RRU introduces Graduate Certificate in Decolonizing Education Systems
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A previous article did not accurately reflect the grounding, governance, or intentions of the Graduate Certificate in Decolonizing Education Systems. What follows is a clarification of the program as it was designed and is being held.
The Graduate Certificate in Decolonizing Education Systems (GCDES) at Royal Roads University is a graduate-level offering grounded in Indigenous governance, relational accountability, and responsibilities to land, water, sky, and communities. The certificate was collectively, intentionally designed to be interdisciplinary and is not organized around prescriptive outcomes or linear models of change.
More than a decade has passed since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its 94 Calls to Action, including multiple calls that speak directly to education, professional training and post-secondary institutions. While governments and institutions continue to respond unevenly, educators and adult learning professionals are grappling with how colonial systems persist and how responsibility might be taken up differently within their own contexts of practice.
The GCDES is a nine-credit, fully online program completed over approximately seven months. It brings together a community of learners from a range of (professional) roles and positionalities — including early childhood education, K–12, higher education, community organizations, and other professional learning settings — to engage with the complexity of decolonizing educational systems and relationships.
The certificate is intentionally interdisciplinary and is not organized around prescriptive outcomes or linear models of change. Instead, it emphasizes relational and intellectual rigour, affective responsibility, and emergent learning. Students and instructors engage with course materials, assignments, and one another guided by what is most generative and significant within their work and life contexts, and by what may be asked of them — and sometimes of others — in efforts to unsettle colonial systems, beliefs and practices.
Assessment within the certificate is ungraded and aligned with certificate-level learning outcomes. This approach is intentional: shedding a traditional grading structure is meant to open space for deeper learning focused on responsibility, reflection, and application within complex and diverse contexts. Students have flexibility in how they pursue assignments, guided by what is most meaningful and appropriate within their respective professional and community settings.
Online delivery supports both flexibility and immediacy, enabling learners to engage with course concepts while applying insights in real time within their own contexts, with the support of a learning community. The program does not presume to transform systems or to offer decolonization as a completed outcome. Rather, it makes space for critical engagement, imagination, and experimentation, while remaining attentive to the risks of reproducing the very logics and relations it seeks to unsettle.
The certificate is comprised of three courses: Settler Decolonization, Decolonizing Educational Systems, and Decolonizing Educational Relationships. Together, these courses invite sustained engagement with colonial foundations, contemporary systems, and the relational dimensions of educational work.
Settler Decolonization focuses on historical and ongoing processes of settler colonialism in Canada and beyond. Learners examine social location, emplacement, and responsibility, and consider how individual and collective orientations are shaped within settler colonial systems. The course asks participants to contend with complexity and to resist binary framings that reduce colonial relationships to fixed identities or roles.
Decolonizing Educational Systems differentiates key concepts such as Indigenous resurgence, Indigenization, reconciliation, and decolonization, and examines how these are often conflated in educational discourse. The course explores how colonial systems are produced and maintained, and how they may be disrupted through practices grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing, land- and place-based learning, and community-embedded approaches.
Decolonizing Educational Relationships attends to the relational dimensions of educational work, including accountability, consent, and responsibility. Rather than offering techniques for relationship-building, the course emphasizes the conditions under which relationships are possible, ethical, and sustainable, and the limits of relational work within colonial institutions.
The Graduate Certificate in Decolonizing Education Systems does not position itself as a solution, a model to be replicated, or a pathway to expertise. It is a collective learning space that holds uncertainty, responsibility, and restraint as central to the work. Public representations of this program must therefore remain accountable to its grounding in Indigenous governance and to the ongoing relational work that such accountability requires.