Exploring Anti-colonial Pedagogical Practices as an Intervention Supporting Community Planning

Dring was awarded a SSHRC Insight Development grant to explore the potential of anti-colonial pedagogical practices as an intervention to support community planning and rural development.

Colonial and racialized legacies in Canada play a central role in understanding the systemic inequities facing Indigenous, Black, Brown, and Asian peoples. Planning and educational programs, policies, and practices are increasingly called upon to address these inequities. However, there is an emerging concern that mainstream solutions may reflect, reproduce, and amplify uneven social, political, and economic relations. This project explores interventions that may enable Settler peoples and institutions to responsibly engage with divesting from dominant colonial ideas of community planning and rural development. In British Columbia, prescriptions and approaches for integrating de/anti-colonial practices into community planning processes remain unclear, particularly when there is resistance to engagement with critiques of colonialism. In addition, there is a need for active experimentation in operationalizing theoretical developments so that communities can imagine and enact diverse alternatives to a dominant, universalized Eurocentric onto-epistemology. These alternatives aim to generate socially and ecologically ethical relationships of accountability between non-Indigenous peoples, Indigenous peoples, and the places they share and call ‘home.’

The proposed research methodology for this project is community-engaged and qualitative, with a focus on using phenomenography and case study approaches to unpack the complex sociocultural processes that reproduce colonial beings. These methodologies will support the application of an anti-colonial planning framework to understand ways of developing accountable, reciprocal, and respectful Settler-Indigenous relations in Prince Rupert, British Columbia. The framework has been developed explicitly to prevent enculturation of colonial ways of being, to reveal Eurocentric patterns foundational to a colonial form of food planning and rural development; and to support relational accountability across sociocultural difference.

Our research questions are: (1) How can anti-colonial pedagogical approaches be developed to support identity development that enables new ways of knowing, alternative to the dominant onto-epistemology? (2) How (if at all) do these approaches contribute to the emergence and creation of ethical relationships? (3) What lessons can be learned from successes and failures from implementing these approaches? These questions will be answered through two streams of research activities: a) Delivery of CPKs and workshops with community members in the case study region that explore the effects of anti-colonial pedagogical activities; b) Interviews employing qualitative and community-based research methods to document lessons learned about how to enact relational onto-epistemologies in food planning and rural development.

This research aims at furthering scholarly and community knowledge and practice of relational forms of community planning and rural development. Providing creative and supportive anticolonial pedagogical activities supports communities to respond to complex challenges, and potentially, the implementation of anti-colonial practices to bridge communities in historical dissonance. By doing so, this investigation contributes to an emerging body of literature moves beyond the discursive binary of Settler/Indigenous. The new knowledge generated, and knowledge mobilization activities will lead to further research into this area, increased models for others to learn from, and increased capacity to imagine and enact anti-colonial, relational futures.