Carolyn M. Melro

Carolyn M. Melro is a Killam Scholar and recent PhD graduate from Dalhousie University. Dr. Melro’s doctoral dissertation explored what works, why, and how when developing educational content on Indigenous Peoples experiences with historical and ongoing colonialism. Her research unearthed the overreliance of knowledge-based outcome evaluations of educational opportunities to teach about Indigenous Peoples experiences in Canada and the limits to these evaluation designs. She further found that these educational opportunities can have unintended effect, no effect at best or worse wherein the learners’ blaming attitudes, sense of professional responsibility, and support for government social action and policy worsened at the end of the course. Within her dissertation she called for exploring learners’ affective reaction to learning about Indigenous Peoples traumatic experiences with historical and on-going colonialism. One such way of evoking emotion is through the use of arts and humanities, she looks forward to exploring this as a HARC fellow. Carolyn is a Settler researcher first generation born Canadian to Portuguese immigrant parents and currently lives in Mi’Kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq.