Settler school psychologists readiness to decolonize practice

Abstract

This study presents a modified grounded theory analysis of settler school psychologists’ engagement with the idea of “decolonizing” their professional practice in working with Indigenous students and their families. Data was gathered through two rounds of interviews with seven settler school psychologists across Western and Northern Canada who are active in the profession. A personalized “self-location” situates the researcher as a settler school psychologist as a means of challenging psychology’s perception of itself as an “objective” science. Decolonization theory is explored from a variety of perspectives beginning with the work of Frantz Fanon (1961/2021). A variety of critical frames, including critical psychology, Critical Race Theory (CRT), and TribalCrit are used to explore how psychology and education interact in the field of school psychology and how this impacts Indigenous peoples. Grounded theory approaches were adapted to incorporate Indigenous research design and ethics, including working with an Elder and a Community Advisory Committee to ensure Indigenous perspectives remained centred in the analysis. Participants at various career stages described training programs that included no Indigenous content and workplaces that emphasized assessment and testing for programming decisions rather than focusing on a holistic consideration of student needs. Participants were varied in their understanding not only of Indigenous worldviews but also the worldviews embedded in dominant psychology. Most participants were unable to provide a clear statement of what it might mean to decolonize their practice and most described some type of fear or anxiety as preventing them from doing more to incorporate Indigenous worldviews in their work. While participants varied in their reflective examination of their practice there appeared to be little awareness of their own DECOLONIZING SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGY subjective position within the profession. They did not make explicit links between Indigenous epistemologies and how that might impact pedagogical recommendations. Participants seemed to simultaneously place themselves outside the problem of colonization and outside the solution of decolonizing their practice. While participant reluctance to engage in further decolonization of their work can be explained in terms of being based in “precontemplation” fears in the trans-theoretical model of change (Prochaska et al., 2008), they are also symptoms of what Mawhinney (1998) describe as settler “moves to innocence” as an attempt to avoid responsibility and accountability. A key implication of this research for the future of school psychology is recognizing the lack of critical self-reflection among practitioners and helping them increase their awareness of their subjectivities and biases while overcoming their discomfort with the process of decolonization. Key words: school psychology, educational psychology, decolonization, Indigenous education, Indigenous research, psychology training