Truth and then reconciliation research: an emerging field of educational studies

Abstract

In the past 25 years, state sanctioned apologies for historical atrocities have become a neoliberal norm in many countries around the world. These apologies are often followed by commitments to policy enactments of truth, and then reconciliation education. In Canada, First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Survivors of colonial injustices have long-called for the truths that they have courageously shared to be taught in schools across the country. In their positions as settler teacher educators, the authors examine exactly how such truth-telling are re-storied as part of an emerging field of truth, and then reconciliation education research. Drawing on recent research done by educational researchers in Faculties of Education across Canada, the authors maintain that settler colonialism can be unlearned through ethical relationality, truth-telling and listening, and pedagogical moves that re-story our collective pasts in ways that strengthen Indigenous communities while politicizing the nation-state's settler colonial creation stories as ones of forgetting as much as remembering selective historical truths. The authors conclude that although there are challenges and limitations toward the ways in which truth and then reconciliation educational research is conceived and lived across the different settler colonial educational systems, possibilities are realized when we seek to learn from and in collaboration with First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples.