Kimberly Edmondson

• Social studies education
• Difficult knowledges and histories
• National parks and public pedagogies
• Curriculum theory
• Critical geographies
• Decolonial, anti-colonial, and de/colonizing pedagogies and practices
• Post-structural and post-human research methods 
• Walking methodologies
• Foucauldian discourse
• Teacher education

Dr. Edmondson is an Assistant Professor of Curriculum Studies in the College of Education at the University of Saskatchewan. Her research and teaching are informed by her nearly 20-year long career as a practicing high school social studies teacher in Alberta, as well as her love for curriculum theories that open space for practitioners, teacher-educators, and educational researchers to consider the diffractive curricular and pedagogical possibilities that may emerge when curriculum is approached “obliquely” (Ellsworth, 2005).

Inspired by her experiences growing up near Jasper National Park, learning of experiences and land stories from the descendants of those evicted from homelands that are now Jasper National Park, and her career as a high school social studies educator, Dr. Edmondson’s research centres on teachers’ relationships with national parks in Canada, and how those relationships may generate an orientation toward more anti-colonial social studies education. Her PhD research revealed that because national parks are both coded in settler colonial logics, they are generative sites to recognize, disrupt, and ultimately dismantle those logics in the context of teaching. Dr. Edmondson’s areas of research are guided by a feminist poststructuralist paradigm of discourse and power (e.g. St. Pierre, 2000; Ellsworth, 2005); theories of settler colonialism and whiteness (e.g., Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2013; Patel, 2016; Dion, 2007; Frankenberg, 1993); decolonization theories (e.g. Battiste, 2013; Madden, 2019; Tuck & Yang, 2012); critical inquiries of place (Massey, 2005; Tuck & McKenzie, 2015); critical geographies (e.g. Holfenbein, 2021; McKittrick, 2006); difficult histories and difficult knowledge (Britzman, 1998; Epstein & Peck, 2018; Gross & Terra, 2018), and post-humanism (e.g. Bennett, 2020; Braidotti, 2019; Derrida, 2006). Her research fits within a broader theme of dismantling systemic oppression with/in social studies education that she has cultivated throughout her emerging academic career. She has approached this theme through scholarly explorations in both social studies education and research and interdisciplinary curriculum theory.

• PhD, University of Alberta, 2025
• MEd, University of Alberta, 2019
• BEd, University of Alberta, 2008
• BSc, University of Alberta, 2008

ECUR 386 – Methods in Secondary Social Studies

ECUR 805 – Trends and Issues in Curriculum Research and Development

Edmondson, K. (forthcoming). Pyre, Patriotism, and Public Lands: Reflecting on Proximities and Anomalous Places of Learning with National Parks. In B. A. Varga & A. Franklin-Phipps (Eds.), Accumulating Proximities. Routledge.

Edmondson, K. (in press). “We saved you a seat!”: A haunted storying of Adirondacks and Indian Hospitals in Canada. In B. A. Varga (Ed.), Hauntological social studies: More-than-human deviances, imbrications, and proliferations of possibility. Springer.

Jones, B. & Edmondson, K. (2024). What is the word “difficult” doing in social studies research? A systematic literature review of empirical research on difficult knowledges and histories 2004–2022. Theory & Research in Social Education, 53(2), 218–248. https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2024.2430782 

van Kessel, C., & Edmondson, K. (Eds.) (2024). Teaching villainification in social studies: Pedagogies to deepen understanding of social evils. Teachers College Press.

Edmondson, K., & Tate, M. P. (2024). Out of sight, out of mine(d): Theorizing extractionary logics in mining communities. Ecokritike, 1(2), 153–174. https://doi.org/10.17613/8waw-wz43

van Kessel, C., Jones, K., Plots, R., Edmondson, K., & Teo, A. (2024). High school social studies teachers and their tactics for justice. Critical Education, 15(1), 51-73. https://doi.org/10.14288/ce.v15i1.186783

Edmondson, K. (2021). An analysis of Orientalist discourse in a social studies text resource. Canadian Social Studies, 52(2), pp. 89-100. https://doi.org/10.29173/css21 

van Kessel, C., Jacobs, N., Catena, F., & Edmondson, K. (2021). Responding to worldview threats in the classroom: An exploratory study of pre-service teachers. Journal of Teacher Education, 73(1), 97-109. https://doi.org/10.1177/00224871211051991

van Kessel, C., Jacobs, N., Catena, F., & Edmondson, K. (2020). Preparing Pre-Service Educators to Teach Worldview-Threatening Curriculum. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 18(1), 145–146. https://doi.org/10.25071/1916-4467.40473

Edmondson, K. (2025, December 3–5). The teacher is positionless: A new cultural myth of decolonized social studies teaching [Paper presentation]. Accepted to the College and University Faculty Assembly (CUFA) for the 105^th annual National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) conference, Washington D.C.

Edmondson, K. (2025. December 3–5). “They portray Canada as a virtuous state”: Social Studies Teachers’ Understandings of Canada’s National Parks [Paper presentation]. Accepted to the College and University Faculty Assembly (CUFA) for the 105^th annual National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) conference, Washington D.C.

Edmondson, K. (2025 April 23–27). The teacher cannot be positioned: A new cultural myth of decolonized social studies teaching [Paper presentation]. Social Studies Research SIG, American Educational Research Association (AERA) annual meeting, Denver, CO.

Jones, B., & Edmondson, K. (2025, April 23–27). Strategies for teaching difficult topics: A systematic literature review[Paper presentation]. Teaching History SIG, American Educational Research Association (AERA) annual meeting, Denver, CO.

Edmondson, K. (2024, November 20–21). “Decolonizing is not done through me”: Teachers’ engagement with national parks in walking interviews [Paper presentation]. College and University Faculty Assembly (CUFA) for the 104^th annual National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) conference, Boston, MA.

Jones, B., & Edmondson, K. (2024, April 11­­–14). Difficult pasts, possible futures: A systemic literature review of empirical research on difficult histories in social studies education, 2004-2022 [Paper presentation]. Social Studies Research SIG, American Educational Research Association (AERA) annual meeting, Philadelphia, PA. 

van Kessel, C., & Edmondson, K. (2023, November 29–December 1). Teaching villainification in social studies: Pedagogies to deepen understanding of social evils [Panel presentation]. Social Studies Research SIG, American Educational Research Association (AERA) annual meeting, Philadelphia, PA. 

Edmondson, K. (2023, April 13 – 16). (Un)settling the colonizer within: Settler life-writing as discursive truth-telling [Paper presentation]. American Educational Research Association (AERA) annual meeting, Chicago, IL.