EDDE806 Winter 2024Athabasca University

Welcome here; I am honoured by the gift of your precious time.

Snow Labyrinth 2024

The image above is a snow labyrinth I created in January 2024 when winter [in all her glory] touched down on the land I call home for a few days, as she has each year since my arrival in the summer of 2021. This land is so different from the center of the continent where I spent the previous 20 years, 14 of those on the shore of the Red River. There I created snow labyrinths that could sometimes last a couple of weeks before wind, drifting or fresh snow would leave a shadow of what once was. I would return to the same starting place and create another -- sometimes overlapping with what has been before and sometimes moving into new spaces until winds or new snowfall would give me the opportunity to let my feet once again create something new. This continued until the sun warmed the ice and the river moved onward without any echo of what once had been there. The image below is the third in a series, measuring 0.75 km of uninterrupted contemplative walking path. This, and the others that will be found throughout my dissertation represent the iterative non-linear journey I have been on --circling back to questions from different angles on different labyrinths at different times, somewhat paralleling my journey towards what is evolving into a digital critical autoethnography.

Slide 4, from my proposal for a digital critical autoethnography. January 10, 2024

I begin this way guided by Sheila Cote-Meek (2020) who reminds me of the importance of starting with my positionality. I come to this work as a straight cis-woman Irish Scots Ukrainian Canadian nurse educator who has had the privilege of spending ten years of my early nursing career living and working in rural and remote Indigenous communities on land I was raised to call Canada. This work is part of my response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRCC, 2015) calls to action 23, 24, and 45 i, ii.

I am deeply influenced years of sacred, profane, and mundane moments in time living, working, and playing in the lands of the Anishinaabe Aski, Heiltsuk, and Kitasoo nations. The almost six years my love and I spent in Bella Bella had a significant impact on my relational world view as I this is where I had my babies, got married, and was adopted into the Housty family at a potlatch in 1998. Love, through chosen-family-connections inform this work as I seek to advance and elevate Joyce’s principle that “aims to guarantee to all Indigenous people the right of equitable access, without any discrimination, to all social and health services, as well as the right to enjoy the best possible physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health [...and this...] requires the recognition and respect of Indigenous people's traditional and living knowledge in all aspects of health” (Council of the Atikamekw of Manawan and the Council de la Nation Atikamekw, 2020, p. 10). I look at online nursing education as ripe with opportunity to bring specific intention to supporting the development of culturally safe online learning spaces. After all, how can we expect practice spaces to be culturally safe if our learning spaces are not?

Slide 10: Revised Feb. 14, 24. From Proposal presentation Jan. 10, 24

This is the space I open to share my reflections and invite your comments during my final research seminar in the EdD program where I always keep the current version of my research questions front of mind. The full questions are for my consideration, the chartreuse green words are for you to consider at your leisure. If you don't teach nurses, there will be other calls that relate to your area of expertise. I invite you to seek them out.

From the beginning I have talked about wanting to support the decolonization of higher education, really it is about wanting create online learning spaces that support cultural safety, drawing on bell hooks (2015) idea of centering margins. How do we create learning spaces where the most marginalized (i.e., Indigenous students) feel safe to take risks, try new ways, and experience transformative learning? What do my Indigenous nursing and education colleagues have to say about this? Am I disrupting? Reimagining? Is it de-colonial? Anti-colonial? Does it have a name yet? Is there a way to avoid centering whiteness or is that just impossible for me as one who walks in white skin? I touch the edges of a post-human world view, and I begin to see a new horizon beyond an intersectional ecofeminist lens. To be frank, I am a little freaked out. Regardless, this is not the place where I explore these questions - I invite you to visit and explore the dissertation for more on this subject. [https:www.accidentialandraheutagog.ca coming soon]

I find myself struggling with the word 'decolonization'. Like Styres (2017), I am starting to experience the word like a bit of "a needle in my brain" (p. 34). The word 'decolonize' was in the place of 'disruption' in the final question, above just five minutes ago, and certainly present in my dissertation proposal. After the recent thought provoking chat with Dr. KC and my supervisor Dr. DH about digital spaces as place and anti-colonial academic ways, I move deeper into the land of embracing 'good trouble', 'disruption', and 'reimagining' as positive outcomes that support the ultimate objective of creating culturally safe and welcoming online learning spaces. 'De' and 'Anti' are so glass half empty, whereas I am a glass half full kind of human. I prefer to think we can cooperate and collaborate our way to a sustainable planetary future in world that does a better job of living in peace than we see in the world today, or is portrayed in one of the many post-apocalyptic TV shows such as the The Walking Dead, American Horror Story, and The Last of Us.

ePortfolio pedagogy supports peer review. You are welcome to comment below, please keep in mind that this is a space that supports radical love. Deliberative dialogue (Bohm, 2014), kindness, respect, and right relationships are all welcome here. Hate is not. Comments do come directly to me -- they are not posted in this space.

Disclosure: Parts or all of this work may become or transform into a learning artifact associated with my digital dissertation.

*note: works cited are not always in APA, sometimes they are presented in order of appearance. Also, foliotek does not seem to reliably do hanging indents. Or maybe it is Canva that has the problem with hanging indents.....

References:

Bohm, D. (2014). On Dialogue (Kindle). Routledge Great Minds.

Cote-Meek, S. (2020). Introduction: From colonized classrooms to transformative change in the academy: We can and must do better! In S. Cote-Meek & T. Moeke-Pickering (Eds.), Decoloninizing and Indigenizing education in Canada (pp. xi–xxiii). Canadian Scholars.

Council of the Atikamekw of Manawan and the Council de la Nation Atikamekw. (2020). Joyce’s Principle. https://principedejoyce.com/sn_uploads/principe/Joyce_s_Principle_brief___Eng.pdf

hooks, bell. (2015). Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (New Edition). South End Press. https://doi.org/10.5070/f7143017029

Styres, S. (2019). Pathways for remembering and (re)cognizing thought in Indigenous Education: Indigenizing teacher education and the academy. In H. Tomlins-Jahnke, S. Styres, S. Lilley, & D. Zinga (Eds.), Indigenous education: New directions in theory and practice (1st ed., pp. 39–62). University of Alberta Press.

Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (2015). Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action. http://trc.ca/assets/pdf/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf

About Me

Margaret Rauliuk MN EdD(c) RN FCAN

mrauliuk1@

learn.athabascau.ca

EDDE806 Winter 2024
Athabasca University

About Me

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