Curriculum & Resources

Joanna reflected upon the Nova Scotian curriculum she teaches, including African Canadian Studies and Mi’kmaq Studies. She believes in supplementing the curriculum to include community voices and resources. Joanna said the “biggest strength and weakness is that our curriculum outcomes are so large.” 

Joanna suggested that the curriculum could be improved by having “more guidance when teaching culturally sensitive topics.” Joanna said the curriculum should represent community-based knowledge and she suggested “reaching out to communities and understanding how they want their history to be represented… to ensure that different perspectives are being reflected, but also respected.” For Joanna, reaching out to community leaders is essential to “make sure that you are delivering their material with care.” As she said, “these are people’s lives that are still being impacted from historical traumas and have been historically silenced.” 

Joanna, who belongs to the African Canadian community, explained that “I haven’t been taught about how impactful my communities have been; I’ve never seen myself reflected in my history courses.” Joanna added, “I’m able to bring a perspective to a hegemonic community that has maybe only seen history from a certain perspective: the dominant culture’s perspective.” Joanna stated that these resources for her students who are “predominantly white, … add to their critical and socio-political consciousness.”

Joanna also emphasized how curriculum can be culturally responsive beyond content but also through method and assessment. She pointed out that “the Mi’kmaw Studies course is inquiry based,” which allows for students to “discover what the content means to them and how it connects to the histories that we’ve learned about.” Additionally, teaching “Mi’kmaw Studies shows there are different ways of expressing knowledge and knowing.” For Joanna, these approaches mean exploring oral histories and “giving my students an opportunity to reflect their learning back to me in ways that work for them and allows them to use two-eyed seeing to express their knowledge. Two-eyed seeing is based on viewing the world through both Western and Indigenous Knowledges and worldviews.”

Civic Engagement

Joanna uses historical perspectives in the classroom to highlight the context of social issues present in students’ own communities and to build students’ capacities to be social actors through action oriented activities.

On cultivating students’ ownership to engage, Joanna said, “what I can hope for as an educator is that I have created a sense of ‘my voice matters, too.’” She hopes through introducing community issues students see they “can either help change [their] situation or the situation of others by just investing their time, voice, and ideas.” As such, Joanna says her goal of teaching history is: “to have citizens that go out into the world and want to change it for the better.”

Joanna and students watched the documentary ‘There’s Something in the Water,’ based on the research by Dr. Ingrid Waldron. The proximity to one of the featured communities, Shelburne, allows “the students to see a community, right within the area that they live, facing environmental racism… the connection makes it real for them.” After watching, Joanna connected the students to an organization involved, who said that since the film, “not much has happened,” which confirms one of the symptoms of environmental racism: slow action. The students felt their responsibility to their nearby community and wanted to take action, asking “What do you mean, nothing’s happened? How can we help fix this?”

Joanna asks students to reflect on civic engagement that may go beyond their own lived experiences. She described an assignment surrounding the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as “a reflective piece to understand our responsibilities to take on the TRC as something that we are responsible for as citizens.” Joanna believes this approach “embodies what I try to teach my students, to be very reflective on the histories of Canada in order for us to address them and make for a better future.”

Co-created by Joanna Alphonso and Christine Moreau