Examining deficit thinking and moving to strength-based strategies to better work with Indigenous students
Workshop will explore the harms of deficit thinking and look at best practices to implement in the classroom.
UM faculty are invited to a workshop to learn about how historical events and policies have shaped deficit thinking, and how this impacts Indigenous students in education spaces.
Deficit Thinking and Strengths-Based Approaches in the Classroom When Working With Indigenous Students takes place on Wednesday, January 15 from 9 am – 12 pm online.
Deficit thinking is the idea that someone’s circumstances and background can’t be successful in the classroom because of internal deficiencies—and it’s often an unconscious bias.
Workshop creator and facilitator Randi Desmarais, an Indigenous Initiatives Educator with The Centre for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, says the history and policies around Indigenous people have shaped deficit thinking toward Indigenous students.
“Through the Indian Act, Indigenous people were made wards of the state, which led to many perceptions of them being inherently incapable of being successful,” she says. “I think people aren’t aware of how convoluted and complicated history has been for Indigenous people and how that’s shaped people’s thinking.”
That same history and policies have also shaped Indigenous peoples’ relationship to education.
“Education was weaponized and it still is a colonial system,” says Desmarais. “What we have now is Indigenous people trying to better themselves through this colonial system and getting retraumatized again. All of these students come with strengths, so the question is how can we use strengths-based approaches to work with them in the classroom.”
Part of the workshop will include looking at case studies of real situations Desmarais has seen Indigenous students face.
She acknowledges the case studies and conversations may be challenging, which is part of why the conversation is so important.
“To fix something the first thing we need to do is identify it and point it out,” she says. “Some of your previous ideas or thinking are going to be challenged a little bit and it may be uncomfortable because you may not be aware of it. But it also comes with solutions and new approaches so we can all strive to do better moving forward.”