Story-Making Reconciliation

with Indigenous and non-Indigenous Youth

A thesis proposal submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for a

PhD in Education

By Carol LeeFaculty of Education, University of Ottawa

Thesis Advisor:Dr. Nicholas Ng-A-Fook

Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa

Thesis Committee:Dr. Ruth Kane

Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa

Dr. Linda RadfordFaculty of Education, University of Ottawa

Dr. Giuliano ReisFaculty of Education, University of Ottawa

June 2019

This proposal is funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Table of Contents

Introduction...................................................................................................................1

Positionality...................................................................................................................1

Literature Review.........................................................................................................2Pedagogical Threads 2Weaving Practice Around Threads of Praxis 3Threading Narratives of Collaboration 6Making Worlds with Story Threads 7

Purpose and Contribution of This Research..............................................................9Proposed Framework 10A Relational Worldview 10Arts-based Research 10Agential Realism 13Participants 13Inquiry Set-Up 14The Fiction-Based Research Method used by Participants 15

Participants’ Acts of Inquiry and Acts of Analysis 16Collecting Data about the Participants’ Acts of Inquiry and Acts of Analysis 16Researcher Analysis of Participants’ Acts of Inquiry, Acts of Analysis, and Acts of Making 17

Ethical Considerations................................................................................................19A Child-to-Child Ethic 20Author Attribution of the Ensuing Online Publications 20

Participant Benefits.....................................................................................................20

Conclusion....................................................................................................................21

Appendix A: Tentative Timetable.............................................................................31

Appendix B: Research Information Letter to Participants’ Parents Requesting their Permission to Allow their Children to Participate in the Story-Making Activity and Consent Form (print & electronic)......................................................32

Appendix C: Research Information Letter and Consent Form Inviting Students to Participate in the Story-Making Activity (print & electronic)...........................35

Appendix D: Consent to Publish Story.....................................................................38

Appendix E: Fish Diagram Template.......................................................................40

Appendix F: Decision Flow Chart Template............................................................41

Appendix G: Best Practices in Empathy Teaching.................................................42

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Introduction Reconciliation is about stories and our ability to tell stories.

(Fontaine, L. in TRC, 2015, p. 242)

The Truth & Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) Call to Action 63.3, invites teachers to

“[build] student capacity for intercultural understanding, empathy, and mutual respect” (TRC,

2015a). However, there has been little guidance provided to settler teachers on how to respond, in

practical terms, to such a call to action. Indeed, it is telling that the word “reconciliation,” does not

currently appear in any of the Ontario Ministry of Education Elementary School Curriculum

documents. It is not surprising, then, that incorporating reconciliation into the curriculum and

classroom can be a challenge for boards of education, teachers, teacher educators, and researchers.

This said, some boards of education are piloting programs, such as the Grade 11 Indigenous

literature course, some history teachers are integrating Indigenous oral history into their

classrooms, and teacher training institutions, like University of Ottawa, have introduced a

foundations course, First Nations, Inuit and Métis Education: Historical Experiences and

Contemporary Perspectives (PED 3138) to the curriculum to address settler educational

obligations for truth and reconciliation as set out by the TRC (Brant-Birioukov, Ng-A-Fook, &

Llewellyn, 2019).

As researchers, our work must add to this growing body of literature which seeks to

understand how settler teachers might try to address reconciliation within their research, public

school classrooms, and teacher education programs (Brant-Birioukov, 2017; Conrad, Jagger,

Bleeks, & Auger, 2019; Daniels, Deer, Donald, Low, & Wiseman, 2019; Furo, 2018; Korteweg &

Fiddler, 2019; MacDonald & Markides, 2019). My proposed research builds on three relational

pedagogical threads running through this nascent body of educational reconciliation literature:

praxis, collaboration, and story.

Positionality

I position myself in this research as an aging white female of mixed settler descent—

French-speaking Quebecois farmers and bûcheron and English-speaking Irish farmers. I was born

in Maniwaki and raised Catholic by relatively non-educated parents1 in a decidedly non-agrarian

setting. I grew up in what began as a closed, gated, nuclear research town whose population could

be characterized as highly educated white Anglo-Saxon protestant males. As an adult, I worked

primarily as a writer and course developer in high tech. When I worked as a teacher, I lived in

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Kingfisher Lake, a Cree reserve where I taught in the community’s day school, and where my

daughter’s first language turned out to be Cree. Although most of my relatives still live in Quebec,

I lived most of my life in Ontario until recently moving to the outskirts of Gatineau with one of

my three Euro-Asian sons, where for the first time, I feel at home. I locate myself as a border

dweller, neither outside nor at the center of the dominant culture in which I live, and that this

geography more than anything else has, not only shaped how I think but defined who my

neighbors are and therefore, who I think with (Haraway, 2017). For this reason, I suspect that the

literature I draw on to think with and which informs my proposed research may be perceived as

unnecessarily eclectic. I share this rather lengthy positionality statement because as Kovach

(2009) reminds us, “self-locating is a powerful tool for increasing awareness of power

differentials in society and for taking action to further social justice” (p. 19732).

Literature Review

Pedagogical Threads

In the following sections, I will relate the pedagogical threads developed in the works of

the scholars identified in my introduction and other scholars to reconciliation as a praxis, a

collaboration, and story. Brant-Birioukov (2017), for example, conceptualizes reconciliation as a

pedagogical dialogic praxis/practice that must continue past the teacher education stage and move

into the classroom where it must be enacted ethically. Furo (2018) conceptualizes reconciliation

as a classroom-based relationship-building praxis, and MacDonald and Markides (2019)

conceptualize reconciliation as a hands-on, on-the-land, and in-the-woods praxis by treaty

peoples, who through learning a respectful relationship with the environment may come to

acknowledge the value of Indigenous ways of knowing. Korteweg and Fiddler (2019) embody

their idea of reconciliation as a collaboration. They have developed their collaborative way of

reconciliation through their sustained Indigenous and settler work together making a course and

several scholarly papers. Similarly, Daniels, Deer, Donald, Low, and Wiseman (2019) came

together as editors in a cross-cultural collaboration to produce/make a journal publication that

explored different approaches and conceptualizations of reconciliation. They, like Korteweg and

Fiddler, use the focus generated by a making task, in their case editing, to provide a platform (or

reason) for the collaboration to take place and to situate their reconciliation efforts. In such

collaborative making places, intercultural understanding develops in an atmosphere of common

purpose and mutual respect to produce a single material artefact valued by the team. The material

artefact reconciles cultural differences by celebrating them. Conrad, Jagger, Bleeks, and Auger’s

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(2019) also embrace this pedagogical way to reconciliation and extend it using the arts. They

explore reconciliation as a collaboration with place, people, and culture using the medium of art.

Weaving Practice Around Threads of Praxis

For this proposed study, I am situating the concept of praxis in relation to the theoretical

works of Freire (2005), Brant-Birioukov (2017), Furo (2018), and MacDonald and Markides

(2019). For this thesis, I am situating praxis threads as a curricular and pedagogical way to weave

a broad critical dimension into and across an otherwise smooth colonial cloth. The texture of these

praxis threads draws on the narratives of Indigenous resurgence which are in turn informed by

Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Together their strength is in the pedagogy that energizes a

woven collective action that seeks to free both Indigenous and non-Indigenous settlers from the

ongoing systemic colonial oppression (Freire, 2005). How might reconciliation, therefore, situated

as a settler colonial pedagogical response, draw on an Indigenous praxis as a way to support

respectful intercultural exchanges.

Drawing on the oral testimonies used in teacher education programs, testimonies like those

shared by Indian Residential School (IRS) system survivors with the Truth and Reconciliation

Commission (TRC), settler teachers might participate in history-based reconciliation practices that

can support Indigenous praxis—the collective actions of Indigenous communities in self-

determination and resurgence. Oral history education not only opens public space for IRS

survivors to share their histories with each other and settler Canadians, a sharing that was

previously ignored and sometimes banned (TRC, 2015a), but also exposes settler students to

history in a different form and of a different kind that is Indigenous. Opening public curricular

spaces provides settler students opportunities to take up IRS survivors’ “truths” as part of a

Canadian history curriculum on Indigenous terms and in Indigenous forms. The practice of ethical

listening, as Brant-Birioukov et al. (2019) make clear, is an appropriate response to this

Indigenous praxis, not because it affords non-Indigenous Canadians opportunities to challenge

colonial history scripts and to question the events in colonial historical accounts, which it does,

but because it honours Indigenous truth telling as a praxis of decolonization. A history-based

approach to reconciliation has two closely coupled dimensions: a telling praxis that gives (creates

spaces) voice to Indignity and helps heal those directly affected by the intergenerational harms of

the IRS, and practice of settler ethical listening which helps raise settler historical consciousness.

Many educators and scholars hope that raising settler historical consciousness will lead to the

social/institutional transformations needed for reconciliation.

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However, historical consciousness raising as a path to reconciliation is a contested

pedagogical praxis. Some settler scholars, such as Tupper (2014) suggest that creating historical

consciousness about the truth of past events helps to challenge “epistemologies of ignorance” and

promote reconciliation and peacebuilding (p. 469). Other scholars such as Maddison, Clark, and

De Costa, (2016) suggest that history education capacity to raise historical consciousness has done

little to promote reconciliation in places like Australian where it has been taught for more than 20

years. Battiste (2013) takes a different tack. She suggests that public school education is so

steeped in settler discursive practices that it cannot help but work to shape settler mindsets and

worldviews regardless of the content or the best intentions of teachers. Further, a settler colonial

discursive regime does not even begin to account for or address the significant differences

between settler and Indigenous worldviews, including conceptions of history.

For example, settler history taught in schools is typically unidirectional—past-facing3

whereas Indigenous history when understood in temporal terms, is typically bidirectional—future-

facing as well as past-facing for seven generation in both directions (Bell, 2011; Borrows, 2017).

An historical understanding of the intergenerational trauma of IRS is a case-in-point. Indigenous

history connects the acts of ancestors, or in this case acts of violence committed against ancestors

to events of the present and future. But it is more than a linear temporal connection. It is, as

Simpson (2011) suggests in the following rhetorical question and answer, about Indigenous

resurgence and regeneration:

Are we participating in a process that allows the state to co-opt the individual and

collective pain and suffering of our people, while also criminalizing the inter-

generational impacts of residential schools and ignoring the larger neo-assimilation

project to which our children are now subjected?... Reconciliation must move beyond

individual abuse to come to mean a collective re-balancing of the playing field. This

idea is captured in the Nishnaabeg concept Aanji Maajitaawin: to start over, the art of

starting over, to regenerate. (p. 22)

From the perspective of an Indigenous worldview, those living today in the aftermath of IRS are

responsible to their ancestors’ for Indigenous resurgence brought about by listening to their

ancestors for guidance through stories, ceremony, and songs (Simpson, 2011).

Considering how Western and Indigenous perspectives conceive narrative accounts of the

past differently, I have serious reservations about the effectiveness of raising historical

consciousness as a route to reconciliation (Seixas, 2011). As Bell (2011) puts it, without an

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understanding of “Indigenous and non-Indigenous worldviews and values, … [students] will

never be effective change agents toward healthy cross-cultural relations (p. 383).4 Nonetheless,

this does not diminish the necessity of, and the value placed on an Indigenous truth-telling praxis

and an ethical settler listening practice. In fact, it is essential for what Furo (2018) discusses as an

“ethics of relationship building” (p. 2). For Furo, relationship building is a praxis, although it is

not clear to me, how in her context, settler students are emancipating themselves. However, in

calling out relationship building in her work, she highlights the importance of Indigenous praxis

and settler supportive practices for reconciliation.

According to Lederach (2005) and Gair (2013), empathy and imagination are important

aspects of a relationship building and integral to the reconciliation process as a whole.

Specifically, moral imagination—the ability to imagine a relationship with another—is key.

Taking Lerach’s lead, Maddison et al. (2016) suggest that “relational concerns” are central to

“reconciliation efforts” (pp. 34-5), and further suggest that relationship building needs to be the

focus of reconciliation efforts in the classroom. An important question is how can educators

interested in the power of imagination/moral imagination, use it to help their students build

equitable relationships, imagine different possible futures, and learn how to think about their

actions/decisions as future-shaping hopeful acts that help correct past mistakes and injustices (den

Heyer, 2003; Lederach, 2005).

In an on-going way, we might take up our understandings of an Indigenous praxis through

scholarly, literary, and artistic works, such as City Treaty, a long poem by the late Marvin Francis.

His book, written in English makes a powerful statement as a praxis of resistance, resilience, and

reconciliation. He uses the English language in ways that defy conventional usage or that play

with conventional meanings to make a point about colonialism. He asserts the rights of traditional

community members to deny assimilation even when forced to live in settler urban environments.

For example, one poem is called “Trick or Treaty,” others are, “mcPemmican” and “Lee Eegle

Eze.” In “word drummers” he suggests that:

those word drummers pound away and hurtle

words into that English landscape like brown beer

bottles tossed from the backseat on a country

road shattering the air turtle words crawl slowly from

the broken glass (p. 69)

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In this final poem, his concluding comment is one of resurgence. Despite all the settler talk,

stereotypes, and falsehoods generated through the English language for English settlers to dismiss

Indigenous cultural worth, Indigeneity will prevail because of its knowledge of and connection to

place—the slow language that Turtle Island has taught to generations of ancestors.

Threading Narratives of Collaboration

Collaboration threads, as taken up by Korteweg and Fiddler (2019), Longboat, Kulnieks, and

Young (2019), and Peterson et al. (2018), are like the stitches that sew two or more different

pieces of fabric together to dress, ad-dress or re-dress a body of knowledge. These threads are

sinuous and strong enough to hold differences of equal value together long enough to be

celebrated, for information to be shared, for commonalities to be recognized, so that a new

garment of reconciliation may be created. Such threads stitch together what Pinar (2010).

describes in another context as “common and particular cultures” and “the dialogue among them”

(pp. 30-31). Similarly, collaborative writing threads together “substantive interaction, shared

decision-making and responsibility for [a] document” (Fung, 2010, p. 18). Collaborative activities,

such as collaborative writing, but others as well focus on bringing people of different cultures

together to make, share, and interact with each other. Through common activities and face-to-face

interactions, the personal side of mutual respect, empathy and intercultural understanding can also

be cultivated and experienced as the moto of the Canadian Roots Exchange (CRE) Youth

Reconciliation Initiative suggests “exchange unites us” (CRE, 2009). The Caring Society also

supports educators who create “opportunities for students to take part in activities that foster

reconciliation and culturally based equity for Indigenous children and youth” (First Nations Child

& Family Caring Society, n.d.).

Korteweg and Fiddler (2019) regard their “Indigenous-settler” collaborative writing as a

learning partnership that requires them to enact reconciliation to ensure that they juxtapose their

“identities in such a way that [their] differences—cultural, racial, socio-economic, educational,

knowledge systems—[are] highlighted without subjugation, erasure, dominance or denial” (p.

256). While the success of their personal cross-cultural academic collaboration and that of

Longboat, Kulnieks, and Young (2019) are collaborations between adults, the research coming out

of the maker-spaces community also suggest that children and youth collaborations in general

making contexts, as well as collaborative writing contexts (Allen, Atkinson, Morgan, Moore, &

Snow, 1987; Jaeger, 2019; Magnifico, Woodard, & Mccarthey, 2019; Pehrsson, 2007), foster idea

exploration, peer-to-peer training, tinkering/tweaking, community partnership, and a culture of

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creating (Hobson Foster, Lande, & Jordan, 2014; Litts, 2015; Moorefield-Lang, 2015; Shercliff,

2015; Wang, Dunn, & Coulton, 2015). These attributes relate in important ways to reconciliation

—mutual respect, empathy, and intercultural understanding (Britton, 2012; Cohen, Jones, &

Smith, 2016). Peer-to-peer training, for example, has implications for reconciliation in the

classroom if students are given opportunities to teach each other about the other’s culture. Martin

(2015) and Sheridan et al. (2014) suggest that makers working in collaborative environments can

often imagine solutions to complex problems by working together. Collaborative making and

collaborative writing, although not necessarily the same thing as the practice of teachers making

spaces for reconciliation across the curriculum can be used together to facilitate the kind of face-

to-face exchanges CRE promotes at a micro level to support intercultural relationship building.

Lenters and Smith (2018) who studied collaborative dramatic story-making in high school

students found an unexpected by-product of their research that has implications for reconciliation

research. Students, on completion of their collaborative dramatic story-making, surprised the

researchers by requesting more class time to create individual stories that extended and built on

group stories by taking up a different point of view or by exploring “new trajectories” (p. 188).

This is significant for reconciliation research because it indicates that a collaborative activity

produced empathy in students, or alternatively, allowed them to imagine different possible futures.

Students in wanting to story different points of view suggests a desire to further develop their

skills of empathy as a result of the collaboration. Students wanting to story different trajectories

suggests that collaboration opened students to the possibility of alternative futures—of imagining

different endings and different ways forward.

Making Worlds with Story Threads

When story makers assemble a story, they lace story threads into a net of knotted

intersections. The knot obviously binds the intersecting threads very tightly, but between every

knot there are large openings, gaps that are crafted by the story maker. These deliberate openings

make room for the listener or reader to insert themselves into the story fabric and feel the pull and

subtle quivering of every knot through every thread. Story threads connect and relate us to the

whole net no matter how distantly or how loosely that may be (Kovach, 2009; Archibald, 2008).

The net when cast can pull in and land ideas the tellers want tell, as well as filter out the small-fry.

The arrangement of knots and openings in a net can always be altered—reimagined, redesigned,

and repurposed, as can story which is why many Indigenous cultures, according to Cajete (2000,

2005, 2009, 2017), King (2013), and many literary scholars, such as those discussed by Bertens

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(2010), and Shaw, Kelly, and Semler (2013a), revere story’s power and hold it in a place of

honour. And yet the attributes that make story revered are the same attributes that allow it to be

manipulated, distorted, appropriated, and subverted5. As Cole (2006) puts it,

my story is not yours my history is not yours

our stories and histories including accounts receivable transmissable are not yours

your stories about us are housed in libraries archives museums special collections…

my words belong to the air and to ancestors thosetocome

not to places of white legislated or otherwise expropriated ownership (p. 83)

Even though stories are all these things and more, perhaps it can be said that while stories are

personal and cultural, stories when told are less about who launches them and more about why

they were told in the first place and in the end where they land and root. It is also why once a story

is created and shared, it must be regarded as a living being that has a life of its own, related to but

independent of its makers, and who over time, much like a relative becomes a cultural ancestor

(Garroutte & Westcott, 2015; Jan Shaw et al., 2013a).

Stories be they literary creations, personal anecdotes, or oral histories catch us with their

emotional content and make us empathize. Stories are very important to us as individuals and as

cultures and to reconciliation because the “power of storytelling to produce narratives about

reconciliation…can effect reconciliation” (Shaw, 2013, p.3). However, the greatest power of

stories exists because they are intertwined with what Shaw (2013) calls an “ongoing process of

social formation” (p. 2). Stories, she claims, shape how we think and behave, and that our

personal and collective agency can be expressed as an ability to change existing stories either by

telling them differently or by creating new ones and adding them to the “cultural store of stories”

(p. 2). Drawing on Massumi, Irwin’s (2013) research, also connects the “creative and inventive

potential” of stories to relationships, agency, and action supporting more equitable imagined

futures (p. 168). Leavy (2016) concurs, saying story

grants us an imaginary entry into what is otherwise inaccessible. The practice of

writing and reading [and telling and listening to] fiction allows us to access

imaginary or possible worlds, to reexamine the worlds we live in, and to enter into

the psychological processes that motivate people and the social worlds that shape

them. (p. 20)

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Of key importance to this research is the connection between stories and reconciliation, where

stories as agents of change can further reconciliation through social re-formations.

Purpose and Contribution of This Research

My proposed research will add a new dimension to the existing scholarship on praxis,

collaboration, and story by bringing all three threads together in a single research project. Even

though reconciliation as praxis, collaboration, and story have been researched as isolated objects

of study, in reality they do not exist independently outside of their relationship with each, they

feedback into each other, and iterate as a set. I propose to examine a collaborative story-making

activity as an Indigenous praxis and settler practice of reconciliation with small groups of

Indigenous and non-Indigenous students because small groups facilitate personal intercultural

“exchanges” (CRE, 2009) that move knowledge from the head to the heart where they can be used

(Latremouille, 2016, p. 9). My proposed research asks several questions: 1) Can a collaborative

story-making activity become a space for Indigenous youth praxis that is shared by non-

Indigenous students as a space that supports practices of reconciliation: intercultural

understanding, empathy, mutual respect?, and 2) What can the artistic and collaborative elements

of the a story-making activity contribute to reconciliation? In other words, how will these youth

use the apparatus of story, plot, characters, setting, helpers, etc. to create a fictional reconciliation

verisimilitude; use the apparatus of the wonder-tale genre to structure their understanding of a

reconciliation problem; use their collective imagination to find a solution to that problem as a

different reconciliation future; use the apparatus of artistic crafting to iteratively make/remake

decisions); and use the apparatus of collaboration to build relationships by making an artefact

together? How will they spin, stitch, weave and/or tie their personal and cultural threads with the

threads of their collaborators to produce a single story that speaks to Call to Action 63.3? How

will they bead together their different perspectives and worldviews, to advance intercultural

understanding? Will they use empathy to motivate the re-dress of past wrongs, and imagine

possible different futures based on mutual respect?

Taking inspiration from Witi Tame Ihimaera (2013), the first published Māori novelist, my

proposed research will explore how youth working together towards reconciliation by making a

story together may shape—effect and affect—one’s agency and responsibility for reconciliation. I

hope to understand in broad strokes how story-making might create opportunities for youth from

different nations and cultures to form meaningful, respectful relationships which in turn may

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allow them to imagine possible reconciliation futures together that further intercultural

understanding and empathy.

Proposed Framework

In the context of a relational world view, my proposed research can be understood as

having two parts, one embedded by the other. The first part has participants author a story

together using a fiction-based research (FBR) methodology (Camargo-Borges, 2019; Leavy,

2016) that fits into an arts-based research (ABR) paradigm, as distinct from quantitative or

qualitative paradigms, (Camargo-Borges, 2019; Leavy, 2019b; Rosiek, 2019). Participants will

through collaborative acts of inquiry generate the data they will use to create their fictional story.

The second part is intra-related, albeit slightly removed from the first part, and involves the

researcher collecting data about the participants’ storying processes as decision points that affect

the story’s development. The second part uses the ABR paradigm (Leavy, 2017) to structure data

collection for a diffractive analysis (Barad, 2014; Mazzei, 2014; Springgay & Truman, 2018;

Taylor, 2016), as understood by agential realism (Dolphijn, 2016; Mauthner, 2015; Murris, 2016;

Rosiek, 2016; Søndergaard, 2016), and to conduct an arts-based evaluation and analysis of the

participants’ story (Leavy, 2019a; Norris, 2011) as it relates to reconciliation.

A Relational Worldview

The relational worldview that informs this proposed research, regards all elements of planet

Earth and beyond as being interconnected. This includes the connections between potentialities

and materialities such as the connection between the role of imagination and the generative

potential of arts-based research, and the connection that enables the imagination of possible

futures to materialize as stories and other forms of art (Camargo-Borges, 2019). Understood more

broadly, it includes the unconscious relationship of mind, heart, spirit, and body with their

conscious counterparts (Bell, 2014a; Ceder, 2016; Hoffman-Kipp, Artiles, & López-Torres,

2003).

Arts-based Research

Arts-based research is a generative, knowledge producing, research paradigm, as

differentiated and distinct from quantitative and qualitative research paradigms. The orientation of

arts-based research is different from the objective knowledge, discovery orientation of

quantitative inquiry, and the reflexive knowledge, representational orientation of qualitative

inquiry (Leavy, 2019b). Arts-based research is oriented towards imaginative knowledge (of

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possibilities) made material through art. In other words, “imagination in research is meant to offer

new intelligibilities and creatively construct new realities” (Camargo-Borges, 2018, p. 93).

Arts-based research has been described by Camargo-Borges (2018) as “world-making”

because the purpose of the art creation processes is to “generate alternatives that construct new

knowledge that are sensitive to the specific context and useful for those involved” (p. 94). The

artistic artefacts produced by the research, be it a photo display, a theatrical performance, or a

story, not only embody the specific arts-based process that generated it, but the hope or despair of

the world imagined by authors and shared with audiences.

Arts-based research has three distinct parts: data generation, data analysis, and the

production of a piece of art that accurately represents the data and the analysis made by the

researcher. In my proposed research, the young authors/artists use an FBR authoring methodology

to simultaneously generate data about reconciliation as participants, analyze their story decision in

the context of reconciliation as researchers, and create a story based on the data and their analysis

of it as the artists. This differs from most arts-based research projects, in that it is usually the adult

researcher who analyzes the data (often collected using more conventional quantitative or

qualitative tools) and who is the artist that fashions the artistic creation from the data (Leavy,

2019b).

What is important to my proposed research is that the participants are not only the authors

but the agents of their own potential (reconciliation) transformations (Reimer et al., 2015, p. 320),

and any reconciliatory social change that may ensue as a result of others engaging with their story.

Indigenous participants, as researchers and authors, actively participate in a reconciliation praxis

by giving their personally defined story character a voice that offers “insights… about colonial

violence” and possible reconciliation futures (Hill & McCall, 2015, p. 309). More than this

though, it presents participants with opportunities to have meaningful, (and perhaps difficult)

empathetic, cross-cultural conversations with their fellow authors. As novelist, Barbara

Kingsolver (2017) says, fiction “creates empathy, and empathy opens up new ways of seeing the

world” (np) to help us hear bad news and find the courage to address troubling messages. As

young artists, working together, the youth in my proposed research will have many opportunities

to learn from conversations about difficult topics in much the same way that Gabriel and Connell

(2010) found that renga, a traditional Japanese form of collaborative authorship, was able to

provide a forum for “a community of practitioners [to] explore dilemmas and views that would be

unacceptable [to discuss] otherwise” (p. 509). There is a distancing factor in collaborative story-

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making, like renga, that affords the characters of the story (not the participants directly)

opportunities to meaningfully engage in these difficult conversations but allows the authors to

stand back a little behind their characters so that they do not have to defend themselves

personally, be debilitated by guilt, or have fingers pointed at them. This built-in distancing factor

may prove advantageous in that the authors in my proposed research may use it to simply get on

with these important conversations in highly productive ways, as peer-to-training that “cultivate

meaningful learning experiences” (Griffin, 2000, p. 2).

Iterative creation, what maker communities call tinkering, is also a practice of many artists

(Dougherty, 2012; Litts, 2015). Artistic tinkering is of strategic importance to my proposed

research. In a tinkering environment, authors can make provisional story choices then test the

implications of their choices for fostering reconciliation with impunity (Barone & Bresler, 2006;

Phegley & Oxford, 2010). They can experiment with story ideas and trajectories and try ideas out

before committing to one. Authors can change their minds about any decisions they make at any

point along the way if they later feel it was the wrong one. Trying out ideas or changes decisions

may also be a way for participants to practice how to make good decisions, and to practice how to

have the courage to change bad ones. It is likely they will also learn firsthand (although perhaps

not consciously) that making decisions and story choices, both good and bad, allow and limit story

action and character development in very specific ways, and what Chambers (2004) calls

wayfinding. My research will document participants’ awareness of how their story decisions open

and close potential story futures and if they develop an awareness of the correspondence between

their story decisions and real-life decisions that affect reconciliation futures. Potentially, my

research may also show patterns in the data that indicate the practice of reconciliation as mutual

respect, intercultural understanding and empathy is a decision-making skill that can be learned

and practiced. I hope to understand whether developing decision-making skills inside the arts-

based research, as story choices, provides a safe place for the young authors to practice ethical

decision-making that support reconciliation in different scenarios.

My role in part one of this project, the story making, will be to ensure that the authors

consider all the decision points in their story in terms of intercultural understanding, empathy, and

mutual respect, and to document how the participants work to develop reconciliation-based

decision-making skills. My role in this proposed project, therefore, will not be a neutral one. I will

necessarily participate in the production of the knowledge that emerges. In consideration of Rish

and Canton’s (2011) collaborative writing research that allowed the contributions of some group

15

members to be devalued, my role will also include being the adult voice to challenge any

marginalizing behavior that might arise.

Agential Realism

Agential realism is a way of conceptualizing a relational worldview that is consistent with

quantum physics (Barad, 2007). Barad6 advances a relational conceptualization of ontology,

epistemology and ethics (axiology) based on the quantum entanglement of intra-acting agencies.

She suggests that when agencies become entangled, a (new) ontological phenomenon forms and

produces knowledge of itself based on its intra-actions in the entanglement. In short when

agencies become entangled, their meeting causes their differences to combine and diffract in ways

that are unique to the phenomenon (Barad, 2007, p. 81). Paradoxically, to register these

differences a mediating apparatus must intra-act with the entanglement to record its diffractive

and differential interference, thus making the recording apparatus also a part of the entanglement.

Put another way, the apparatus not only records differences, it also influences the production of

those differences. In this case, the apparatus comprises 1) story making conventions, 2)

collaborative interactions, and 3) decision-making ability to name only some. In terms of my

proposed research, I am interested in seeing if and how a collaborative story-making apparatus

can influence—aid—the production of intercultural understanding, empathy, and mutual respect.

Methodology

Participants

Participants will be recruited from an English-speaking school in Gatineau that has both a

large non-Indigenous student population and a large Indigenous student population. The latter

group come from many communities in nations they identify as having Cree, Anishinaabe,

Ojibwa, and Inuit cultures. Many of these students have accompanied their parents to the

Outaouais where they temporarily reside to attend university or college, or to get medical care in

area hospitals. Once I have defended my thesis proposal, I will formally request two letters of

support to conduct my research, one from the principal and one from the teacher. I will then as

part of my research create two letters (similar to the ones in Appendices) addressed to the parents

requesting permission for their children to participate in 1) the classroom story-reading activities

outlined below and 2) the classroom story-making activity. The children will also be asked to give

their permission to be participants in both the story-reading and story-making activities.

My recruitment strategy uses purposeful and emergent sampling (Emmel, 2014; Gentles &

Vilches, 2017) that selects for urban public schools and classrooms where Indigenous and non-

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Indigenous youth are enrolled and educated together. While all students who have elected to

participate in the study with their parents’ permission will engage in the inquiry’s story-making

task, in this proposed research, participants may be further purposefully selected by me as

researcher for closer study based on the demographics of the four-person groups that voluntarily

emerge. Groups that are made up of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students will be of

greater interest to me.

Each group of four students will have a dedicated Elder assigned to it to ensure that

Indigenous students who may have been cut off from their cultural heritage through the

intergenerational harms produced by the Residential School System have access to Elder

teachings. The presence of these Elders will also help non-Indigenous students learn more about

Indigenous culture as well. One Elder who currently advises me, has offered to provide a list of

Elders who may be interested in participating in the research. Using proper protocols, I will make

my request to these Elders and offer them compensation for their time.

Inquiry Set-Up

In groups of four, students will create a fictional story together that attends to

reconciliation as defined by TRC Call to Action 63.3. They will engage in research activities for

not more than two hours a day for 10 days or shorter intervals if the teacher requires them to do

so. At the beginning of the story-making inquiry, I will introduce a Grade 5-6 class of Indigenous

and non-Indigenous students to the wonder tale genre by reading them three stories: The land, the

storyteller, and the great cauldron of making meaning told by Spence (2010), Scar face as told by

Cajete (2000), and The missing bone by Bonnell, Ko, Chandan, and Wardle (2000) and contrast

these to The Poet: Pauline Johnson (Roberston, 2014) which is not strictly speaking a wonder tale

but has many of its elements. I have selected the quest wonder tale for this story-making activity

for both practical and ethical reasons, including simple class management, multi-cultural

applicability (Brusentsev, Hitchens, & Richards, 2012; Cajete (Tewa), 2017; Propp, 1928, 1976),

the recent use of wonder tales for collective Indigenous activism (Bacchilega, 2017; Kuwada &

Yamashiro, 2016), and student familiarity with the wonder tale’s formulaic template that

Hollywood uses extensively (Campbell, 1949).

Wonder tale characters represent archetypal roles: hero, mentor, ally, herald, trickster,

shapeshifter, guardian, shadow, etc. (Campbell, 1949). Wonder tale plots move through

predictable phases to unfold a hero or heroine’s specific problem-solving journey. The phases in

simple terms are: the problem, the call to action, acceptance of the call, the journey outside the

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familiar to find a solution, overcoming obstacles to find a solution, finding a solution, and the

journey back to the community with the solution (Campbell, 1949; Chang et al., 2014; Villate,

2012).

Participants will model their own story on the structure of the wonder tale, that is, using

the elements described above organize them according to the grammar of the genre (roles and

sequence of events) (Kress, 2012, 2015). The youth will next discuss possible storylines for their

story in terms of solving a problem. The problem they choose will in some ways suggest the

linguistic modalities the story will use. For example, if the problem is set in the school playground

with only other children as characters, a playground literacy will determine what is understood by

listeners and readers as normal, acceptable discourse, unusual behaviors, etc. and the authors will

need to write to that modality. The same would be true if the problem involved a secret hideout

deep in the woods, except that a land-based literacy and modality would need to be used (Martens

et al., 2018).

As participants discuss and develop their story, I will transcribe their discussions using

Google Speech-to-Text software and a computer-connected audio receiver. The authors will also

record their story as it develops using the same hardware and software.

I will keep field notes, in the form of decision flow charts (see Appendix F), to document

the decision points in each of their stories. As I rotate between groups, I will ask group members

to look at their story decisions in terms of what each decision allows in terms of story or character

development and what each decision forecloses and record this data on the Fish chart (see

Appendix E). Specifically, I will ask authors to identify four ways their decision now allows, and

four ways their decision now limits story possibilities going forward regarding plot, individual

characters and/or authors, and reconciliation as characterized as empathy, mutual respect, and

intercultural understanding. In my daily review of the transcripts, I will also note any tensions

involved in their collective decision-making.

The Fiction-Based Research Method used by Participants

Leavy (2017) describes three methodological approaches for fiction-based research (FBR)

which are defined by how content data is generated. An FBR fiction can be produced from data

collected through other methods such as interviews or case studies, from a literature review, or by

using the creative writing authorial process “as both the act of inquiry and analysis” (Leavy, 2017,

p. 199). The third and last approach is the one that I intend use for part one of my proposed

research.

18

Participants’ Acts of Inquiry and Acts of Analysis

Participants’ acts of inquiry into reconciliation throughout the story-making process will

generate data for them that they will then be able to assign meaning to the data through acts of

analysis. This FBR/ABR research process imitates the artistic creation process. I anticipate that

the questions below will be asked by participants (in plain type) to generate data. This will be

followed by a period of analysis during which they seek out/figure out answers (in italic type):

What does reconciliation look like? (Figuring out what reconciliation is to them.)

What do the authors want to say about reconciliation, and how can they say this with their

story plot, characters, setting, dialog? 7 (Figuring out what their reconciliation story will be

about and how it will speak to audience.)

How do character and plot decisions limit or allow the story to develop in specific

reconciliation or non-reconciliation ways? (Figuring out that decisions can prevent some

things/thinking from happening as well as make possible other things/thinking to happen.)

What trade-offs, if any, do they have to make between staying faithful to their picture of

reconciliation and other competing wants? (Figuring out that most decision are not black

or white and then figuring out how to weigh the value of conflicting wants.)

How much must be said explicitly for the audience to get it? (Figuring out that audiences

will fill in the gaps if the story-makers don’t and figuring out the blessings and dangers of

working with gaps.)

Is the future written? (Figuring out that imagination writes plots for different futures and

decision-making choices affect those plots.)

The participants’ acts of analysis on the data they generate informs their fictional story. They first

ask questions, then seek answers by way of analysis, so that they can make their story (Cajete,

1994; Leavy, 2019). Their finished story is true to their data and analysis without being a literal

representation of these. Building on Tinker (2003), the discreet story is a manifestation of their

analysis of their whole reconciliation inquiry and is like the relationship between an eagle feather

and the eagle—indivisible.

Collecting Data about the Participants’ Acts of Inquiry and Acts of Analysis

I will use the participants’ acts of inquiry and acts of analysis into reconciliation through

the story-making process as my primary data source. I will collect data on all participant acts of

inquiry and analysis and confirm data and interpretation accuracy with them on an on-going basis

through the project. Specifically, I will record

19

all final story decisions the authors make in creating their story (Appendix F)

all discussion the authors engage in to come to their decisions (Appendix E, discussion

transcripts, and note taking)

all revised decisions made by authors as their story evolves and their explanation as to why

it is needed (Appendix F)

participants’ awareness of how their decisions open and close future possibilities using

fishbone diagramming.

Further, I will look for data that suggests if and if so, how authors use 1) the artifice of the story-

making process and 2) real-time collaborations to suggest imaginative ideas, pose difficult

questions or try out various solutions. Specifically,

Do authors take advantage of the artifice/artificial nature of storying-making, similar to a

thought experiment, to explore the effects of their decision-making before committing to a

decision? If yes, how? If yes, do they practice unmaking poor decisions and remaking

better ones?

Do authors figure out that artmaking is a safe place to try out ideas, figure things out, and

even practice purposeful decision-making?

Do authors question their individual behavior to each other in the same way they let their

story characters question their interactions?

Do authors figure out that characters’ behavior can be applied to day-to-day life?

Does the interactive verbal component of collaborative story-making make visible the

decision-making processes authors enact that would otherwise be hidden if the story was

created by a single author?

Researcher Analysis of Participants’ Acts of Inquiry, Acts of Analysis, and Acts of Making

Firstly, as a reader of the final stories I will conduct a critical narrative/discourse analysis

(CNDA) of the stories produced. I will use two specific CDA analysis approaches that focus on

agency. I will conduct a socio-cognitive CDA that focuses on the agency of systems, particularly

language and how word choices, or rhetorical inclusions and exclusions affect thinking (van Dijk,

1996), and I will conduct a social actor CDA that focuses on the agency of individuals or artefacts

to affect social systems (Scollon, 1976, 2001; Scollon & Scollon, 2004).

Secondly, seeking to understand the relational aspects of the project, I will assess how

youth intra-actions as collaborators and decision-makers work with genre-specific story elements

and the making process itself creates a story about reconciliation by conducting a diffractive

20

analysis (Barad, 2007; de Freitas, 2017; Mazzei, 2014; Rosiek, 2018). A diffractive analysis is a

reading of the data to find specific insights (ah-ha moments if you will) that could only have been

produced by this specific configuration of materialities and potentialities intra-acting together.

Using the transcripts and charts, my diffractive analysis will identify insights made by the authors.

I will seek to identify 1) the differences/effects produced by collaboration on the story-making

process and the reconciliation inquiry, 2) the effects of story-making on the reconciliation inquiry

and collaboration practices, and 3) the effects of the reconciliation inquiry on author collaborative

skills development and on the story artefact itself. In each case the marks left on the story and the

primary data will be co-related.

Thirdly, I will conduct both a thematic analysis (Maguire & Delahunt, 2017) of the

transcripts and a pattern analysis (Latino, Latino, & Latino, 2011) of the decision and fishbone

charts to identify what knowledges emerged from this project related to 1) what the authors’

understand reconciliation to be and what the issues are, 2) what their understanding of decision-

making is as a future generating vehicle, and 3) what they understand their responsibility to be for

making choices that allow rather than limit empathy, cultural understanding, and mutual respect.

Finally, I will conduct an arts-based research evaluative analysis on the final story artefact.

While many ABR evaluative analysis methods exist,8 I will use two. The first is one used by

Leavy (2016) and the second is one used by Norris (2011). Leavy’s methods include mapping

more recognizable qualitative research evaluation criteria to corresponding but different ABR

research evaluation criteria. Using her criteria, I will analyze the final story for resonance which

maps to validity and trustworthiness in qualitative research; for aesthetics that maps to rigor; for

structure and design instead of congruence; for empathetic engagement instead of transferability

or generalizability; for verisimilitude instead of authenticity; for a signature writing style instead

of reflexivity; for sensitive portrayals; participant protection, and for how the research is directly

accessible to general audiences as public scholarship, audience response, and usefulness. Norris’

ABR method involves a Four P model—Politics, Public Positioning, Poiesis, and Pedagogy—

approach which assesses how well the art-making facilitates the purpose of the inquiry, which in

this case is reconciliation (Norris, 2011).

I will conduct an analysis to address the research questions by evaluating the story’s plot

using Norris’ criteria I will assess whether or not the story demonstrates a political sensitivity to

the Indigenous youths’ praxis and support of this praxis by non-Indigenous story characters as

mutual respect; demonstrates intercultural understanding between story characters as peer-to-peer

21

training in the story line; and demonstrates poiesis in the crafting of the story that evokes empathy

and makes it compelling and comprehensible to the classroom audience. I will also assess whether

the story using Leavy’s criteria demonstrates sensitive portrayals of characters, plot, setting, etc. I

will further assess whether the story can be regarded as useful in forwarding the cause of

reconciliation by reflecting current reality as verisimilitude and build on this to imagine and tell a

different reconciliation future that resonates as possible and credible. Finally, does the story

demonstrate a relationship between characters and other story elements that suggests collaboration

builds empathetic intercultural relationships based on respect.

Ethical Considerations

I will submit my ethics application and receive approval from the University of Ottawa

Research Ethic Board prior to conducting my research. As an ethical preparation for my study in

working with Indigenous children, I attended a week-long ethics conference at Carleton

University’s Institute on the Ethics of Research with Indigenous Peoples which addressed

research issues related to working with Indigenous adults. My proposed research is consistent

with the ethical research principles of utility, self-voicing, access, inter-relationality as outlined by

the USAI Research Framework (OFIFC, 2012). In terms of utility and access, my proposed

research is practical, relevant, and directly benefits Indigenous children and possibly their

communities by opening a space where Indigenous children’s voices are heard in their story

praxis, and where settler children’s voices are heard in support as they conduct a story dialogic

together about reconciliation (Bahktin, 1981). Both during and following the research, the

participants and their parents will have access to the story artefact and the data related to the

collaborative story-making process, and how it may be used in future. In terms of self-voicing and

inter-relationality, my proposed research recognizes that “knowledge production, authorship, and

dissemination constitute a political process to decolonize Indigenous knowledge and praxis” and

as such belong to both the Indigenous and settler communities of the youth involved (p. 5). My

proposed research will be “situated in the [local] present, supported by the past, and contemplates

the future” and “takes place within the complex web of interconnected relationships” (p. 5). My

proposed research is in fact premised on these views of temporality, spatiality, and interaction.

A Child-to-Child Ethic

However, because children will intra-act with each other in a collaborative activity, I must

consider a less understood ethical concern—an Indigenous/non-Indigenous child-to-child ethics,

as distinct from an adult-to-child one. For this reason, I consulted Elder Dr. John Kelly, PhD to

22

discuss this concern prior to writing my thesis proposal and why during my study, I will consult

on-going and as needed with a study-specific ethics committee comprised of the local teacher,

several Elders, and a parent who can provide feedback on any issue that might arise.

Author Attribution of the Ensuing Online Publications

Should the participants’ novels produced in this inquiry be published, they will be under

their own names in compliance with copyright law. However, to comply with University of

Ottawa and SSHRC Ethics Guidelines, designed to protect the identity of participants, the names

the authors select for the characters in their story cannot be their own names. For the purposes of

the study my thesis report will only identify participants by their assumed names.

Participant Benefits

Apart from participants being the collective makers of a story, and taking joy in their

accomplishment, they can also part-take in sharing what they have made with their friends and

family and perhaps a larger community. As Cajete (1994) reminds us, through the connected rings

of Indigenous visioning—asking, seeking, making, having, sharing, celebrating and being— the

creation of art contributes to spiritual development, relationship and community building and in

this way participants also benefit (Cajete, 1994, p.71). However, as he goes on the say, the

relational agency one comes to know while engaging with the beings and material apparatus of the

artistic creation are intra-actions of influence and of being influenced in reciprocal balance.

The creation of art is an alchemy of process in which the artist becomes more

himself through each act of true creation. He transfers his life in a dance of'

relationship with the life inherent in the material that he transforms into an artistic

creation. (Cajete, 1994, p. 149)

A further participant benefit is linked to Cindy Blackstock position that “putting children

first must be a foundational principle for reconciliation” (Castellano, Archibald, & DeGagné,

2008, p. 165). This proposed research positions children’s voices first as champions of hope and

reconciliation. I have initiated correspondence with the Caring Society in the hope that some of

the participant stories can be shared and celebrated at various Caring Society gatherings in the

winter of 2020.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I hope to find out through this inquiry if tapping into students’ imagination

of different reconciliation futures and practicing conscious decision-making about how to bring

23

about those imagined futures that artmaking requires them to do, will make them aware of their

personal and collective agency in furthering reconciliation? I hope to find out if this agential

awareness coupled with the relationship-building inherent in a collaborative a story-making

activity can help to break cycles of Indigenous marginalization in the classroom. I also hope to

find out if students, as a result of their arts/fiction-based inquiry, develop an awareness of their

real power as agents of change. Finally, I hope to find out if students develop an appreciation for

the concept of changing a bad decision is better late than never, and that the longer a relational

entanglement created by a “bad” choice continues, the more complicated it is to reverse.

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Appendix A: Tentative Timetable

June, 2019

Move towards proposal approval by committee

Mid-July, 2019

Conduct Thesis Seminar

August, 2019

Work with the research ethics board to obtain UO ethics approval for my research project

September, 2019

Secure UO ethics approval for my research project Meet with the principle of Pierre Elliot Trudeau Elementary School, David McFall, to

arrange a date and time for to conduct research and to meet the Grade 5/6 teacher whose class I will be working with.

Distribute various invitations to participate to class

Late September, 2019

Conduct research at Pierre Elliot Trudeau Elementary School

October - December, 2019

Analyze data and write dissertation

January - March, 2020

Defend thesis and deposit

34

Appendix B: Research Information Letter to Participants’ Parents Requesting their Permission to Allow their Children to Participate in the Story-Making Activity and Consent

Form (print & electronic)

Study Title: Story-Making Reconciliation with Indigenous and non-Indigenous Youth

Researcher: Carol Lee

PhD CandidateFaculty of Education, U of Oclee185@uottawa.ca(613) 218-0530

Invitation to Participate: Your child is invited to participate in a story-making reconciliation

activity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous youth, conducted by Carol Lee, in partial

fulfillment of the requirement for a doctorate degree in Education. As part of the research, but

preceding the story-making activity, the class will be invited to listen to four stories as models for

the stories they might make. Your permission for this story-reading activity will be sought

separately but is mentioned here for completeness.

Purpose of the Study: The purpose of this research is to explore through an arts-based

collaborative story-making process how imagination may generate knowledge in support of the

reconciliation (Call 63.3) in the classroom. It will also explore how a youth-authored story may

embody and embed a spirit of reconciliation and how the story may act as an agent of change.

Participation: If parental and student permission is granted, the class as whole will participate in

the research. Participants will form groups of four and in these groups, they will make a fictional

story together that addresses reconciliation as set out in the TRC’s Call to Action 63.3. This study

will consist of each participant in each group of four assuming a character for their story then role-

playing their part in solving a story problem that they choose together. During the story creation

process, all of the collaborative story decisions they make with the other authors will be recorded.

35

During each decision-making process, they will be asked to explain why they made the decisions

they did and how, if at all, it supports reconciliation.

The total estimated time of the project is 20 hours during regular school hours.

Risks: Participant confidentiality will be protected partially—story character names will be used

as pseudo names in the research and all reference information collected. However, because the

real name and that of the other authors will be used when the oral and written story is published

digitally, there is a possibility depending on how the story develops that participants may be

identifiable through their story character.

Benefits: Your child’s participation in this study will allow the researcher to gain a better

understanding of how story-making as an arts-based teaching tool can foster reconciliation in the

classroom. Further, your child’s participation will allow them to reflect on how their decisions can

create possible reconciliation futures. All stories will be assigned ISBNs making participants

recognized authors.

Confidentiality: The information your child shares will remain partially confidential and will be

used only for the purposes explained above. Further, in publications related to the research, your

child’s confidentiality will be protected using pseudo names.

Conservation of data: Data will be stored digitally in a password-protected file on the

researcher’s password protected personal computer. Once data collection, analysis, and reporting

is complete, this information will be digitally removed from the personal computer and placed on

a memory stick and stored in the researcher’s personal safe. All data, except the story artefacts

themselves will be securely destroyed five years after the completion of this research project.

Compensation: There will be no student compensation for participating in this project.

Voluntary Participation: Your child is under no obligation to participate in this research, nor are

you obliged to give permission for your child to participate. If you and your child agree to

36

participate in this research, you or your child may withdraw from the study at any time. You may

request to have your child’s data withdrawn after it has been submitted. Due to the collaborative

nature of the story’s creation, the actual story cannot be unpublished, nor can the name of your

child be legally removed as an author from the ISBN registration. You or your child may refuse

any involvement in this research without suffering any negative consequences.

If you have any questions about the study, you may contact the researcher at the email and

telephone number listed above. If you have any ethical concerns regarding your participation in

this study, you may contact the Protocol Officer for Ethics in Research, University of Ottawa, 550

Cumberland Street, Room 154, Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5, (613) 562-5387, ethics@uottawa.ca

Please print a copy of this information and consent to keep for your personal records.

STORY-READING ACTIVITY

Parent (s) or Guardian (s): Please select one story-reading option:

[ ] I agree that my child __________________may participate in the story-reading activity in the above mentioned study.[ ] I respectfully decline my child’s participation in the story-reading activity in the above mentioned study.

Signed: _____________________________________

Signed: _____________________________________

STORY-MAKING ACTIVITY

Parent (s) or Guardian (s): Please select one story-reading option:

[ ] I agree that my child __________________may participate in the story-making activity in the above mentioned study.[ ] I respectfully decline my child’s participation in the story-making activity in the above mentioned study.

Signed: _____________________________________

Signed: _____________________________________

37

Appendix C: Research Information Letter and Consent Form Inviting Students to Participate in the Story-Making Activity (print & electronic)

Study Title: Story-Making Reconciliation with Indigenous and non-Indigenous Youth

Researcher: Carol Lee

PhD CandidateFaculty of Education, U of Oclee185@uottawa.ca(613) 218-0530

Invitation to Participate: You are invited to participate in a story-making reconciliation activity

with other members of your class. The researcher is Carol Lee, who is working to complete her

doctorate degree in Education. As part of the research, but before the story-making activity

begins, you will be invited with the class to listen to four stories as models for the stories you

might make. You will be asked for your permission to participate in this story-reading activity

separately below in addition to the story-making activity.

Purpose of the Study: The purpose of this research is to find out if a four-person story-making

activity can support reconciliation (TRC Call 63.3) in the classroom and if working as a group to

create a single story is way for you to imagine a future that includes reconciliation. The research

will also try to determine if the story you make, makes you more empathetic, more respectful, and

more sensitive to intercultural learning and understanding.

Participation: If parental and student permission is granted, the class as whole will participate in

the research. Participants will form groups of four and in these groups, make a story. The study

consists of each person in each group making a character for their story then role-playing their

character’s part in solving a story problem that they choose together. During the story making

process, all story decisions will be recorded. For each story decision you make as a group, you

38

will be asked to examine four story lines your decision stops from happening and four story lines

that your decision lets happen.

The total estimated time of the project is 20 hours during regular school hours.

Risks: Your confidentiality will be protected partially in so much as your story character name

will be used instead of your real names in the research and all reference information collected.

However, because your real name and that of the other authors will be used when the oral and

written story is published digitally, there is a possibility depending on how the story develops that

other people may be able to identify through your story character.

Benefits: Your participation in this study will allow the researcher to understand better how story-

making can be used to foster reconciliation in the classroom. Your participation will allow you to

reflect on how your decisions can create possible reconciliation futures. All stories will be

assigned ISBNs and copies will be sent to the Library of Canada. This act makes you recognized

authors.

Confidentiality: The information you share will remain partially confidential and will be used

only for the purposes explained above. In publications related to the research, your confidentiality

will be protected using your character name.

Conservation of data: Data will be stored digitally in a password-protected file on the

researcher’s password protected personal computer. Once data collection, analysis, and reporting

is complete, this information will be digitally removed from the personal computer and placed on

a memory stick and stored in the researcher’s personal safe. All data, except the story artefacts

themselves will be securely destroyed five years after the completion of this research project.

Compensation: You will not receive any money for participating in this project.

Voluntary Participation: You are under no obligation to participate in this research. If you agree

to participate in this research, you may withdraw from the study at any time. You may also

39

request to have your data withdrawn after it has been submitted. Because the story is made as a

group, it cannot be unpublished, nor can your name be legally removed as an author from the

ISBN registration. You may also refuse any involvement in this research without suffering any

negative consequences.

If you have any questions about the study, you may contact the researcher at the email and

telephone number listed above. If you have any ethical concerns regarding your participation in

this study, you may contact the Protocol Officer for Ethics in Research, University of Ottawa, 550

Cumberland Street, Room 154, Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5, (613) 562-5387, ethics@uottawa.ca

Please print a copy of this information and consent to keep for your personal records.

STORY-READING ACTIVITY

Students: Please select one story-reading option:

[ ] I agree to participate in the story-reading activity in the above mentioned study.[ ] I respectfully decline participation in the story-reading activity in the above mentioned study.

Signed: _____________________________________

STORY-MAKING ACTIVITY

Students: Please select one story-making option:

[ ] I agree to participate in the story-making activity in the above mentioned study.[ ] I respectfully decline participation in the story-making activity in the above mentioned study.

Signed: _____________________________________

40

Appendix D: Consent to Publish Story

Consent Form to Digitally Publish the Story

Study Title: Story-Making Reconciliation with Indigenous and non-Indigenous Children

Researcher: Carol LeePhD CandidateFaculty of Education, U of Oclee185@uottawa.ca(613) 218-0530

I understand that this research will produce a fictional story and that I will co-author this

story. I understand that it will be produced in two forms, as an oral story and as a print story. This

letter, when signed below is a consent to allow both story versions produced to be published

digitally under a Creative Commons license. This license would allow others to freely download,

use, and build on the content of the publication so long as it is attributed to all the authors who

created it. The specific Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license

is designated as follows: . The legal description of the license can be found at:

https://creativecommons.org/.

Please print a copy of the consent form to keep for your personal records.

41

Students: Please select one option:

[ ] I agree to allow the story produced in the above mentioned study to be published under the

specified Creative Commons license.

[ ] I respectfully do not agree to allow the story produced in the above mentioned study to be

published under the specified Creative Commons license.

Signed: _____________________________________

Parent (s) or Guardian (s): Please select one option:

[ ] I agree to allow the story produced by my child ________________in the above mentioned

study to be published under the specified Creative Commons license.

[ ] I respectfully do not agree to allow the story produced in the above mentioned study to be

published under the specified Creative Commons license.

Signed: _____________________________________

Signed: _____________________________________

42

Appendix E: Fish Diagram Template

43

Appendix F: Decision Flow Chart Template

44

Appendix G: Best Practices in Empathy Teaching

45

46

(Cuzzo, Larson, Mattsson, & McGlasson, 2017, pp. 68-71)

47

End Notes

1 Father, Grade 6 and mother, Grade 10.

2 Kindle page numbering.

3 This view of time is contested by many physicists and more recently, some educators (Barad, 2007; de Freitas, 2017; Mauthner, 2015).

4 Note: I pick up on Bell’s connection between worldviews, agency, and relations later as important features of my proposed research.

5 The freedom of fiction to enter into dialogue with the given context in such a way as to underscore the play of interpretation…is at once necessary and extremely dangerous. Fiction is never innocent. The imagination is never disembodied. But that is precisely why fiction-as-research possesses huge potential for engendering agency. The grounded, emotional particularity of fiction is capable of transforming the reader. [And I would add the listener too.] Fiction permits border crossing and defamiliarization, which are both essential for diacritical empathy (de Freitas, 2003, np).

6 Barad has a PhD in quantum physics.

7 This question focusing on the dialogic or conversational aspects a story mediates between author and audience (Bahktin, 1981; Fish, 1980) and the transactions the listener or reader negotiates between what the story is saying and what one already knows (Iser, 1997; Rosenblatt, 1989).

8 For example, Barone & Eisner, 2008; Cole & Knowles, 2008; King, 2008; Leavy, 2016; Norris, 2011.