Circle as pedagogy: Aboriginal tradition enacted in a university classroom.

Abstract

This thesis undertakes to describe and analyze an educational process undertaken in an effort to revitalize Aboriginal Traditional culture within a contemporary Western institutional location. Epistemologies of a Traditional worldview---immanence, balance and interconnectedness---are revealed as the foundations upon which our Self-In-Relation is constructed. The role of experience, voice and humor are noted in Aboriginal pedagogies. Tribal worldviews were disrupted by colonialism, as is this narrative. A critical interrogation of the foundations of Eurocentrism is inserted as necessary historical context for the current revitalization struggles.

The research project itself evolved as an analysis of students' journals, and Talking Circles held with participants from the Native, Black, Asian and White Communities on the themes of Consciousness, Context, Community, Change and Visions. The Medicine Wheel, an Aboriginal guiding metaphor, gives form and direction to both the description and critical analysis of the teaching Model-In-Use in a Cross Cultural Issues for Social Workers (CCI) classroom. This thesis reveals what participants learned and taught about: developing heightened consciousness about oppression, racism, privilege and culture; the introduction of aspects of Aboriginal Tradition into the university classroom; building community relations within the classroom, as well as between the profession of social work and members of diverse cultural Communities; and change as involving both a "personal" commitment to altering one's Self-In-Relation in multiple contexts, as well as through enacting activism collectively with others.

Introducing this combination of Aboriginal and critical philosophies and pedagogies, particularly given the Eurocentric nature of the university context, is fraught with contradictions. These are raised in the form of questions critically interrogating multiple aspects of the process itself, and the context in which it took place. Issues of language as a medium of knowing; the "service-role" of "minority" educators; adaptation or appropriation of Tradition; "negative" feelings enacted as resistance by students; and the endangering potentials of taking an activist position are the focus. Finally, visioning is theorized as a necessary component to sustainable critical engagement.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 1996.