\u201cWe were never meant to be squares. We are circles and circles with Creation.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was a member of the audience who, with soft urgency,\nreminded everyone in the room whose heads had swiveled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I recently had the pleasure of attending the 2019 conference\nfor CACUSS (Canadian Association for College and University Student Services)\nin Calgary, Alberta. The jury is still out (expected back soon) but this may\nhave been the best conference I have ever attended. I made one of the most\nfruitful decisions of my career and attended a number of streams on Indigenization\nand Decolonization and kicked it all off with a session on decolonizing\nassessment. I am a scholar in\neducational psychology, a colonial stronghold. I have connection and experience\nto Indigeneity in a number of personal and private ways, but I have not delved\ninto the literature to any degree worth noting. I made the decision to enter\nthe frame quietly and humbly, with curiosity because it\u2019s respectful to do so\nin any new frame (cultural, linguistic, historical, or otherwise) but also\nbecause I didn\u2019t want to assert in a place of rebuilding and reconciliation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I wanted to recognize being a settler and decided that the\nbest way to do that was to keep quiet, at least until I knew more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After the session, I touched this magnetic audience member\non the shoulder. \u201cThank you so much for your thoughts. I really liked what you\nsaid.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
He looked deeply into my eyes, all the way down into my arteries,\nput his hand on his chest, and said thank you. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Circle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I think I broke the circle. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I think I broke the circle by asking all those grown-up,\nmeasuring questions that The Little Prince (de St – Exupery, 1945) abhorred,\nthe ones that make you think you have learned something about a person when you\nhave learned nothing. Where do you work. What do you do. Have you been doing it\nfor long. I stammered and stumbled, horrendously shy, feeling my betrayal. I\nmade a quick escape shortly after.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since, I have been overcome and can\u2019t stop thinking about\ncircles. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Colonialism has translated to measuring, showing value,\nhierarchically developing ways of knowing. It means validating, objectifying,\npulling into line, and marginalizing that which cannot be pulled into line. It\nmeans creating squares and boundaries and cutoffs and lines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Decolonizing is to break it all down. To start with\nyourself, to know where you are and where you have been. Unwinding oppression\nmeans that you start with unwinding yourself and recognize your gifts.\nDecolonizing means that we work first on relationships and recognize the\nimbeddedness of our lives, our history, and our thinking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I think that decolonizing is important in Universal Design\nfor Learning. In our modern times, as we search for new solutions to climate\nchange, plastic pollution, pipelines, poverty, and disenfranchisement, we talk\nabout connectedness and we talk about relationships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don\u2019t think it goes far enough. If we are going to look at\neducation in terms of universal design, I would like to argue that universal<\/em> goes beyond \u201call people who\ncould be in your class\u201d and \u201call the ways that people can vary\u201d. It stretches\noutward, way beyond into shared and unshared history, our animalism, our\nbelonging, our radiance, our gifts, and our darkness. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Indigenization can mean that we universalize on the grounds\nof a shared journey, on the whole being. We can universally design, thinking about circles,\non the way our histories and humanness are knitted together. I\u2019m not sure what\nelse to say or how to get there but in offering choice and different ways of\ndemonstrating knowing, I feel that we may have a way, at least in education, to\nunravel, to recognize our own gifts and in turn, recognize each other\u2019s. Maybe\nit\u2019s a way education can feel like thank you, right down to our arteries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cWe were never meant to be squares. We are circles and circles with Creation.\u201d It was a member of the audience who, with soft urgency, reminded everyone in the room whose heads had swiveled. I recently had the pleasure of attending the 2019 conference for CACUSS (Canadian Association for College and University Student Services) in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","iawp_total_views":7,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84],"tags":[54,53,41,42],"class_list":["post-237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-universal-design-for-learning","tag-decolonization","tag-indigenization","tag-udl","tag-universal-design-learning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":240,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237\/revisions\/240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}