee
Although IMAGINING is now taking place virtually, the original in-person symposium was planned to take place at McGill University which is located on land which has long served as a site of meeting and exchange amongst Indigenous peoples, including the Haudenosaunee and Anishinabeg nations. McGill honours, recognizes and respects these nations as the traditional stewards of the lands and waters. Together, we the organizing committee, wish to take this opportunity to welcome everyone who is a presenter, discussant, contributor, musician, volunteer or participant. We are thrilled that you have chosen to engage deeply with us around IMAGINING new visions for pedagogies of reconciliation and what tensions across systems, ontologies and disciplines are generative and which ones are incommensurable. We invite you to read our bios. below and to spend some time engaging with the information on our website.
Mindy R. Carter,
PhD
Principal Investigator
Associate Professor, DISE, McGill University
Mindy R. Carter is an Associate Professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University, Canada. Her research focuses on teacher identity, and on using the arts to foster culturally responsible pedagogies. Carter’s “CREATE: Creativity Research in Education using Artful inquiry for societal Transformation and intercultural Exchange” research program has received Fonds de recherche du Quebec (2015-2018) and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council funding (2017-2020). She is currently the Vice-President of the Canadian Society for the Study of Education’s Curriculum Studies special interest group and the Chair of the Artful Inquiry Research Group (AIRG) at McGill (2020).
Elaine (Ying) Huang,
PhD
Co-Investigator
Research Associate, McGill University
Ying-Syuan (Elaine) Huang is a Research Associate of the Faculty of Education at McGill University. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering at National Taiwan Normal University and a Master of Arts degree in Education and Society at McGill University. Her research focuses on policies and practices related to science education, teacher education, and sustainable development. For her doctoral study, she examines Taiwan's policy initiatives for implementing UNESCO’s Education for Sustainable Development framework.
Claudia Mitchell,
PhD
Co-Investigator
Distinguished James McGill Professor, McGill University
Claudia Mitchell is a Distinguished James McGill Professor in the Faculty of Education, McGill University and an Honorary Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. At McGill she is the Director of the Institute for Human Development and Well-being and the founder and director of the Participatory Cultures Lab, a research and training unit in the Faculty of Education, funded through the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI). Her research focuses on participatory visual and arts based approaches to working with young people and communities in relation to addressing critical social issues such as gender equality and gender-based violence and in a wide range of country contexts in West Africa, Southern and Eastern Africa, and East Asia Pacific. She currently leads several l funded projects focusing on girl-led ‘from the ground up’ policy making to address sexual violence with Indigenous girls in Canada and South Africa. She is the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of the award-winning journal Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. She is the author and co-editor of 30 books including Disrupting shameful legacies: Girls and young women speaking back through the arts to address sexual violence and Participatory visual methodologies in global public health.
Sandrina de Finney,
PhD
Co-Investigator
Associate Professor, Faculty of Human and Social Development, University of Victoria, Lekwungen and WSANEC homelands
Sandrina is a lead researcher with Sisters Rising: Honouring Indigenous Body and Land Sovereignty (sistersrising.uvic.ca), an Indigenous-led project supporting Indigenous responses to gendered and sexualized violence. Sisters Rising promotes intergenerational, youth-engaged, land- and water-based gender and sexual wellbeing frameworks that recenter Indigenous knowledges and practices of body-land sovereignty.
Teresa Strong-Wilson,
PhD
Co-Investigator
Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, McGill University
Teresa Strong-Wilson is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at McGill University and editor-in-chief of the McGill Journal of Education. She is interested in memory, literacy/ies, stories, teachers, curriculum studies, and social justice education. She has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals, including Changing English, Educational Theory, Journal of Curriculum Studies, and Teachers and Teaching. She has co-/authored and/or co- edited several books on curriculum, teaching and change: Provoking Curriculum Encounters (Strong-Wilson, Ehret, Lewkowich & Chang-Kredl, 2020); The Emperor’s New Clothes?: Issues and Alternatives in Uses of the Portfolio in Teacher Education Programs (Sanford & Strong-Wilson; 2014), Productive Remembering and Social Agency (Strong-Wilson, Mitchell, Allnutt & Pithouse-Morgan; 2013), Envisioning New Technologies in Teacher Practice (Strong-Wilson et al., 2012), Memory and Pedagogy (Mitchell, Strong-Wilson, Pithouse & Allnutt; 2011), and Bringing Memory Forward: Storied Remembrance in Social Justice Education with Teachers (Strong-Wilson; 2008). A forthcoming book (Routledge) focuses on teachers’ ethical self-encounters with counter-stories in the classroom.
Dawn Wiseman,
PhD
Co-Investigator
Dawn Wiseman, Associate Professor, School of Education, Bishop’s University
Dr. Wiseman’s work focuses on the manner in which Indigenous and Western ways of knowing, being, and doing might circulate together in STEM/STEAM teaching and learning (kindergarten through post-secondary education) by examining how interactions and interrelationships between policy, practitioners, and practice create, maintain, or collapse the possibilities for such circulation. While the research has a heavy theoretical component, it emerges from what educators do in classrooms and how those acts of doing, impact student learning and understandings. She is particularly interested in student-directed inquiry emerging from relationships with place and Land, the development of locally meaningful STEM/STEAM, unlearning colonialism, and the roles and obligations of educators in terms of redressing relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, peoples, and communities in what is currently Canada.
Symposium Material
Future Projections
Coming Soon
We would also like to acknowledge the Social Society and Humanities Research Council of Canada, LEARN Quebec, Vanguard School, McGill University, CREATE!, The IHDW and Artful Inquiry Research Group (AIRG) for their generous contributions to this symposium.
We would also like to thank our symposium volunteers for their contributions
Marta Cotrim
Marta Cotrim is a PhD candidate at DISE at McGill. Her doctoral research focuses on Posthumanism and Drama/Theatre Education, re-thinking Teacher Training and Professional Development. She holds MA in Dance Anthropology from the University of Surrey. She has completed her BA in Theatre Studies at Paris 8 and Performance at the Art School of Amsterdam.
Darshan Daryanani
Darshan Daryanani, a Senior at McGill University, is pursuing a joint honours degree in Political Science and International Development Studies with minors in Social Entrepreneurship and Communications Studies. This summer, as Global Health Scholar supported by the John Locke Churchill Scholars Award, Darshan is interested to learn about the roles that leadership, policy-making and education play for reconciliation between the federal and provincial governments of Canada and Indigenous nations. He is looking forward to the informative and productive dialogue between key scholars, community members and the general public.
Mary Lynne Loftus
Mary Lynne Loftus is a Political Science, Communications and Canadian Ethnic and Racial Studies student going into her final year at McGill. Passionate about advocacy and community engagement, Mary Lynne previously worked at Minister of Justice and Attorney-General of Canada David Lametti’s constituency office. She is currently a Research Intern at the McGill Institute for Human Development and Well Being and is delighted to be part of the IMAGINING Symposium team.
Christopher Orr
Christopher Orr is a PhD candidate in the Economics for the Anthropocene (E4A) project at McGill University in Montreal, Canada and is an Earth System Governance Research Fellow. His doctoral research focuses on understanding deep transformations in society-nature relationships and explores their dynamics in the context of Canadian climate change politics. He holds a B.Sc. in Physics and Environmental Science from the University of Toronto and an M.S. from McGill University. His Master’s research focused on the legitimacy of collaborative watershed governance in Quebec. He recently co-edited Liberty and the Ecological Crisis: Freedom on a Finite Planet.
