Daniela Bascuñán - Bishop's University

Research Axe:

Education and Pedagogy

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Dr. Daniela Bascuñán

Assistant Professor

Education: Ph.D. in Education Curriculum Studies and Teacher Development, University of Toronto. BA Honours in Sociology and Latin/Caribbean Studies, York University.

daniela.bascunan@ubishops.ca

Keywords: Critical studies, settler colonialism, Indigenous education, practitioner research, childhood subjectivities, relationality, spatialized perspectives

Research Project(s):

Research explores children’s sense of self and relationality within settler colonial contexts, integrating Indigenous perspectives. Studies how classrooms shape identity and relational positionalities, and how children navigate and challenge colonial structures.

Biography:

As an Assistant Professor at Bishop’s University’s School of Education, I teach courses related to field practica. My courses prepare future teachers for the complexities of teaching and learning by prioritizing culturally responsive teaching and pedagogical care. I support teacher candidates to meaningfully incorporate the tenets of Competency 15 by exploring the ethical integration of Indigenous perspectives into their teaching. I utilize unorthodox teaching methods: drama conventions to highlight how active instruction strategies help children learn, modeling theoretical concepts with found objects, student-led workshops, and visual metaphors as thought exercises. I also support teacher candidates to use research methods that have depth as they gather practicum data: data portraitures, “human libraries” to share teaching journeys, and artful before/after teacher portraits are examples of these methods. Of utmost importance in all courses, is my intention to bridge the world of teaching with the world of childhood studies. I believe that it is vitally important for teacher education to incorporate understandings from this field so that teacher candidates have the conceptual lens to make sense of their relationships to children and youth. By doing this, I seek to divest from universalist developmental approaches to understanding children, childhood and youth. Instead, I take an interdisciplinary approach using sociological, spatialized, critical, and historical framings of what it means to be a child.

Prior teaching at Bishop’s I was an elementary teacher for 25 years, where I taught in K-6 classrooms at the Toronto District School Board. I was a classroom teacher and also held roles as a drama and dance specialist, ESL positions, and taught in various special education settings, including resource support and working children with multiple dis/abilities. I held the Position of Responsibility (Chair) role at two schools to advancement the schools’ capacities in the areas of Equity and Literacies.

My research is situated in the intersecting fields of critical studies, settler colonialism, Indigenous Treaty education, and practitioner research. I explore children’s conceptions of the self (subjectivities) through critical place-based and spatialized perspectives that are attuned to Indigenous wisdoms of place and in contestation of settler colonialism. Because the experience of childhood is both intersectional and intersubjective, my work critically engages how children navigate and are shaped by the social, cultural, and historical forces of settler colonialism.

I study children’s conceptions of relationality/ kinship and subjectivity (identity). The construction of children’s social subjectivities is highly spatialized, multiply-dimensioned, and co-constructed. Time and place are central in understanding the socially-constructed process of children’s subjectification and the making of relational positionalities. This process is mediated within the larger socio-historical context and specifically here, within a settler colonial matrix.

The aim of my approach is threefold. First, I study how children’s subjective and relational positions are locally co-constructed in a classroom environment and in a co-constitutive manner shaped by classroom interactions with knowledge (Indigenous, familial, ancestral), peers, and teachers. Second, I highlight how the dialectical dynamic between the making of the self is refracted within in the context of intersectional difference. I do this to acknowledge that children in schools have their persons configured based on markers of difference such as gender, race, class, and also in relation to place, time, and Land. By studying children’s sense of self as refracted and co-constituted, we can see how children’s subjectivities are shaped: their ages get refracted into positions of knowledge authority in their relationships with adults; their ethnic backgrounds get refracted within whiteness; their citizenship statuses get refracted within discourses of nation-building; their linguistic experiences get refracted within dominant languages; and their family histories get refracted into transnational occurrences. Third, within the context of the latter, I study how children unsettle the experience becoming a settler and analyze children’s ideation about the world as it refracted with their sense of self. I study how children expose cracks in the process of settler conscription and highlight children’s relational experience in becoming Treaty members. Such approaches to inquiry aim to reconceptualize aspects of childhood that require nuance, in particular how to understand the contradictions and tensions of integrating Indigenous sensibilities in settler colonial contexts while emphasizing relationality and kindred-ness. Given the scope of these focal areas, my research inherently challenges settler colonial culture.

Publications:

Book chapters

Bascuñán, D., Sinke, M., & Carroll, S. M. & Restoule, J. P., (2022). Know trespassing: Moving settler teachers toward decolonization and resurgence. In A. Kempf & S. Styres (Eds.), Troubling Truth & Reconciliation in Canadian Education: Critical Perspectives. (32 pp.), (University of Alberta Press).

Journal Papers

Bascuñán, D., Carroll, S., Restoule, J.P., & Sinke, M. (2022) Teaching as Trespass: Avoiding Places of Innocence. Excellence and Equity in Education, 54(1).

Douglas, V., Purton, F., & Bascuñán, D. (2020). Possibility not Difficulty: Difficult Knowledge in K-12 Classrooms as Opportunities for Renegotiating Relationships With Indigenous Perspectives and Knowledges. Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 66(3).

Carroll, S. M., Bascuñán, D., Sinke, M., & Restoule, J. P. (2020). How Discomfort Reproduces Settler Structures:” Moving beyond Fear and Becoming Imperfect Accomplices”. Journal of Curriculum and Teaching, 9(2), 9-19.

Bascuñán, D. (2016) Through children’s eyes: Elementary students respond to the impacts of Indian residential schools. English Teaching: Practice & Critique, 15(3) 450-460.

Bascunan, D. (2010). Awakening the writing student and writing teacher: Bringing meaning to student writing and purpose to teaching. Journal of Classroom Research in Literacy. 3, 22-30.

Reports

2018 Gaztambide-Fernández, R., Bascuñán, D., & VanderDussen Toukan, E. (2018) Wekimün Chilkatuwe School Project Year 5 External Evaluation Report. Prepared for Young Lives Research Laboratory at the University of Prince Edward Island, Global Affairs Canada, and Wekimün Board of Directors.

Audio Publications

2023 Bascuñán, D. Featured speaker. Teaching Writers Speak, “Children Writing Their Legacies with Land with Daniela Bascuñán.” Teaching Writer’s Speak. Toronto Writing Project, 2023, April 3. Spotify Episode Link

Research Axe Profile

Dr. Daniela Bascuñán

Research Project(s):

Biography:

Publications: