Know Your Place for Mental Health on the Prairies: Tacting a Topography of Learning from Alberta for Curricula and Educational Studies

Abstract

How might we understand the role of place within mental health? Already exposed as a teacher to a harmful curriculum of place in Alberta, I posed this question based on the opinion that place relations mattered for making sense of mental health here. Local educators and many beyond, may need to be made aware of a long-running local curriculum on the prairies once invested in perpetuating the eugenics project. Violent and racist, this mental health initiative applied pioneering metaphors, ancient philosophy, medicalized definitions, and ideals shaped by settler colonialism to garner public support. In resistance, I purposely sought place-conscious ideas in and around amiskwaciy wâskahikan on Treaty 6 territory or Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. A review focusing on intercultural, transdisciplinary, lyrical, and decolonizing sensibilities assisted with generating tact-full educational exercises for grounding the co-creative approach introduced as an innovation for academic and critical ecohermeneutic research. Of late, ecohermeneutics has emerged from the texts of curriculum studies as a philosophical, place-conscious practice of interpretation to question and challenge conceptual notions associated with collective mis/understandings and broken relations in Canada. From four rounds of one-on-one meetings with former junior high students over eight months, possible alternative, conceptual responses relevant to the contexts of present-day schooling were expressed and gathered. Following each round, I met with a local Knowledge Keeper, providing ecological teachings and translations of place names that emerged through my former students’ resonant descriptions. Then, layered images from the field were arranged alongside our transcribed interpretations.