Encounters with public art in teacher education: Timely pedagogies disrupting colonial relations with place

Abstract

Public art is placed in relation to its surroundings, conveying messages that are open to interpretation and thus proposing conversations between art/aesthetics, geography, histories and the subjectivity of the viewer. As such, it can engender possibilities to ‘politicize our relations with place’. Embracing the vision of a multidisciplinary assignment for an introductory course on place relations for first-year students in a Canadian teaching university, the authors designed an assignment of living inquiry with public art. The students placed themselves in relation to the art piece by studying the surrounding area of the artwork, embracing the propositions of the piece, and responding to those propositions artistically and through writing. What does it mean to live on Indigenous land? It was imperative to introduce conversations about the different but interconnected concepts of place and land that house public art pieces. The authors envisioned teacher education beyond the limits of a positivist dominant developmental lens that constrains holistic and critical possibilities to embrace decolonial acts. They asked: How might pre-service education disrupt the colonial inheritance and practices rooted in early childhood education? The students critically reflected on their geopolitical position, the contemporary issues of our time and the implications for their journey of becoming educators.

Introduction

Public art has been the site of contradictory concerns. While some public art pieces are being protected from Russian bombardment in the war against Ukraine, others are being defaced or toppled in protest against colonial legacies that continue to oppress marginalized groups such as Black and Indigenous peoples in North America. This is the case in the USA, with the dousing of red paint on the statue of Christopher Columbus in protest against the ongoing violent manifestations of colonization (King, 2020). In Canada, colonial landmarks glorifying various forms of oppression of Indigenous peoples are being taken down. Such is the case of the countrywide statues of the first Canadian prime minister, Sir John Macdonald, who consolidated the formation of modern Canada by implementing Indigenous policies that forcibly assimilated and disenfranchised Indigenous people to the benefit of the European settler (Gray Smith, 2017). A source of historical pride for some, for Indigenous people, these monuments conjure up traumatic experiences and stand as a reminder of historical amnesia about the colonial project of the cultural genocide of Indigenous children by the residential schools of Canada. Tiffany Lethabo King (2020: 78) proposes that the defacing and toppling of colonial landmarks is a movement of resistance, becoming a place marker that brings attention to the ‘colonial unknowing’ about the harmful bravado of the colonizers.

For the purpose of this article, public art is defined as art pieces in the form of historical monuments and statues, as well as the contemporary artistry of murals and sculptures displayed in public spaces (Russel, 2004). Our aim was to generate a space of contestation (Leddy, 2014) of colonial-inscribed narratives of place conveyed or disrupted by public art. This article introduces and discusses our inquiry with public art in pre-service early childhood education. In our context, the course aimed at introducing a vision for the education of young children in British Columbia, Canada. This called for the interruption of colonial inheritances of teaching and learning (Government of British Columbia, 2019). To heed this call, we drew from Nxumalo's (2019) postulation for pedagogies that politicize relations with place to disrupt the predominantly Eurocentric narratives that obscure the Indigenous stories of place. We proposed a ‘living inquiry’ (Meyer, 2010) assignment that embraced an aesthetic vision of teaching as participation in political life (Moss, 2019). ‘Living inquiry’ with public art can render generative beginnings in the complex conversation about the pervasive manifestations of colonization as it begs for contextualized, place-attuned and self-attuned inquiries that challenge the predominantly universal developmental perspectives in the education of early childhood teachers. Our proposition of ‘living inquiry’ in pre-service teacher education is informed by various scholarly perspectives. However, the scope of this article prevents a more in-depth engagement with the scholarship that nurtured our work as instructors of early childhood pre-service teachers.

Our positionality

This article was written on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish, which include the Musqueam, Sechelt, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. As settler educators attending to content that concerns the histories and world views of Indigenous people, we acknowledge the limitations of our positionality. Elaine is an educator of European descent from Brazil, where she reckoned with the ongoing marginalization of Indigenous and Black people. She was educated during the military dictatorship in Brazil. As an Afghan educator, Tahmina experienced first hand the marginalization of minority ethnic groups. As immigrants to Canada, although our ancestors were not direct participants in the Canadian colonial project, we are implicated in the legacies of colonization in our countries of origin and here in Canada. We are aware that we benefit from living on the confiscated Indigenous lands of the Coast Salish people. We are joining our students in learning about the problematic history of colonization in Canada and its enduring acts in negating Indigenous rights. One of the limitations of our project is that, despite a commitment to social justice conveyed on paper, there is minimal representation of Indigenous and Black scholars in our post-secondary institution. Their voices are essential to disrupt the colonizing practices of academia.

We are concerned that our propositions to engage with Indigenous art pieces could misrepresent or reinforce romantic notions of a mythic other (Baloy, 2016). Rather than being taught about Indigenous iconography, the students sought the voice of the artist conveying the meanings of the symbols in the artwork. In our mutual commitment to seek the marginalized Indigenous stories of place, we partnered with the Museum of North Vancouver, which is committed to developing ethical partnerships with Indigenous communities. This collaborative work included the guidance of an Indigenous cultural programmer who no longer works at the museum and whose name we do not have permission to disclose. Her support for our assignment was instrumental in helping us navigate the complexities of attending to Indigenous public art in a predominantly settler-colonial context.

The project of ‘living inquiry’ in pre-service early childhood teacher education

We proposed a living-inquiry-inspired assignment that embraced aesthetic renderings of public artworks. The assignment asked the students to compose three responses interconnecting photographs and text. The students photographed, filmed and took notes about the relations between the artwork with its environment, namely, its materiality in interaction with light, rain, wind, geographical location, and the local histories of Indigenous presence on the lands housing the artwork. The students also analysed their situatedness and their trajectories on and to unceded Indigenous lands. The responses included course readings from both Indigenous and settler scholarship about place, settler colonialism and the history of the forced assimilation of Indigenous people. These are some of the questions that guided the students’ responses to/with their public art piece of choice: What is the history of its creation and what conversation does the artist(s) propose? How is the piece related to its location? How do the human and more-than-human presences interact with the art piece?

Teaching young children requires a disposition for worldliness, which Meyer (2010) conceptualizes as an unfolding process of attending to and participating in the world beyond ‘notions of the given’ in order to ‘imagine otherwise’ (88). Meyer describes the pedagogy of ‘living inquiry’ as the processes of attention to place in the form of ‘[s]hared investigations of the narratives, histories and realities into which we were born and now live and work’ (86). ‘Living inquiry’ proposes an attending to the nuances of our daily relations with the world to transcend what we look at without seeing and touch shoulders with without sensing. In that ‘living inquiry’ calls for a figuring of our relations with the world, it lent itself well as a pedagogical practice to counteract the limitations of developmental theories in pre-service teacher education. Over-reliant on normative theories of development, pre-service teacher programs dismiss the complexities of our worldly relations.

Since land confiscation is central to settler colonialism, we were interested in the students’ unique ways of perceiving the public art pieces in relation to the history of places from the marginalized perspectives of the people on whose unceded traditional territories cities are built. On this note, we take up Meyer’s notion of place within the practice of ‘living inquiry’:

[W]here am I? Attention to place as inquiry heightens our senses to both the physical and social textures of our surrounding environment, natural and artificial. Life takes place somewhere. Place is where we go, where we find ourselves, and where we live and ‘belong’. (Meyer, 2010: 86)

We invited pre-service teachers to identify the impact of a colonial mindset on our understandings of place relations and reimagine participation in public life. Given that place relations are enmeshed with the logic of settler colonialism (Wolfe, 2006), we will now briefly turn to a discussion of its enactments in advancing colonial imaginaries that disregard and suppress Indigenous world views of place. Seawright (2014: 565) contends that the settler state enacts ‘deliberate miseducation of children across subject positions in accordance with sanctioned legitimate knowledge’. The Indigenous perspective on place, land and Land (with a capital ‘L’) illuminates the strong relationships that Indigenous people have with the land (Styres, 2018). Albeit in small ways, we started addressing complex views, positioning land as a physical and metaphysical entity with sentience and agency. Even if we do not comprehend this spiritual connection with land, we have the ethical responsibility to acknowledge the Indigenous world views of place. Styres writes:

Place refers to physical geographic space and is defined by everything that is included in that space – also referred to as landscape, ecology, and/or environment – and is denoted as land (lower case ‘l’). Connected but distinct, Land (capital ‘L’) is more than physical geographic space. Land expresses a dual reality that refers not only to place as a physical geographic space but also to the underlying conceptual principles, philosophies, and ontologies of that space. (Styres, 2018: 27)

Our aim was not to explicate the complex onto-epistemology of Land; rather, the intention was to contest the settler-colonial discourses that dismiss the ancient wisdom embedded in the social and ecological land ethics espoused by Indigenous world views (Seawright, 2014). This, we hope, has the potential to counteract the purposeful miseducation of settlers dismissing the land rights of Indigenous people.

Through a pedagogy of ‘living inquiry’, the pre-service teachers were called on to experience and construct insights into the taken-for-granted encounters in our relations with place (Meyer, 2010). Eurocentric education tends to neglect or dismiss altogether Indigenous cosmologies and practices that sustain good relations with the land.

Timely pedagogies

Public art and monuments have a visible presence in many cities across unceded Coast Salish territories in what is (for now) called British Columbia. From standing monuments, sculptures and statues to street and architectural decorations, public art has taken many forms and has many purposes (Senie and Webster, 1998). Some monuments have been in a place for so long that the meaning they carry is disregarded. In May 2020, the murder of George Floyd by the police in the USA triggered protests against racism and police violence in many parts of the world. The legacies of colonial injustices of many kinds, including the value given to colonial statues, were questioned. Familiar art pieces in people's neighbourhoods made it into the news headlines. North America witnessed the destruction, removal and what is viewed by some as the vandalization of public monuments. On the night of 24 June 2015, in the North End of Boston in Christopher Columbus Park, the statue of Christopher Columbus was tagged with the words ‘Black Lives Matter’. King (2020) asserts that the intentional defacement of long-standing colonial figures is perhaps a way to make visible or give voice to what remains unspoken or unthought.

Paradoxically, the world has witnessed not only the removal of public statues and monuments but also their protection. In the second phase of the Taliban regime, Afghan artists in Kabul buried their paintings to prevent them from being destroyed. In Kharkiv, Ukraine, sand barricades were erected to protect the statue of Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine's national poet. These recent movements around the world highlight the significance and meaning of public art, and its complex entanglement with contemporary issues of social justice. These events convey that the reach of public art exceeds its aesthetic and celebratory qualities, as it is envisioned, composed and interpreted within political, social, historical and ethical contexts. King's (2020) analysis of the response of North Americans to the defacement of the statue of Columbus reveals the inability of North Americans to make connections between the killing of black people and the enactment of the racist logic of colonization represented by the monument. King (2020: 78 ) conceptualizes this inability to make connections as a form of ‘colonial unknowing’, which is prevalent among the North American public. The concept of ‘colonial unknowing’ is endorsed by the predominantly Eurocentric educational projects in Canada. To our surprise, the Canadian and international students on our courses presume that colonization is a matter of the past. They are not aware of the prevalent ramifications of colonization in producing inequality for Indigenous communities today. We also found it timely to centre public art within the discourse of colonization by bringing attention to the fact that there is a strong movement of Indigenous resurgence through various art practices. The many pieces of public art by Indigenous artists in the Greater Vancouver region on the west coast of Canada defy the dominant narrative of vanishing indigeneity. We hoped that engagement with public art could begin to disrupt the ‘colonial unknowing’ within western education, which renders land as a utilitarian mass that only becomes a place through settler-colonial enactments (Seawright, 2014). In conversation with public art, the students were introduced to the complexities of place-attuned pedagogy, which, as Seawright (2014) advances, is the identifying and interrupting of settler-colonial engagements with place to consider Indigenous world views centered on the interdependencies of all natural forms comprising the concept of land – rocks, water, soil and other beings.

Senie and Webster (1998: xi) propose that public art be viewed in ‘the complex matrix in which it is conceived, commissioned, built, and, finally, received’. With different public art representing different times or moments in history, we asked: How does public art address the issues of the present times? How do educational institutions respond to contemporary social justice movements and protests? Whose stories does public art celebrate and whom does it silence? Although the students could take up this inquiry with public art with children in their practice, in our course the intention of inquiry with public art envisioned the cultivation of worldly relations (Meyer, 2010) in place making. Processes of becoming worldly transcend developmental theories and their enactments on teacher education, as we discuss below.

Decentring developmental narratives

Scholars in the field of early childhood education, particularly those adhering to the reconceptualist movement (Bloch et al., 2014; Dahlberg et al., 2013; Delaney, 2018; Lenz-Taguchi, 2010; Mac Naughton, 2005; Manning et al., 2012; Mevawalla, 2013; Moss, 2019; Pence, 2011; Penn, 2005; Robinson and Jones Diaz, 2005; Tobin et al., 2009), have been concerned with the dominance of developmentally appropriate practice as the ‘best’ and universal approach to early childhood education. The misconceptions around early childhood programs are that pre-service educators will gain knowledge of child development to support children's optimum development and make them ready for kindergarten. The discourses of readiness and child development are so powerful that it leaves less or no room for the fundamental role of the educator and place-based pedagogy in children's learning. Developmental-stage theory, as Mac Naughton (2005: 1) writes, has ‘settled so firmly into the fabric of early childhood studies that its familiarity makes it just seem “right”, “best” and “ethical”’. The discourse around early childhood education influences the ways in which early childhood educators construct their identities. Bringing in alternative theories, perspectives and stories is necessary to challenge developmental frameworks and discourses. As Davies (2021) suggests, focusing on child development theories in pre-service programs prevents pre-service teachers from learning about critical theories and frameworks that reflect their lived identities and experiences. Therefore, inviting students to dwell on contemporary issues, critically reflect on their geopolitical positions, and critically attend to their lived experiences could counteract the fixities of developmental discourses. In this light, we asked: How might we invite pre-service educators to see the connection between contemporary issues in our times and children's education? How might we invite early childhood educators to see how their ways of knowing have been shaped by Eurocentric education systems and how that might reproduce colonial-minded subjects?

Critical and anti-oppressive education begins with the unpacking of universally normalized discourses and discursive practices that produce neo-liberal subjects (Battiste, 2013). Gruenewald (2003b) contends that the capitalist, consumerist and free-market values of neo-liberalism have influenced us to become individuals who are moving away from the ecosystem and the culture of our place. He asks educational institutions and schools to respond to this urgently. He argues for place-based and place-conscious education to orientate teachers and students towards exploring the perceptual, cultural, ideological, ecological and political dimensions of places (Gruenewald, 2003a). Teachers are therefore to encourage students to think about the meanings espoused by the places that shape our culture, identity and beliefs. In engaging with place, students are called to discern the fixed, colonial-bound identities of place and participate in political processes of disrupting the colonial logic that dictates who we are and how we should be.

To shift the gaze away from developmentalism, our inquiry engaged in timely pedagogies of place by inviting the students to dwell on their relationships with place, and share personal narratives and stories of their lived experiences. In our proposition, we cautioned the students not to fall into the binary thinking of outdoor–indoor, human–non-human, nature–culture spaces in their study of public places so that they could see the entanglement of human and more-than-human lives (Nxumalo, 2019). We wanted to trouble the binary thinking of right/wrong, fixed, measurable, determined and outcome-oriented thinking rooted in developmental theory. Instead, we asked the students to view and engage with complexities. The students constructed understanding and knowledge of education that was personal, contextualized, politicized, historicized, complex, embodied, holistic, multi-agentic and transgressive of the four walls of institutions. The design of the assignment disrupted the normative teaching of development-focused early childhood pre-service teacher education in that it proposed engagements that called for a lingering with the public art piece to attend to its place-making enactments with the more-than-human participants (rain, rocks, objects, light), the intention and story of the piece and the artist, the positioning of the artwork on unceded Indigenous lands, and the students’ geopolitical contexts.

Settler colonialism: problematizing colonial identity formation in education

Our work with the pre-service early childhood educators on this first-year course sought to bring to attention the envisioning of ‘a more equitable and broader theory of education that informs, includes, and builds with Canadian pluralities and identities’ (Battiste, 2013: 163). We asked ourselves: How might pre-service education disrupt the colonial inheritance and practices rooted not only in early childhood education but also in education at large?

Canada has much reckoning to do with its colonial past and its legacies of oppression of Indigenous people in the present. This project was enacted by forcefully removing children from their families to be in the care of the state within the structure of residential schools. These schools negated the well-being and survival of many Indigenous children through sexual abuse, harsh punishment and maltreatment, and the prohibition of enacting their culture and speaking their language (Gray Smith, 2017). The trauma engendered by these genocidal practices continues to harm many Indigenous people today (Gray Smith, 2017). Another harmful aspect of the assimilation agenda is known as the Sixties Scoop – the removal of thousands of Indigenous children from their families to be adopted by settlers (Gray Smith, 2017; McKenzie et al., 2016) – and the current child welfare system continues to harm Indigenous children by removing them from their communities as Indigenous families are deemed incapable of parenting (McKenzie et al., 2016).

To bring awareness of Eurocentric schooling that negates Indigenous identities, together with the reproduction of settler-colonial ways of being, the students were introduced to Wolfe's (2006) theory of settler colonialism. Engendering notions of empty land, the settler-colonial logic dismisses the complex vibrancy of Indigenous communities by deeming Indigenous groups inferior, nomadic and primitive (Wolfe, 2006). King (2019), through her examination of De Brahm's 1757 map of the Coast of South Carolina and Parts of Georgia, discovered that Indigenous and Black bodies were placed offshore on the White cartographic rendering of the map. In De Brahm's representation of space, not only was the presence of Indigenous peoples obscured, but they were also relinquished of their relationship with water, the river and land (King, 2019). The existence of Indigenous public art is a form of decolonization of spaces as it maps Indigenous identities and world views back onto colonial lands.

The Black abolition and Indigenous decolonization movements are two radical projects that challenge and exceed the discourse of settler colonialism (King, 2019). Many of the public art pieces by Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists evoked issues embedded in the settler-colonial paradigm. King (2020) invites us to see the defacement of the statue of Christopher Columbus in 2015 from a longer history of incidents of defacement. In 2010, in protest against Columbus Day celebrations in Boston, Indigenous people beheaded Columbus’s statue. Black and Indigenous people have shown resistance to settler-colonial violence in many forms, with the defacement of Confederate statues being one of them. To counteract practices of erasure of Indigenous world views perpetrated by settler colonialism and to nurture conversations about decolonization, we invitedour students to inquire with art pieces by Indigenous artists. A few students chose pieces by contemporary non-Indigenous artists that articulate messages about social justice. In selecting art pieces by Indigenous artists, the students sought out the stories that were suppressed by the colonial project. When engaging with non-Indigenous art, the students attended to the histories of the land, positioning the art pieces in response to the following questions: Whose traditional unceded territory houses the art piece? What are the stories of this place in conversation with the art piece? What is your connection to this place and its history? How does who you are affect how you experience the world around you?

Many of the public art pieces by Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists evoke issues engendered by the colonial legacies impacting Indigenous people today. In this light, a public art piece created by Coast Salish artist Jody Broomfield, entitled ‘Strength and Remembrance’, is a ‘carved red cedar pole [that] stands in remembrance of the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls across Canada, the fourteen women murdered in the Montreal Massacre and all women who suffer in silence as victims of violence’ (City of North Vancouver, 2022). This is how Broomfield describes the piece: ‘at the top of the pole is a woman wrapped in a blanket with eyes closed in a peaceful state to honor all loved ones who have suffered. Below her is an eagle imparted with the power to carry prayers to the creator’ (City of North Vancouver, 2022). The students found information about the artist's vision and the meaning of Indigenous iconography. They also critically reckoned with its location, standing in front of the police headquarters. As we see it, the art piece acts as a reminder of the consistent and committed work required by the police in preventing violence against all women. A place of mourning for the families of the murdered and missing women, the artwork stands as a testimony to the colonial inheritances of devalueing and disregarding Indigenous lives. Institutions are known for their complicity with the colonial project. In Canada, the police have a history of over-policing and under-protecting Indigenous women. For Razack (2016: xi), ‘Indigenous women have, since the inception of the colonial project, been understood as sexually disposable, and social and legal institutions have sustained this logic’. As is the case with the child welfare system, the socio-economic conditions of Indigenous women and racism in these institutions are issues that must be tackled to break the inequality engendered by colonial practices.

To counteract practices of erasure of Indigenous world views perpetrated by settler colonialism and to support Indigenous movements towards decolonization, we encouraged the students to consider art pieces by Indigenous artists, within the rich cultural and personal dimensions of their work. When engaging with non-Indigenous art, the students attended to the histories of the Indigenous presences on the lands housing the artwork. The aim was not to explicate Indigenous world views; rather, we envisioned a conversation about Indigenous rights and a disruption of settler-colonial ways of being. The students were introduced to Wolfe's (2006) concept of settler colonialism. Engendering notions of empty land, the settler-colonial logic dismisses the complex vibrancy of Indigenous lifeways by deeming Indigenous communities inferior, nomadic and primitive (Wolfe, 2006). Such narratives substantiate(d) the erasure, dismissal and dehumanization of Indigenous people to make way for settlers’ confiscation of traditional territories. In Wolfe's words:

So far as Indigenous people are concerned, where they are is who they are, and not only by their own reckoning. Whatever settlers may say – and they generally have a lot to say – the primary motive for elimination is not race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory. Territoriality is settler colonialism's specific, irreducible element. (Wolfe, 2006: 388)

We also brought to the students’ attention the fact that Indigenous rights to land and education are framed by treaties made with the government. Battiste (2013) reminds us that these treaties ascertained that, besides their traditional forms of learning, Indigenous children would have opportunities to be schooled to maintain their livelihood in the imposed economy of resource extraction.

The art pieces became a gateway for critical reflection on students’ identities to develop awareness of their situatedness with place and their co-becoming with the art piece. The discussion around the art pieces and the artists’ identities brought us closer to our geopolitical position on colonial lands. The students critically reflected on their geopolitical position, their implication in colonization and its impact on their lives. They began connecting the current conditions of Indigenous people and their rights with the manifestation of colonialization of land, culture, language and identity.

The students expressed their social location and analysed its manifestation in identity formation and social and political relations with others. Kirk and Okazawa-Rey (2004: 8) postulate that social location is ‘where we meet others socially and politically’. The pre-service early childhood educators were asked to think about how their social location influenced their identity and how they saw and experienced the world. What could they notice about place(s) and their lived experiences and identity? Identity is more than an individual decision or choice. It is fluid, complex and often contradictory (Kirk and Okazawa-Rey, 2004), and continues to be shaped by the places we live in; moreover, our ways of being also shape these places (Seawright, 2014). We proposed a varied experiencing of place through diverse vantage points: the art piece, the vision of the artist, its location, its relation with passers-by. Students documented their inquiry through photographs, film, text, and personal and aesthetic renderings. The students were called on to attend to the dynamics of place-making beyond settler-colonial practices of disavowal of Indigenous world views.

The pre-service early childhood educators began to realize how cultural, social and political environments influence and create geopolitical positions and identities. Our proposition to the students was to notice the complexities of our identities in our lives, becoming aware of the various entanglements between human and more-than-human agencies, and thus starting to engage with the crucial role that education plays in advocating for equity. As they uncovered the many layers of their identities, both the Indigenous and settler-descendant students started a conversation about visions of coexistence on colonized lands. We are reminded by Larsen and Johnson (2017: 49) that ‘the pathways of coexistence follow the spirals of cosmological relationship that emerge from the places we struggle over and share, but that connect us back to the Spirit of Place we all come from’. We hope that this journey sparked students’ critical consciousness and deepened their relationships with places in a never-ending trajectory towards critical and transformative pedagogies.

Politicizing relations with place: entanglement of time, place and pedagogy

Public art is typically created and/or installed in relation to place; as such, it seems a pertinent choice to take up public art as emblematic of our place relations. Public art calls for particular ways of responding to the localities we inhabit and the meanings that we draw in/with these places. Our invitation to students was to perceive place beyond a locality, towards place as an event (Casey, 1996), a way of knowing, an embodied location (Larsen and Johnson, 2017) and ‘something for which we continually have to discover or invent new forms of understanding, new concepts in the literal sense of ways of “grasping-together”’ (Casey, 1996: 26). Such an understanding of place encouraged the students to see place as agentic, relational, always evolving, dynamic, active and composed of plural spaces. Our situated, embodied and sometimes complex existence echoes Casey's (1996) argument that we are of places and not only in places. This positions our humanhood in relation to more-than-human agents of places. One of the pieces selected by the students, ‘Sleuth of Bears’ by Veronica and Edwin Dam de Nogales, consists of playful sculptures of bears and is located in the heart of a busy urban centre in Lynn Valley. As described on the City of North Vancouver (2022) website, ‘the sculptures invite a moment of pause to reflect upon the magnificent creatures, whose territories have extended throughout Lynn Valley and across BC’. The artists seem to be encouraging reflection on our encroachment on bear territory, which causes bears to travel through residential areas for food. Herein lies interesting propositions for students to unpack the human-centric crust of western education. Indigenous world views position all beings within a web of interdependencies (Seawright, 2014). In relation with the bear statues and guided by Indigenous world views positioning animals as relatives (Seawright, 2014), our students started to reimagine the meanings of coexistence with animals. These art pieces exemplify the numerous possibilities for inquiring with public art about issues of climate action and social justice, which is essential in the formation of educators. This envisions, as advanced by Nxumalo (2019), a politicization of place relations to transform inequality in the places we call home. The students were invited to locate themselves in these dynamic, relational and always unfolding emotional and physical places, and to be open to what these places evoked and provoked.

Territory-bound settler colonialism inherently signifies the displacement of Indigenous communities (Calderon, 2014; Donald, 2009). To interrogate the lack of awareness or indifference that reproduces settler logic, Nxumalo (2019) proposes a methodology of refiguring settler presences on Indigenous land. In this regard, we invited settler, international and Indigenous students to start envisioning what is involved in processes of refiguring. We were intrigued by the following question: How do we become witnesses to settler-colonial events? Nxumalo (2019: 26) borrows from the African American tradition of witnessing to experience witnessing ‘as a situated, messy, implicated, active, and entangled “seeing,” where the witnessed and the witnesses are not limited to human storytellers, and where the self-invisibility and innocence of witnesses is not possible’. In the context of our inquiry with public art, to be a witness urged the pre-service teachers to be more than passive observers of the pieces of public art. To deconstruct the dominant narrative of place is to be able to notice what is hidden, untold and unheard. Our settler students grappled with the tension engendered by unconscious investments in colonial legacies. Both the local and international students who were part of privileged groups felt discomfort in witnessing the marginalized stories of their places evoked by the public art pieces that centred their ‘living inquiry’. They realized that their identity determined their access to the kind of power and privilege they could have in places (Kirk and Okazawa-Rey, 2004). To truly witness something means to be moved by it, to feel unsettled and to enter a space of relational solidarity – and to story about what is witnessed. Often, what is witnessed is personal and invites raw and unprocessed feelings. To articulate these emotions, language is required. Kwakwaka’wakw scholar Sarah Hunt (2018) writes about colonial violence, bringing to attention that it is not enough to be a witness. Her work makes us think about what we can do with what we witness so as to enter into relational responsibilities to the act. What ‘response-ability’ (Haraway, 2016) and responsibilities do we take as witnesses? With all the discomforts, challenges and denials such witnessing invokes, Nxumalo (2019: 26) is hopeful that the practice of witnessing will kindle pedagogical practice that is ‘relational, responsive, hopeful, and implicated’.

Nxumalo (2019) questions the narrow approaches of place-based pedagogies in early childhood education for either tokenizing or disregarding altogether settler-colonial relationships with Indigenous groups. Instead, she invites pedagogies that politicize relations with place. She proposes relational ‘place stories’ as a pedagogy that unsettles the prevalent Euro-western ways to encounter place, endorsing inquiry with children about/in place mentored through the perspectives and stories of Indigenous people that have fundamentally different, non-consumptive, embodied and reverential relations with place (Nxumalo, 2019). ‘Place stories’ is a pedagogy of bringing attention to present, past and ongoing local stories. In the context of our assignment, public art functioned as a place story. As such, if made by Indigenous artists, it articulated world views and perspectives of place that had been undermined by the colonial acts of glorifying settler presences. When created by settler artists, given the piece’s situatedness on unceded lands, the students were asked to seek the stories of the place housing the art piece. In this regard, Nxumalo argues:

Foregrounding entanglements between time and place, then, might act as a means to interrupt the representational, decontextualized colonial gaze that most early childhood nature pedagogies embed, including conceptions of this land/place as natural territory that is discoverable, unoccupied, mute, a commodity, and static. (Nxumalo, 2019: 62)

The public places that hosted the art piece, together with the piece itself, acted as a pedagogue, guiding the students’ inquiries. Powell (2019: 192) intuits that ‘[p]ublics and communities are conceived of as pedagogues capable of engaging with place as critical educators’. The students began to see places as pedagogical and notice how public places ‘teach us about how the world works and how our lives fit into the spaces we occupy’ (Gruenewald, 2003b: 621). A piece of artwork drew the students to interpret and contemplate the meanings behind it. The students started from their personal contexts and moved to the broader historical and social context to engage with the complexities, ethics and politics of public spaces. Such an understanding of pedagogy decentred the teachers’ role in learning and teaching, and attended to critical public pedagogy to show that learning takes place across many social and cultural practices and settings (Powell, 2019; Sandlin et al., 2010). The students were introduced to a decolonial lens to ‘critically analyze the systems of knowledge and power entrenched in colonial structures and institutions such as schools, museums, and the academy; acknowledging how these forces facilitate the subjugation, exploitation, and dehumanization of Indigenous peoples’ (Gray Smith, 2017: 175). This engagement with public pedagogy became even more vital during the COVID-19 pandemic, for it took students away from online classes to venture into their communities. A critical public pedagogy invites a relational and embodied way of knowing that highlights vulnerability and asks for responsibility (Powell, 2019; Sandlin et al., 2010).

Further considerations

Since Eurocentric education tends to undermine local Indigenous knowledges, and the lived experiences of students, it is imperative that pre-service educators attend to place-specific history and practices. ‘Living inquiry’ with public art prompted students to attune to the interconnections between place, time, art and the missing narratives of Indigenous world views.

This article has conveyed our experiences designing and teaching an assignment with a decolonial vision framed in an aesthetic living-inquiry-inspired practice with public art. Pre-service early childhood educators engaged with the colonial history of education on Coast Salish land. In attending to the politics of erasure of Indigenous pasts and ongoing presences and Indigenous rights to unceded traditional territories, the students constructed narratives of self in/with place. In relation to their public art piece of choice, the students narrated their family histories and trajectories on these lands while reflecting on the pervasive mechanisms of settler-colonial practices through their biographical accounts and artistic renderings.

Within the complexities, tensions and limitations embedded in our positionality as nonIndigenous educators addressing issues that could further appropriate or misrepresent Indigenous world views and histories, we endorse a practice of ‘living inquiry’ with public art to address issues of social justice as a generative pedagogy to disrupt the predominantly developmental discourse of pre-service teacher education. This experimentation involved risks and doubts around taking up place-based education in settler-colonial contexts. We took up the risks, uncertainty and vulnerabilities to extrapolate from Eurocentric voices in settler-colonial academic space, including our own. We invite other early childhood programs to take the risk of engaging with critical and social justice issues. Moving forward, students, pre-service teachers, educators and faculty instructors must situate pedagogy and practice within the current calls of time and local places. They must also know how Indigenous peoples’ lives have been impacted by educational institutions and amplify conversations that inform and activate our ethical responsibilities for equitable practices.