Teaching Immigration for Reconciliation: A Pedagogical Commitment with a Difference

Authors

  • Soma Chatterjee School of Social WorkYork University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.48336/IJRXSC6536

Keywords:

Immigration, Indigenous self-determination, Social Work, Reconciliation, Pedagogy of reconciliation

Abstract

This essay takes as its point of departure the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s recommendations for facilitating understanding of reconciliation between “Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians,” specifically, the recommendations meant to educate newcomers/immigrants about Indigenous issues. While these and similar educational initiatives deeply inform reconciliation measures across public post-secondary institutions, I suggest that the disconnect between immigrants and Indigenous peoples has more to it than mere lack of education, and that their relationship is better conceptualized as a series of tensions between land and labour rights that reproduces settler colonial capitalist nationalism. I further suggest the post-secondary classrooms as important sites for working with these tensions. In this essay I discuss a fourth-year social work elective course on immigration where I attempted to explicitly engage with some of these tensions and their productive role in settler colonial nationalism. I conclude with some thoughts on what moving beyond education for reconciliation could look like in our teaching on immigration, with specific recommendations for the discipline of social work in which such a pedagogical shift is long overdue.

Author Biography

Soma Chatterjee, School of Social WorkYork University

Dr. Soma Chatterjee is an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Work, York University. Soma is interested in migration and mobility, sovereignty and borders, and their ideological and material implications for contemporary Western nation building. She is actively thinking and writing about the complexities and contradictions of immigration, antiracist politics and Indigenous sovereignty in contemporary Canada.

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Published

2018-09-24