Through children’s eyes: Elementary students respond to the impacts of Indian residential schools

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to explore young students' perceptions about the impacts of Indian residential schools. A hopeful era of reconciliation has been ushered in to confront the injustices committed to approximately 150,000 indigenous children and youth in Canada’s Indian residential schools in the not-so-distant past. Of these children, there were at least 6,000 recorded deaths; those who survived, faced the devastating impacts of forced assimilation. In the spirit of making “relation to and with the past, opening us to a reconsideration of the terms of our lives now as well as in the future” (Simon, 2006, p. 189), the author invited eight- and nine-year-olds to depict their thoughts about Indian residential schools.

Design/methodology/approach

A practitioner inquiry stance was used in this study. This approach takes into account that teachers are uniquely positioned to carry out highly contextualized classroom research. The data include a documentary analysis, observations of students’ work and short interview-like prompts. The data also included stimulated recall using student-participant responses to elicit feelings, thoughts, attitudes and beliefs (Freeman, 1998). A collaborative approach to the data analysis“engaging the author’s own and students’ interpretations of their work”allowed for a range of perspectives that address representativeness (Cornish et al., 2014).

Findings

Students’ representations reveal that even young children engage in political thought by understanding governance structures that are impinged upon young lives in Indian residential schools. The students in this study positioned themselves as “cultural citizens” (Kuttner, 2015) by contributing compelling ideas on power, relationships, displacement, assimilation and identity, in their mixed media texts. Rather than reducing what they had learned only to questions of oppression, they proposed possibilities of living a more ethical present by including teachings about living more ethically than those that have come before them.

Originality/value

This work aims to deepen decolonizing possibilities in classroom research, particularly in elementary classrooms.

Citation

Bascuñán, D. (2016), "Through children’s eyes: Elementary students respond to the impacts of Indian residential schools", English Teaching: Practice & Critique, Vol. 15 No. 3, pp. 450-460. https://doi.org/10.1108/ETPC-09-2016-0109