THUNDER BAY — Melissa Twance has been named Lakehead University’s latest Canada Research Chair.
Over the next five year’s Twance will focus on land-based learning and Indigenous pedagogies and how they can help decolonize education.
Twance is a member of Netmizaagamig Nishinaabeg (Pic Mobert First Nation) and said the values of the Western education system never felt relevant to her life or her community, which made her feel isolated and frustrated.
“Bringing about transformative change means that we need to go against the colonial norm that is infused throughout Western education institutes and allow Indigenous knowledge to be validated as its own form of knowledge, which will make learning a more positive experience for Indigenous people,” she said in a news release.
Twance plans to use an approach that is community engaged and arts based for her research; that includes sharing and beading circles to study how traditional Indigenous places of learning and ways of being, immersing youth in culture, language and tradition.
“My research will focus beyond the Western classroom because that’s where I was able to find validation and support for myself growing up,” she said. “My grandmother taught me beadwork and my mother ensured that we had a cultural upbringing and participated in ceremonies and Powwows, which helped me build a sense of community and identity.”
“Instead of conforming to and meeting Euro Western measures of success, how do we define success for ourselves, how does learning with and through the land point to different futures for us?” she added.
The research chair appointment includes $600,000 in funding over five years and a $39,000 research infrastructure grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation.
Lakehead University's Maryam Ebrahimi was also renewed for a second five-year term as a Canada Research Chair.
Ebrahimi, an assistant professor in the university’s chemistry department, will continue her work in molecular-based low-dimensional nanomaterials, focusing on the fundamentals of low-dimensional nanomaterials whose properties are determined by their size, structure, and growth dimensions.