Braiding Pedagogies

Using Etuaptmumk (Two-Eyed Seeing) as a Foundational Ethic

Abstract

The discourse on teaching and learning includes work on anti-racist education, decolonization, trauma informed pedagogy, universal design for teaching and learning, feminist, and queer pedagogies, etc. While each of these frameworks represents a different set of interests, they vibrate in harmony around critical reflections on the production of knowledge and the practices and processes of teaching and learning. Elder Murdena Marshall and Elder Albert Marshall characterize Etuaptmumk (Two-Eyed Seeing) as the gift of multiple perspectives; the ability to perceive the world through two lenses, one framed by Western Science, the other by Indigenous ways of knowing. This gift of multiple perspectives provides a means to find the common threads in the calls to engage in transformative teaching and learning practices and processes outlined above. Etuaptmumk, as an ethic, calls us to imagine ways to harvest the practices of various pedagogies as if they were blades of sweetgrass and weave them together to create transformative and sustainable classroom spaces.