Truth-telling, in the sense Busch employs it, refers to public, institutional, and community processes that establish and communicate truths about serious harms, especially where histories of violence, dispossession, and exploitation have been denied, minimized, or excluded from public memory. Within higher education, this work takes curricular, pedagogical, and institutional form when universities teach these histories, examine their own silences and selective memories, and connect learning to a responsibility for repair. Reparative education treats past injustice as active in present institutions rather than as a closed historical chapter, and it seeks relationships oriented toward listening, reciprocity, and historical redress. In Canada, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action intensified awareness of these responsibilities across public education, post-secondary institutions, and professional training, particularly where curricula have historically reproduced settler accounts of health, law, family, land, and governance.

Psychology warrants particular scrutiny within this endeavor, and the historical record is stark. Psychological education, research, assessment, and practice have participated in colonial projects through intelligence testing, diagnostic racism, pathologizing accounts of Indigenous distress, residential and boarding school research, support of eugenics programs and forced sterilization, knowledge extraction, and the universalization of Euro-Western theories. In Canada’s residential school system, intelligence tests compared Indigenous children with White children while scores were often interpreted without adequate consideration of restricted classroom time, forced labour, English-language demands, poorly trained teachers, and inadequate instruction. Low scores helped justify restricted academic opportunities and greater reliance on vocational and auxiliary curricula that often amounted to child labour rather than education. In Alberta, John M. MacEachran, who founded the University of Alberta’s Department of Philosophy and Psychology and drafted the Canadian Psychological Association’s founding constitution, chaired the Alberta Eugenics Board from 1929 to 1965. People placed in the ‘Aboriginal’ category were disproportionately diagnosed as mentally defective and sterilized, with the board seldom acting with any form of consent. In 2018, the Canadian Psychological Association acknowledged the discipline’s participation in cultural genocide, and in 2023 the American Psychological Association offered an apology to First Peoples for harms caused by psychology institutions and psychologists.

Busch argues that the reparative value of such acknowledgements depends on structural change throughout the discipline. Apologies that preserve inherited training structures can convert truth into professional absolution and self-protection. The article identifies two specific risks that limit truth-telling in psychology education. The first is symbolic response: reconciliation language is adopted while curricular and professional structures continue to maintain colonial authority intact. Courses can add Indigenous content while preserving the clinician or researcher as the primary interpreter of Indigenous life. A review of 627 school psychology articles found little engagement with decolonizing frameworks or researcher positionality, and few acknowledgments of psychology’s role in colonization—illustrating how content inclusion can leave dominant standards of psychological knowledge unchanged. The second risk is deficit framing, in which educators represent Indigenous Peoples primarily through lenses of harm, pathology, and service disparity. While colonial violence has produced serious and continuing harm that requires accurate teaching, Busch draws on Eve Tuck’s critique of damage-centred research to argue that documentation of injury can secure institutional attention while confining communities within narratives of depletion. Students may then encounter Indigenous Peoples primarily as clinical subjects of concern, with less attention to continuance, healing, resistance, joy, and sovereignty as sources of psychological knowledge.

The pedagogical framework Busch proposes is grounded in survivance, a concept developed by the Anishinaabe writer and scholar Gerald Vizenor. Vizenor described survivance as active Indigenous presence, narrative continuance, and a refusal of dominance, tragedy, and victimry. The concept contests what Vizenor calls manifest manners—the stereotypes, misnomers, and authoritative distortions through which settler archives claim the power to define Indigenous life. In psychology education, this critique applies directly to diagnostic instruction, case formulation, research methods, theories of development, and clinical training whenever these practices translate Indigenous Peoples into deficit, risk, disorder, or cultural difference. Busch also draws on the health survivance scholarship of Rachel Wilbur and Joseph Gone, whose scoping review of survivance in the health literature identified five recurring dimensions: narrative, temporality, community, decolonization, and sovereignty. Their account distinguishes health survivance from conventional resilience through its emphasis on resistance to unjust social arrangements, a temporal arc across past, present, and future, community and cultural persistence, and refusal of victimization.

The distinction from resilience is technically significant. Busch notes that psychology courses often rely on the language of resilience when teaching Indigenous mental health, trauma, and recovery, but Wilbur and Gone identify several limitations in this usage. Resilience rhetoric can place responsibility for adaptation on individuals and communities, obscure structural sources of harm, and organize Indigenous life around static narratives of trauma and recovery. It can also praise one’s ability to endure suffering while leaving the conditions requiring endurance unchanged. Health survivance, by contrast, directs students toward the political conditions that shape well-being and toward the Indigenous practices through which families, communities, and Nations sustain wellness, healing, and self-determination. Each of the five dimensions is then translated into concrete teaching activities. Under narrative, students examine clinical storytelling itself: whose knowledge receives decision-making authority, which histories appear in formulations, and what possibilities for healing a client is considered eligible for. A hypothetical case exercise asks students to revise a deliberately narrow formulation that attributes missed appointments to avoidance, instead examining how housing insecurity and prior racism in services contribute to distress and attendance, while treating the client’s chosen relationships and aspirations as relevant to healing.

Testimony offers another pedagogical avenue. Busch points to research on testimonies from survivors of the Beauval Indian Residential School, which identified cultural continuity, improving Indigenous futures, and acts of resistance by children, families, and communities—including children speaking Indigenous languages in secret and family efforts to protect children from residential school attendance. Such accounts can educate students about the realities of abuse, grief, and institutional violence while simultaneously revealing Indigenous agency, ingenuity, cultural continuity, and collective responsibility. Under temporality, students map one clinical or research issue across a colonial policy, its present-day effects, Indigenous-led responses, and professional obligations, connecting past violence, current institutional arrangements, and intergenerational processes of resistance and healing. Under community, students examine assigned resources to identify who created them, whose knowledge they present, and any conditions placed on their use—recognizing that Indigenous knowledge has its own intellectual authority, pedagogical processes, and internal consistency. This dimension also includes protections for Indigenous students, who research describes as experiencing isolation, invisibility and hypervisibility, limited mentorship, and devaluation of Indigenous ways of knowing. Survivance-informed teaching should protect Indigenous students’ right to participate as students and emerging professionals, with control over personal disclosure and cultural instruction.

Two practical tools anchor the framework. The first is a survivance-informed planning matrix, a course design instrument organized around the five dimensions that instructors might use to design a unit, review an existing syllabus, prepare a supervision seminar, or revise an assignment. Each course element challenges students to encounter truth, recognize continuance, analyze professional practice, and demonstrate responsibility. The second is a psycholonization audit, which applies the concept of psycholonization—the ways colonialism permeates psychological theory and practice, marginalizing Indigenous epistemologies, pedagogies, and healing practices—to the examination of routine professional tools. The audit covers five domains: case formulation, diagnosis and assessment, evidence and intervention, research and ethics, and supervision and practicum. Students examine a psychological tool’s assumptions, the conditions of its use, and its consequences, then justify recommendations to retain, revise, replace, or discontinue a practice. A measure used to support a client’s chosen goals may have very different effects when used to determine service eligibility, and the audit may point to needed revisions in institutional policies such as the rules governing how assessment results determine access to services.

Busch is careful to specify safeguards. Any pedagogical work with an anti-colonial objective requires culturally safe learning environments established before instructors assign testimony, archival materials, or clinical texts describing colonial violence. Research on decolonizing psychology curricula has found that limited faculty preparation, workload pressures, accreditation requirements, and uneven responsibility can constrain such efforts, so programs should provide faculty development, shared planning time, and institutional support. Contributions to course design or teaching from Indigenous faculty members, Elders, Knowledge Keepers, and community partners should be appropriately recognized and compensated, with clear agreements concerning roles, consent, attribution, and subsequent use. Preparation also includes content advisories, accessible support resources, careful sequencing, structured dialogue, and clear protections from spotlighting or coerced disclosure. Indigenous students should decide whether to share personal experiences or contribute to cultural instruction, ideally in private communication rather than in the middle of a class. Instructors should explain that discomfort may accompany critical learning and establish clear processes for responding to distress, harm, and possible retraumatization. Assignments that include testimony should frame listening as an act of truth-witnessing guided by relationship, reciprocity, reflexivity, responsibility, and Elder-led teaching.

Crucially, Busch acknowledges that the proposed tools may themselves reproduce symbolic reconciliation when completed matrices, audits, or revised documents are treated as evidence that colonial harms have been resolved. Evaluation should distinguish students’ learning from changes in institutional decisions, resources, and relationships with Indigenous communities. Indigenous collaborators should be able to contest institutional accounts of success without being expected to endorse them, and unresolved disagreements should remain documented and open to review. Completing a matrix or audit does not certify decolonial competence. The framework’s feasibility and effects have not been empirically evaluated, and Indigenous-led, community-accountable studies could examine learning at course, practicum, and program levels, with longitudinal work assessing whether students sustain changes in case formulation, consent, consultation, referral, and research decisions as they enter professional roles. The framework may inform work in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, the United States, and other settler-colonial settings, though applications beyond Indigenous contexts would require separate conceptual justification that respects survivance’s Indigenous intellectual and political origins. Ultimately, Busch concludes, the reparative value of this work depends on sustained changes in professional practice and institutional relationships that remain open to scrutiny by those most affected by the discipline’s actions.

Subject of Research: Does psychology have a truth-telling problem? Survivance as truth-telling pedagogy in psychology education

Article Title: Does psychology have a truth-telling problem? Survivance as truth-telling pedagogy in psychology education

Article References: Does psychology have a truth-telling problem? Survivance as truth-telling pedagogy in psychology education. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1917470

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2026.1917470

Keywords: Does, psychology, truth-telling, problem, Survivance, pedagogy, education, scientific research