Leadership as Métissage: Seeking to Indigenize our faculty of education

Abstract

As a faculty of education, we have ethical, professional, and legal commitments that compel us to make meaningful and significant contributions to reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. This work is long overdue, justice has too long been denied, the ongoing legacies of colonization that play out through education need to be disrupted now. Yet this work must be done in a good way, decolonization is required, many complexities exist stemming from the past and present dominance of Eurocentric knowledge in our society, K-12, and post-secondary education systems. The authors of this paper made up all of the full-time staff members in a faculty of education. We used a collaborative scholarship of teaching and learning research project and a Métissage methodology to seek to collectively lead the Indigenization of learning, teaching, leadership, and scholarship in our faculty. In braided narrative vignettes, we situate ourselves in relationship to this work, explore tensions and complexities, wrestle with axiological considerations, reflect on practices we have engaged in, share how we have taken up this work with our students, colleagues, and school partners, identify questions and steps in front of us, and reflect on how Métissage has served as a shared leadership process to support the Indigenization of our faculty and our University as a whole. Our stories are situated in a Bachelor of Education after degree program that serves approximately 120 students located in the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Tsuut’ina Nation, and the Stoney Nakoda Nations.