Investigating practitioner navigation of institutionalized social justice education in British Columbia secondary schools

This graphic métissage aims to embody a holistic framework as a means for telling the story of the BC curriculum for Social Justice 12. Through the weaving of life-writing, Indigenous research practices, graphic storytelling, institutional ethnography, and graphically rendered self-reflexive, dialogic interviews as a pathway for participatory and collaborative research, this métissage reflects my efforts to conduct scholarship in a way that aligns with my identity as a Métis scholar, secondary teacher, teacher educator, and lecturer. Throughout this dissertation, I explore the generativity of graphic text as a means of rendering my account and those of seven other teachers who have experience with the Social Justice 12 course. In enacting this graphic research praxis, I aim to explore the potential of graphic text as a kind of scholarship that is more than representational, a site of anti-colonial resistance, and a vehicle for my own self-reflexivity. My hope is that this dissertation pushes beyond merely representing a journey in pictures, but instead makes use of the graphic text as a platform for critical self-reflection and reflexivity and as a means of inviting participants into an ethical, self-reflexive, and self-aware research practice. The artistic enactment of my account of the teachings offered by these seven teachers, my own life-writing, and the images, text panels, and narration panels of the graphic form come together in what can be seen as a new kind of métissage. The teachings offered by this study include approaches to self-location in research, considerations of the on-going legacy of the colonial values of positivism in the context of moving towards anti-colonial teaching and research practices, and thoughts on the continued value of the Social Justice 12 curriculum in an ever-changing political landscape.