Higgins & Madden, 2017 Canadian Social Studies, Volume 49, No. 1 34 (Not So) Monumental Agents: De/Colonizing Places of Learning Marc Higgins Department of Secondary Education Faculty of Education University of Alberta marc1@ualberta.ca Brooke Madden Department of Educational Policy Studies Faculty of Education University of Alberta bmadden@ualberta.ca What might it mean to inflect the current focus on public memory encapsulated in monuments by considering an equally important yet more subtle or (not so) monumental agent: educational institutions as products and producers of colonial logics and ways of being in relationship? In this essay, the authors offer pedagogical orientations that seek to embed curriculum in a multiplicity of colonial here-nows and there-thens that always already constitute our places of learning and learning selves in the making. Thought is able to confront us from the only place where it can confront us: from outside the concepts we already have, outside the subjectivities we already are, outside the material reality we already know. (Ellsworth, 2005, p. 55) In light of calls to address explicitly lingering and momentous celebrations of white settler nationalism—perhaps most recently made visible through the events surrounding the proposed removal of the Robert E Lee statue in Charlottesville and the related “Unite the Right” rally and protests—we take up the invitation to explore the roles we might play as teacher educators specializing in Indigenous education and truth and reconciliation education. Without diminishing (re)naming efforts that seek to address appropriation of Indigenous symbols (e.g., UBC, n.d.) and celebration of public figures who played key roles in the “cultural genocide” (TRC, 2015) of Indigenous peoples (e.g., Clancy, 2017; Wherry, 2017) for example, we suggest decolonizing education involves attending to a much more expansive and insidious landscape. Accordingly, we inflect the focus on public memory encapsulated in (and produced through) monuments by considering an equally important yet more subtle or (not so) monumental agent: educational institutions. While we hold that is imperative to vigilantly engage in the refusal, resistance, and resignification of historical moments of racism and colonialism and the ways in which they materially manifest, we suggest that these mo(nu)ments are also components of greater movements (i.e., relations of power that flow directionally, vary in intensity, and sometimes sediment). They are at once a moment and a movement: a “mo(ve)ment” (Davies & Gannon, 2009). Mo(ve)ment calls attention to the ways in which colonial logics (Donald, 2012) and the types of relationships they secure (Dion, 2009) exceed a series of mo(nu)ments that geographically and historically perforate the fabric of society. Beyond a symbolic node, mo(ve)ment includes the material-discursive force within, between, and beyond these