Relationality Assignment

When I began my tenure-track position in the autumn of 2019, I knew that I wanted to decolonize and Indigenize course content, but I also wanted to create alternative assessments that equally embraced decolonizing and Indigenizing practices. Through the years, I have created numerous assessments that I offer as options alongside what we might consider as more traditional assessments, such as a summary assignment or an essay. One of the assignments that I find has been the most successful and generated the most engagement and response is the Relationality Assignment. The Relationality Assignment can be challenging, but it reaps rewards. This assignment asks students to embrace and recognize their personal experience, their culture, and their place-based understanding and being as paramount and valuable. The assignment asks the students to consider themselves as part of a greater whole and to situate who they are in relation to people, land, weather, time, and course content. Because this assignment asks quite elevated questions, I often do the assignment and offer it up as an example. I include the first Relationality Assignment I did, which fails at many of the criteria. I highlight my own colonization when I review the assignment with students. I include a few others that are more successful at the assignment. I remind my students that I have been indoctrinated into the educational systems, so I find (maybe as they do) the assignment to be demanding. I remind them that there really isn’t a wrong way of doing this assignment. Students have undertaken this assignment in various ways—journals, letters, collage, paintings, beadwork, poems, and so on. I have included the assignment guidelines, the rubric, and an example of my own Relationality Assignment.

Bio: Heather Simeney MacLeod is a Michif (Red River Metis) writer and educator born in Treaty 6 (Edmonton) and currently lives in Kamloops on the unceded territory of the Secwepemc Nation. Heather works as an Associate Teaching Professor at Thompson Rivers University and is cross-appointed between two departments, Communication and Visual Arts as well as Literatures, Languages, and Performing Arts. Heather's courses highlight the importance of Indigenization and decolonization while recognizing these are fraught and challenging terms.