Notes from today’s readings:
“In an academic context, decolonization… means challenging the racist ideologies that produce hierarchies of knowledge systems/worldviews and peoples.”
“Indigenous knowledge systems were, until fairly recently, perceived by anthropologists as failed epistemology.”
“Critical pedagogies explain how power operates as a diffuse network of ideologies and institutions, such as racism and the legal system.”
“Reframing critical and antiracist analytics with a settler colonial lens helps us understand how coloniality operates all around us.”
“An Indigenist approach to pedagogy means deferring to Native peoples as the foremost experts of their own experience and knowledge systems.”
“I have noticed that when I am teaching about Buddhism, students are often enamored by its own reference to interdependence, an idea rooted in dependent arising, a philosophical framework that describes all phenomena as interconnected.”
“Students are sometimes more dismissive of similar concepts rooted in Native America and other Indigenous communities because the stigma of their views as failed epistemology is more pronounced.”
“If we want students to understand racism as structural, we have to make these epistemological assumptions legible.”
“When students can deeply conceptualize how Others have become so deeply ontologically and structurally dispossessed through these assumptions, they can change the way they relate to the greater world.”
From Avalos, Natalie (2021). “Decolonizing the Classroom: Settler Colonialism, Knowledge Production, and Antiracism.” In H. N. Nguyen & A. Desai (Eds.), Global Perspectives on Dialogue in the Classroom (pp. 23–32). Springer International Publishing.
BPMH is the only program at U of T where students can engage in deep and sustained study of the science, histories, practices, and global Indigenous cultures associated with mindfulness and other contemplative practices – from multi-disciplinary perspectives in a suite of academic courses enhanced by co-curricular programming.
You tell me:
Why has the University of Toronto suspended our program?
#bpmh #contemplativescience #uoft #mindfulness #truthandreconciliation
