From Self to the World: Practicing Truth & Reconciliation
This year, I have the privilege of teaching across five grades in Nova Scotia: Grade 6 through to Grade 10 in the subjects of Science, Social Studies, Citizenship and History. I am teaching at a private method school, far from the path I might have expected to take.
There is something serendipitous about being here. My experiences, my commitment to decolonising practice and my interest in truth and reconciliation have met the work I am being asked to do in the classroom. But I am still finding my feet. I am not arriving with everything figured out. I am learning the curriculum, learning the students and learning how to teach subjects that are vast, layered and new to me in this place.
Across the subjects and ages, I keep returning to one question:
What can learning help us see, understand and change?
Truth and reconciliation are part of the school’s educational work. For many students, this is the first time in their school lives—and in this school—that decolonisation is being studied deliberately as both an academic concept and a practice. Their responses are varied: sometimes there is eye-rolling, sometimes genuine intrigue, and often a great deal they have not yet had the opportunity to learn. I can feel uncertain about how to meet those different responses.
My role is to facilitate their learning: to make space for questions, offer tools for looking closely and help students encounter histories and perspectives that may be unfamiliar. At the same time, I am learning how much there is to understand about Nova Scotia’s curriculum, Mi’kma’ki and the histories held in this place. Planning often means pausing to ask myself what I am foregrounding, whose knowledge I am drawing on and what I may still be missing.
As I plan, I have been thinking with a few simple images: a library, a filing cabinet and a set of lenses. A library holds many accounts side by side. A filing cabinet helps us organise evidence by time, place, people and question. Lenses give us different ways to focus our attention.
These images remind me that learning is not just collecting information. We make choices about what to seek, how to organise it, whose accounts to hear and what questions to ask. Those choices shape what becomes visible—and what may remain overlooked.
I have also been trying to imbibe something I came across in the NS curriculum content about Social Studies for Grade 8 (~13 year olds) learning as a cycle:
Self → Community → National → Digital → Global → Community → Self
We begin with what we know and the experiences we bring. We connect those to the communities around us, then consider wider national and global histories and issues. Digital sources can carry us across distance and time, but they also ask us to think about credibility, representation and whose voices travel. We return to our communities with new questions, and then return to ourselves: What have I learned? What might I need to reconsider? How will I act differently?
The cycle does not end with an answer. It brings us back with a changed perspective and a deeper responsibility to listen, learn and take part.
I want students to practice asking questions that can guide that work:
What is hidden?
Whose dignity has been harmed?
What do I need to learn?
What needs to change?
Who holds decision-making power?
Who has been left out?
These questions connect with outcomes I value in Nova Scotia’s curriculum and with the principles I am trying to bring to my teaching: bringing hidden truths to light, respecting the dignity of people who have been harmed, learning with humility, and working towards repair, fairness and more holistic relationships.
There is a particular complexity in doing this work here. I feel fortunate to be in a school where there is room to teach and learn about de-colonisation, and where truth and reconciliation can be part of what students study. That sense of possibility sits alongside unease. Across Europe—the continent I have called home—right-wing sentiment is rising. I find myself holding the contrast between the relative safety of this classroom, where we can question dominant stories and learn together, and the political currents elsewhere that can make such work feel increasingly contested.
I do not know how to resolve that tension. I can only notice it and let it deepen my attention to the conditions that make learning possible: time, care, openness, honest questions and the willingness to stay in conversation when we feel uncomfortable. The privilege of this classroom is not something I want to take for granted. It asks something of me as a teacher and learner.
Teaching across five grades lets me see these questions take different forms—from the close observation and evidence of science to the interpretation of stories, societies and histories. I do not expect students to have everything figured out. I hope we can leave with better questions, a stronger sense of how knowledge is shaped and a deeper understanding that learning can change how we relate to one another.
For me, practicing truth and reconciliation begins in that ongoing work: staying willing to learn, noticing whose knowledge has been centred or overlooked, and asking what our learning calls us to do next.
