Dear Learners,
If we were together at the same time, the stories you engage with here would be offered at the storyteller’s pace, direction, and discretion. Since we are not present at the same time, we offer the following suggestions for your engagement:
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The stories survivor-activists have chosen to share publicly are intimate and simultaneously protect their individual privacy. As you begin to participate in these modules, we ask that you respectfully engage with their stories.
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These stories are primary sources of expert knowledge, and they offer expertise in histories and ongoing realities of colonial violence.
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Each survivor is a highly valued and respected member of their community. Treat them as you would a valued guest speaker in your classroom. They are the ones we are here to listen to and learn from.
How to Engage with the Stories
In each module, the survivors introduce themselves and share their intentions to teach and generate change. When you wish to engage with their stories, think through your own connections to histories of land settlement (“settler colonialism”) and ideas of desirable and undesirable people (“eugenics”). What are your intentions as a learner? What do you have to offer in terms of your own lived experiences?
Agreement/Consent
You agree to enter into these stories respectfully. You also agree to engage with your own familiar and unfamiliar discomforts and difficulties to widen and deepen your own knowledge of the complex effects of settler colonial eugenic thinking, and to move beyond what you already know. The stories belong to the survivors themselves and should not be treated as mere content or information. If you are not ready to commit to respectful engagement, then please return another time.
Dear Educators/Facilitators,
If you are an educator hosting a group of learners, you agree to protect and affirm the survivors and their stories and treat them as respected guests. Here are some ideas:
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You should be aware that the stories included in this learning space include experiences, discussion, and imagery of institutional violence, violence against people labelled as different, forced institutionalization, dehumanization, murder, intimidation, control, neglect, and abuse targeting children labelled as different. Any students with direct or indirect ties to colonial and eugenic violence may experience differing and heightened responses, including trauma responses, and viewers may not know in advance what might trigger a trauma response.
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In advance of engaging with the material, we encourage you to have resources available for you or your students who may need additional support. You can look to your institution where there may be resources available such as through a Wellness Centre, or you might gather information about local counsellors who are trauma-informed and social-justice oriented.
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We also encourage you to think about and understand listening as an active way of supporting people who are engaging with these stories. This is key to helping your students understand the importance of listening to other people’s stories. It is important for you as a facilitator to listen attentively to students as they share their own stories and experiences, without rushing to solve their problems.
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There is some harmful language used in some of the materials since it reflects abusive language used to control and demean people. Harmful words such as retarded (r-word), imbecile, or feebleminded are referred to in the module. Because the r-word continues to inflict harm, we have placed a “Harmful Language” warning label (as seen below) directly next to video media that contains that term.
We request that you explicitly ask students not to repeat this harmful language in or beyond the classroom except when reading and referring to language used in the materials themselves. We do not want to reproduce any of the on-going harms and damage this language has done.
Relaxed Learning
You can take a flexible path through this learning resource. Here are some ideas:
We invite you to do what you need to care for yourself and other people as you move through the learning space. In presenting this challenging subject matter we find disability studies scholar, Margaret Price's advice helpful. She says, “please do what you need […] to take care of yourself. You may need to take up a different position, engage in some manual activity—knitters, feel free to take out your work—you may simply need to leave.”1(footnote)
The survivor-activists who offer their stories here model an approach to accessing challenging stories and subject matter. Informed by the principles of Relaxed Performance, a relaxed approach to learning aims to make educational spaces more accessible. You and your students are invited to show up just the way you are, and we invite you to do what you need to take care of yourself, including moving, speaking, leaving and returning, eating and drinking, among other activities.2(footnote)
Pedagogical Orientations
The title we created for this learning space “Into the Light: Living Histories of Oppression and Education in Ontario” contains many clues about the orientations we aim to prioritize.
Storytelling based on lived experience is central to this learning space. Cherokee scholar and writer Thomas King writes, “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are.”3(footnote) And as Arthur Frank has explained, stories gain vitality and generate change when they invite more stories; on the other hand, stories lose vitality and foreclose the potential for transformation when they produce singular truths.4(footnote) The stories told here by survivor-activists are shared knowing the power of stories to shape our lives and how we live.
The three modules are presented in multi-sensory formats in order to activate not only your mind but your body. We hope that these audio, visual, and textual stories help you find different ways through this learning experience, which may or may not be familiar to you.
Part of what is shared here contain ideas that are hurtful and exclusionary – but we also share images, sounds, and discourses that celebrate difference, decolonization, resurgence, and resistance.
We reflected on the title of this course for a number of months and over several meaningful discussions. While we considered using the terms “eugenics” and “genocide,” we also thought of the way those terms might create barriers to understanding: not everyone is familiar with the term eugenics, and some might assume genocide and eugenics have nothing to do with education. In the end, we prioritized plain language to reach as many people as possible. At the end of each module, we invite you to reflect on the title, “Into the Light: Living Histories of Oppression and Education in Ontario.” After learning from these survivor-activists, do you think the title is effective? If so, why? If not, why not? If you were creating a title for this online learning space, what title would you create?
