Knowing Community through Story: It's Where We Come Together

Abstract

As PhD students and sessional lecturers, we undertook a collaborative narrative study* to explore our pedagogical and curricular approaches to decolonizing a community development course offered in our College of Education. We gathered our conversations, reflective journals, and notes, then wove together the narratives thematically using a métissage research methodology. We discovered ways we come together in the spaces in-between our different experiences, backgrounds, and worldviews, as Indigenous and non-Indigenous educators, decolonizing our curriculum and our students’ classroom experience. This paper shares one of the thematic braids we created, focused on the use of story for research, story as pedagogy and story for building relationships. We encourage educators to consider bridging their worldviews with other ways of seeing and knowing, to work toward decolonizing their teaching practices using story, and to form relationships across differences using story.