Parks make practice: Teacher subjects’ pedagogical encounters with/in Canada’s national parks

This study examines the question of how teacher knowledge is produced from visiting Canada’s national parks. As places coded in settler colonial logics, how those logics come to bear on teacher subjectivities is a generative site of inquiry in social studies education. Drawing from walked interviews with social studies teachers in national parks, this article applies poststructural theories of discourse and power and a discourse analysis of interview excerpts to trace how teachers’ experiences visiting national parks shaped their subjectivities in relation to their civic teacher knowledge and the extent to which discursive slippages produced from national parks knowledge and experiences contribute to relational teacher-knowledge production and anticolonial commitments. The implications of this paper provide further research trajectories into how teacher subjectivities are (re)produced by discourses of place to offer pivots toward more relational understandings that consider teachers’ historical, political and social positionings.