Chapter 6: “Why don’t we get to go Learn about that Stuff?”: Relational Teacher Education and Professional Development Towards Transformational Desettling in Social Studies Education

To confront settler colonialism in social studies education, we must transform pre-service and in-service teacher preparation. Mainstream school systems, educator preparation programs, and in-service professional development efforts are all built on Euro-American values, beliefs, and epistemologies. These Euro-American ways, both implicitly and explicitly, view Indigenous cultures as deficient (Swaney, 2006). To counter assimilative educational practices built on deficit assumptions, we need to build space in teacher education for both a critical Indigenous consciousness and, as a necessary counterpart, a critical settler colonial consciousness (Kulago, 2019). In this chapter, we discuss the need for recognizing these dual critical consciousnesses, and the relationship between them, through what we describe as a vital element of educator growth—transformational desettling—made possible through community-driven professional development for educators of Indigenous youth and their communities.