Catholic Residential Schools

In the summer of 2022, Pope Francis named the Catholic sponsorship and administration of residential schools in Canada as an evil. This course will investigate the historical, educational, and theological roots of the residential schools, particularly those sponsored by the Catholic Church; it will pay particular attention to the voices of those who survived them. It will explore the ways that the Church and its contemporary Catholic schools must begin to atone for this evil. Throughout the course, critical, decolonial, and Indigenous pedagogies will be reflectively practiced as a way of confronting and deconstructing the settler colonialism and oppressive pedagogies that created the residential schools.