Becoming∼Belonging with Land: Entangled Stories of Science Education and Decolonial Pedagogical Transformation

Abstract Our work brings together three educators – a doctoral student and sessional instructor, a middle years teacher and master’s student, and a university professor – who come to this project from divergent positionalities, ancestries and educational geographies. Across the span of one summer, we engaged in critically reflexive dialogue, sharing field texts including teaching artefacts (syllabi, assignments, lesson plans) and personal writings that map our entangled pedagogical transformations. These stories are not linear narratives of improvement, but rather messy, layered accounts of yearning, grief, contradiction and co-becoming in entangled relational worlds. As we story our experiences, we ask: What does it mean to teach science in ways that resist colonial erasures? How might we reimagine science education as a site of ethical response-ability, rooted in Land, story and ancestral relation? Our inquiry is situated in the Canadian education system, but it resists nationalistic framing by foregrounding Indigenous sovereignties, spiritual geographies and the deep affective currents of learning in stolen land. With the reminder that locating ourselves – through ancestry, land, language and community – is an act of relational accountability; we delve into situated, plural stories that trouble the singularity of “Science” itself.