Teaching Canadian citizenship on unceded land: educators and the downloading of reconciliation

This study examines citizenship education as a contested pedagogical space within settler colonial states. It focuses on tensions between state commitments to reconciliation and immigrant naturalization systems dependent on settler state legitimacy. To do so, it draws on interviews with adult educators in Vancouver, Canada, on the unceded traditional territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Using street-level bureaucracy theory, it frames citizenship educators as frontline actors navigating unresolved policy contradictions. ‘Downloading’ is conceptualized as a form of policy displacement through which reconciliation is publicly acknowledged but incompletely institutionalized, shifting responsibility for making this contradiction governable onto community-based adult educators. Three interrelated dimensions of downloading are identified: epistemic, moral, and affective-temporal. Rather than read this gap as a failure of policy implementation, the paper argues that downloading functions as a mechanism through which settler colonial citizenship is itself operationalized by re-stabilizing settler state legitimacy. Beyond adult citizenship education, the analysis offers a broader framework for decolonial and anti-racist education scholarship, including K–12 contexts, by highlighting how symbolic political commitments can redistribute responsibility while leaving institutional contradictions intact.