Teachers' responses to the TQS5 and TRC in Southern Alberta: translations through relations

Abstract

My work is centered around the question of how teachers, in K-12 classrooms in southern Alberta, have responded to the Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) Commission’s Calls to Action and related reform to provincial education such as the fifth Teaching Quality Standard (TQS5). My work is based on ethnographic interviews with nine Indigenous and settler teachers and follow-up collaborative group sessions with some of them. Along with how teachers are responding the TRC and TQS5, I focus on the challenges and possibilities that they find in responding. I found that their responses deliberately value relations and reflect Indigenous notions of relationality. Their challenges reflect commodified, sanctioned, abstracted, and objective ideas of schooling which align with the logic of homo economicus. Their possibilities seem to lie in non-scalable and relational spaces which provide the potential for struggle, engagement, and enunciation.