“What Does Protest Mean?”: A Freirean Intervention In Tamil Genocide Education.

Genocide education in Canadian classrooms is often focused on theoretical concepts and legal processes that don’t account for the lived realities of students who encounter ongoing genocidal projects. In the case of the Tamil Genocide, the Ontario government passed Bill 104, or the Tamil Genocide Education Week Act, which mandated a seven-day period in May of each year to promote education around the Tamil Genocide. Despite this, students continue to face repression, silencing, and otherwise lack of meaningful resources to explore these topics. This paper examines how Tamil, Tamil-Canadian, and/or Tamil-speaking students experience repression for attempting to discuss the Tamil Genocide in their classroom and how this inhibits their ability to recognize, address, and act on the very real ways intergenerational memories of 2009 show up in their everyday lives. It will explore how critical pedagogue and scholar Paulo Freire’s critique of power and authoritarianism masked as benevolence offers a critical juncture in the study of Tamil Genocide education. Rather than be limited to the parameters of a classroom environment, this paper considers how genocide education takes place in assemblies, community halls, and even within the home. It weaves in reflections from the author as a Tamil Genocide Education facilitator with critical pedagogical theory in an attempt to think laterally with and across interlocking oppressions to conceptualize a generative space in genocide education. By engaging with the overlapping, contradictory, and contextually dense narratives of learners, Tamil Genocide educators can reject singular narrative education and imagine alternative possibilities.