Canada continues to struggle with issues of institutional racism and discrimination. Not only are individuals from minoritized groups subjugated to individual forms of racism but also, systemic racism continues to thwart their integration, progress, and upward mobility (Pirbhai-Illich, 2013). I argue that the underlying reasons for this disparity are founded in colonialism, where a form of North-South relations exists at a local level within the prairie province in which this study took place. The province has a high number of students of First Nations descent who are being failed by an education system where teachers are largely of white European descent. Colonialism has constructed an arbitrary and imagined distinction of global boundaries, based on a binary logic (us/them, inferior/superior, civilized/savage, industrious/lazy). These arbitrary distinctions are evident in Canada, (McQuaid, 2008), and to effectively change systemic inequities requires an active citizenry who have a critical understanding of identity politics and contextual issues (local, global, political and historical) (Ladson-Billings, 1999; Giroux, 1985). The research presented here is therefore not about geographical mobility, but about cultural and epistemological mobility where teacher candidates are encouraged to make mental shifts in their positioning of self and other to work in socially just ways. A literacy course with a critical service-learning (Mitchell, 2008) component engaged 19 teacher candidates in learning to work dialogically with and alongside 19 adolescent youth of First Nations descent. The course prepared them through a process of critical consciousness-raising, to question their own complicity in perpetuating the status quo and how systemic racism affects the academic abilities of this marginalized group. Data analysed for this paper trace the teacher candidates’ developing critical consciousness, their understandings of relational pedagogy, and the impact this had on the space for learning they were able to create with their student.

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