Learning Discomfort and Uncertainty: The KAIROS Blanket Exercise as a Canadian Settler Education Tool

Abstract

The KAIROS Blanket Exercise is an experiential learning activity that takes participants in Canada through Indigenous history in North America from an Indigenous perspective. In a 90- minute workshop, participants embody the role of Indigenous peoples and walk on blankets that represent the land. Through the reading of scripts, they re-enact the chronology of Canadian history and the processes of settler colonization and then debrief together to discuss their experiences in the exercise. The popularity and wide-spread use of the Blanket Exercise since the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Report in 2015 as a settler teaching tool illustrates the need to study its educative impact and aims. The premise of this thesis is that settler education is a needed area of focus for transforming the settler-Indigenous relationship into one that is less colonial and less attached to a settled Canadian future. This thesis uses the Blanket Exercise as a case study to reveal settler Canadian investments in settler futurity and examine potentials for disrupting those investments. This study considers that discomfort and emotions are a critical aspect to this education and uses Boler’s Pedagogy of Discomfort and Ahmed’s Cultural Politics of Emotions as theoretical frameworks to unpack settler reactions and resistances in the Blanket Exercise. This thesis uses Grounded Theory qualitative methods to present interviews with KAIROS staff and KAIROS blog posts as sources of data analysis in order to study the potential space the exercise creates for unlearning in settler Participants. The findings of this thesis reveal that though the Blanket Exercise does have the potential to create space for unlearning in settler Participants, this potential is not always reached in the immediate space of the exercise. This is due to the introductory nature of the exercise and Participants’ engagement at easier shifts in learning. However, the study considers that Participants in the exercise are experiencing a learned moment of discomfort that can be cultivated in settlers beyond the timeframe of the exercise to reduce the harm that these practices of futurity have on settler-Indigenous relationships in Canada.