From land acknowledgments to action : highlighting the need to engage with Indigenous history in physics teaching

Author / Creator

PERC SM21 (2021)

Conferences

PERC SM21 Poster Session 2D (2021)

Available as

Online

Summary

In interviews about land acknowledgements, high school physics teachers expressed a number of different ways they had engaged with Indigenous history after learning about and practicing land acknow...

In interviews about land acknowledgements, high school physics teachers expressed a number of different ways they had engaged with Indigenous history after learning about and practicing land acknowledgements in a year-long professional learning community. These different ways included situating Indigenous displacement within sociopolitical inequities, connecting physics to historic and current exploitation of Indigenous lands and people, and identifying ways they could incorporate Indigenous history into their physics education curriculum. Throughout the interviews, teachers expressed how they had always viewed Indigenous history and physics as two separate schools of thoughts, but found through their engagement with Indigenous history that both seemed related. This also led to teachers' engagement and advocacy in transforming schools to incorporate Indigenous land acknowledgements. Findings from our interviews highlight the importance and need for physics education research to be more inclusive of Indigenous voices and to bring to the forefront Indigenous histories, people, and perspectives. This will help start bridging the gap that continues to exclude Indigenous peoples and communities from the field of physics.

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