The importance of place in indigenous science education

In this issue of Cultural Studies of Science Education, Mack and colleagues (Mack et al. 2011) seek to identify the necessary components of science education in Indigenous settings. Using a review of current research in informal science education in Indigenous settings, along with personal interviews with American educators engaged in these programs, the authors suggest some effective practices to use Indigenous ways of knowing to strengthen science programming. For the past 4 years, we have been interested in the importance of place in culturally relevant science education. We have explored the role of place and have used Gruenewald’s critical pedagogy of place (2003) to examine the importance of place in a variety of Indigenous contexts. In response to Mack and colleagues, in this paper we explore the importance of place as a means to reinhabituate Indigenous youth who live in urban, First Nation, and rural Costa Rican contexts.     

The Learning is In‐between: The search for a metalanguage in Indigenous education

Following the first significant research into Indigenous methods of learning, it was argued that Indigenous students could learn western knowledge using Indigenous ways of learning. Subsequent research contradicted this finding to take the position that Indigenous students must learn western knowledge using western methods and so this set the scene for the development of a pedagogy where Indigenous students could learn how to learn. Theorists in Indigenous education began to search for a metalanguage. Crosscultural theorists have perceived this metalanguage in terms of an explicit and transparent pedagogy while critical theorists want Indigenous students to develop their own ways of speaking and writing and to be conscious of how they do this. However, I take the position in this paper that there is already a metalanguage at work in‐between the student and the teacher in the classroom although it is often obscured from consciousness in the effort to articulate valid, quantifiable outcomes.     

There is no place of nature; there is only the nature of place: animate landscapes as methodology for inquiry in the Coast Salish territory

Indigenist scholars have been attending to the research process in ways that highlight the move toward inquiry, the beginnings of the research journey. The energies that animate imagination and inquiry need to be respected and accounted for. If we recognize that place and the consciousness of landscape contain the primordial elements for the Indigenous mind, then it follows that respectful Indigenous research methods should engage with the landscape as the beginning point for inquiry. Centering place and place-ness as containing the ontological meaning of Indigenous methodology is also a way to excavate the specific effects of colonization on Indigenous landscapes and communities. Much Indigenous thought radiates from an invocation of a sentient topography, a land that is aware of human presence. This writing considers what a methodology of place, specifically in the Coast Salish territory, might consist of.     

Secret Transmissions: Modelling cross‐cultural relations in classroom discourses

It is often assumed in education that we have left the deficit model behind, but this paper suggests that policies and programs continue to position Indigenous students within a discourse of progress and enlightenment. Through this discourse, they are positioned between an image of what they once were as disadvantaged and what they are supposed to become in the process of studying at school and university. This paper examines some of the messages that are secretly transmitted both inside and outside the classroom when Indigenous students are constituted in discourse as behind or below and having to catch‐up to the non‐Indigenous students. It suggests other ways in which teachers could address the production of cross‐cultural relations through classroom discourses to avoid positioning Indigenous people in a deficit relation to non‐Indigenous people.     

Indigenous Métissage: a decolonizing research sensibility

This paper is a report on the theoretical origins of a decolonizing research sensibility called Indigenous Métissage. This research praxis emerged parallel to personal and ongoing inquiries into historic and current relations connecting Aboriginal peoples and Canadians in the place now called Canada. I frame the colonial frontier origins of these relations – and the logics that tend to inform them – as conceptual problems that require rethinking on more ethically relational terms. Although a postcolonial cultural theory called métissage offers helpful insights towards this challenge, I argue that the postcolonial emphasis on hybridity fails to acknowledge Indigenous subjectivity in ethical ways. Instead, I present an indigenized form of métissage focused on rereading and reframing Aboriginal and Canadian relations and informed by Indigenous notions of place. Doing Indigenous Métissage requires hermeneutic imagination directed towards the telling of a story that belies colonial frontier logics and fosters decolonizing.     

Child‐directed Dramatic Play as Identity Text in Northern Canadian Indigenous Kindergarten Classrooms

In this paper, an Anishnaabe educator and university researcher/former primary teacher make a case for viewing children's dramatic play as multimodal identity texts. Indigenous children in our research study take up an agentic role and construct positive identities in dramatic play, creating narratives that reflect Indigenous cultural practices, as well as some practices of mainstream Canadian society that may be imbued with colonising perspectives. We argue that the Indigenous Cultural classes and follow‐up dramatic play counter the marginalisation of Indigenous knowledge, culture and languages that has occurred with devastating effects on generations of Indigenous families. Our paper is based on video recordings of 4‐ and 5‐year‐old children's dramatic play that were analysed collectively by 12 Indigenous educators in terms of the Indigenous cultural meanings that children created in their play. We conclude with implications for non‐Indigenous teachers, arguing that a case can be made for including child‐led dramatic play in the literacy curriculum when dramatic play narratives are viewed as multimodal identity texts. These texts, which can involve multiple modes including print, draw from children's own cultural and linguistic knowledge and experience.     

Indigenous STEM success stories as disquieting decolonization: thoughts on new times and,old thoughts about place-ness

While some Indigenous individuals have achieved “success” in STEM careers, persistent questions from many Indigenous scholars and communities about epistemic dominance at universities remain. Going beyond student achievement, this essay regards the centering of local Indigenous place based knowledge as a paradigm shifting move for universities. Thinking into places is more than an equity move to include Indigenous minds in university spaces, it is an undertaking to actually advance and transform STEM fields and all university disciplines.

     

Rethinking environmental science education from indigenous knowledge perspectives: an experience with a Dene First Nation community

This auto-ethnographic article explores how land-based education might challenge Western environmental science education (ESE) in an Indigenous community. This learning experience was developed from two perspectives: first, land-based educational stories from Dene First Nation community Elders, knowledge holders, teachers, and students; and second, the author’s critical self‐reflections focusing on how land-based education could offer unlearning, rethinking, relearning, and reclaiming ESE. This auto-ethnography provides particular insights into who we are as environmental educators, the challenges in Western ESE, why land-based education matters, why and how a significant move should be made from Western ESE to land-based ESE, and how land-based education offers a bridge between Western and Indigenous education.     

Positioning the school in the landscape: exploring Black history with a regional Australian primary school

This paper deals with a project establishing an Indigenous Australian artists-in-residence program at a regional Australian primary school to foreground its Black History. Primary school students worked with Indigenous Australian story tellers, artists, dancers and musicians to explore ways in which they could examine print and non-print texts for a critical appreciation of ways in which their school has been positioned in the physical landscape on the land, and in the historical landscape, where Indigenous Australian roles and contributions have continued to be marginalised. From such critical engagement, the children have created non-print texts of their own: tangible, durable artefacts of acknowledgment of their own school's Black History. Constructed as texts which may be read by all who enter the school, the artefacts produced are visual texts that have formed part of a continuing critical engagement with creators of Indigenous Australian texts, and interpretation by the children of the texts that they have engaged as part of this project.     

Tactics or strategies? Exploring everyday conditions to facilitate implementation of an Indigenous graduate attributes project

In 2017 Universities Australia (UA), the peak body representing Australian universities released its Indigenous Strategy 2017–2020. The document unites universities together in common goals for Indigenous achievement, filling a notable gap in the Australian higher education landscape. The Strategy outlines a comprehensive plan for enhanced Indigenous outcomes in critical areas of higher education including student access and success, graduate research, and community engagement. This paper focuses on the implementation of Indigenous curriculum for all Australian university graduates which is a key aspect of the Strategy. The changing Indigenous higher education landscape invites the nuanced analysis that critical examination of universities, as organisations, might elicit. Drawing on de Certeau’s notion of tactics and strategies, the paper examines the policy and cultural climate of an Australian university which supports an Indigenous Graduate Attribute curriculum project.     

‘Don't talk about what you don't know’: on (not) conducting research with/in Indigenous contexts

This article raises the recurrent question whether non-indigenous researchers should attempt to research with/in Indigenous communities. If research is indeed a metaphor of colonization, then we have two choices: we have to learn to conduct research in ways that meet the needs of Indigenous communities and are non-exploitative, culturally appropriate and inclusive, or we need to relinquish our roles as researchers within Indigenous contexts and make way for Indigenous researchers. Both of these alternatives are complex. Hence in this article I trace my learning journey; a journey that has culminated in the realization that it is not my place to conduct research within Indigenous contexts, but that I can use ‘what I know’ – rather than imagining that I know about Indigenous epistemologies or Indigenous experiences under colonialism – to work as an ally with Indigenous researchers. Coming as I do, from a position of relative power, I can also contribute in some small way to the project of decolonizing methodologies by speaking ‘to my own mob’.     

Unfolding possibilities through a decolonizing project: Indigenous knowledges and rural Japanese women

Rural Japanese women have been overlooked or misrepresented in the academic and nationalist discourses on Japanese women. Using an anti‐colonial feminist framework, I advocate that centring discussions on Indigenous knowledges will help fill this gap based on the belief that Indigenous‐knowledge framework is a tool to show the agency of the ‘colonized’. In this paper, I attempt to answer the following question: What is the role of Indigenous knowledges in the context of rural Japanese women? I first discuss my epistemological approach by exploring the notion of Indigenous knowledges and my location within it. This process led me to employ autoethnography as the central methodology of this paper. Second, in order to better situate rural Japanese women, I look at Japanese history, especially the Meiji period (1868–1912) when Westernization began to exert a major influence on the Japanese nationalist movement via its control over knowledges carried by rural Japanese women. Third, in order for me to reclaim these subjugated Indigenous knowledges, I introduce my lived experience through autoethnography as a starting point to explore the possibilities that lie in the Indigenous‐knowledge framework. Fourth, I further discuss the interlocking nature of the issues surrounding nationalism, representation, knowledge production and identity emerging from the discussion on rural Japanese women and my reflexive text. This leads us to an assessment of how an Indigenous‐knowledge framework may shift discussions/perceptions of rural Japanese women in particular. Lastly, I conclude by noting the potential implications and applications of further research on this topic in other parts of the world.     

Exploring learning goals and assessment approaches for Indigenous health education: a qualitative study in Australia and New Zealand

In higher education, assessment is key to student learning. Assessments which promote critical thinking necessary for sustained learning beyond university are highly valued. However, the design of assessment tasks to achieve these types of thinking skills and dispositions to act in professional practice has received little attention. This research examines how academics design assessment to achieve these learning goals in Indigenous health education. Indigenous health education is an important area of learning for health practitioners to help address worldwide patterns of health inequities that exist for Indigenous people. We used a constructivist qualitative methodology to (i) explore learning goals and assessment strategies used in Indigenous health tertiary education and (ii) examine how they relate to higher education assessment ideals. Forty-one academics (from nine health disciplines) involved in teaching Indigenous health content participated in a semi-structured interview. Thematic analysis revealed learning goals to transform students’ perspectives and capacities to think critically and creatively about their role in Indigenous health. In contrast, assessment tasks encouraged more narrowly bounded thinking to analyse information about historical and socio-cultural factors contributing to Indigenous health. To transform students to be critical health practitioners capable of working and collaborating with Indigenous people to advance their health and well-being, the findings suggest that assessment may need to be nested across many aspects of the curriculum using a programmatic approach, and with a focus on learning to think and act for future practice. These findings accord with more recent calls for transformation of learning and assessment in health education.     

Rethinking the role of Indigenous knowledges in the academy

This paper is an invitation critically to engage in the discussion of ‘Indigenous knowledges’ and the implication for academic decolonization. Among the issues raised are questions of the definition and operationalization of Indigenous knowledges and the challenges of pursuing such knowledge in the Western academy. The paper draws attention to some of the nuances, contradictions and contestations in affirming the place of Indigenous knowledges in the academy. It is pointed out that Indigenous knowledges do not ‘sit in pristine fashion’ outside of the effects of other knowledges. In particular, the paper brings new and complex readings to the term ‘Indigenous’, maintaining that different bodies of knowledge continually influence each other to show the dynamism of all knowledge systems. It is argued that when located in the Euro-American educational contexts, Indigenous knowledges can be fundamentally experientially based, non-universal, holistic and relational knowledges of ‘resistance’. In the discussion, the paper interrogates the notions of tradition, authenticity, orality and the assertion of Indigenous identity as crucial to the educational and political project of affirming Indigenous knowledges.     

Paulo Freire,Critical Literacy,and Indigenous Resistance

Using several case studies drawn from Freire’s cultural context and contemporary Canadian Indigenous resistance movements, this article questions whether a Freirean approach to critical literacy can work with Indigenous literacy needs without reproducing colonial power structures. It also seeks to examine current scholarship in the literacy education of Maritime Aboriginal people in Canada and to illustrate the need for critical pedagogies honoring multiple cultural literacies and ways of knowing among Indigenous youth.     

Critical allies and feminist praxis: rethinking dis-ease

In Australian universities, non-Indigenous educators teaching Indigenous studies and/or Indigenous content must engage critically with anti-colonialism, not simply as lip service to syllabus content, but also, as an ethical consideration whereby consultation and collaboration with Indigenous scholars must necessarily direct praxis. Such an engagement might be referred to as a ‘critical alliance’: an engagement with Others about whom we are speaking that forms the basis for an ethical relationship. A ‘critical alliance’ with Others seeks always to undermine the colonial relations of power that discursively position both Indigenous and non-Indigenous subjects. This paper explores what such an alliance might ‘look like’ as a feminist practice, what will sustain it or give it substance so it can be a productive contribution to a more socially just pedagogy that gives emphasis to Indigenous struggles and Indigenous knowledge.     

Indigenous knowledge and the machinist metaphors of the bricoleur researcher

This paper explores the intersection between critical methodologies and Indigenous knowledge. It is especially concerned with the ways in which the metaphors associated with the bricoleur researcher – tools and production – conceptualize Indigenous knowledge to that of an ecology and environmental work. This limits the appreciation for and engagement with narrative, and the ways in which “ecological” knowledge is embedded in narrative practices and interpretive processes. The author puts the work of Anishinaabe novelist and theorist Gerald Vizenor in conversation with the writings of J. Kincheloe as a way not only to contrast the central metaphors in critical and Indigenous methodologies, but similarly to highlight the differences between a bricoleur language of research and an Aboriginal language of survivance.     

Eco-heroes out of place and relations: decolonizing the narratives of Into the Wild and Grizzly Man through Land education

Eco-heroic quests for environmental communion continue to be represented, mediated, and glorified through film and media narratives. This paper examines two eco-heroic quests in the Alaskan ‘wilderness’ that have been portrayed in two Hollywood motion pictures: the movies Grizzly Man and Into the Wild. Both films vividly document and re-inscribe heroic status to the stories of Timothy Treadwell (Grizzly Man) and Christopher McCandless (Into the Wild), their tragic encounters with nature, and the pivotal experiences that gave them both eco-heroic identities in the American imagination. As is often the case for Greek and Shakespearean dramas, each hero met a tragic, unnecessary death in Alaskan ‘wilderness’, but in the process reiterated a settler colonial narrative. We argue that an Indigenous-focused Land education and its counter-narratives of holistic relations are sorely needed. It is Indigenous Land education that can break the cycle of Eurocentric celebrations of solitary heroism, rugged individualism, and ignorance of place. In order to forge Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations in our cultural imaginations and to address compounding environmental struggles, we need to turn to Indigenous stories and teachings that are already in place, in deep relation with the Land, water, animals and plants on Indigenous territory. We need to turn to Land education that is currently not in place or acknowledged in environmental education.     

Learning from land and water: exploring mazinaabikiniganan as indigenous epistemology

Abstract

Indigenous peoples have long called for education that supports self-determination, counters colonial practices, and values our cultural identity and pride as Indigenous peoples. In recent years, Land education has emerged as a form of decolonial praxis that necessarily privileges Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies and engages in critiques of settler-colonialism. Informed by this theoretical framework and using Indigenous storywork methodology, this study focused on the perspectives of six Anishinaabe Elders on mazinaabikiniganan (commonly known as pictographs) at Agawa Rock, now part of Lake Superior Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada. Revealing ways of knowing and being that are intimately connected to Land and place, the pedagogical potential of mazinaabikiniganan as a form of Land education is discussed.     

The potential of critical race theory in decolonizing university curricula

This paper critiques our experiences as non-Indigenous Australian educators of working with numerous embedding Indigenous perspectives curricular projects at an Australian university. Reporting on these project outcomes alone, while useful in identifying limitations, does not illustrate ways in which future embedding and decolonizing projects can persist and evolve. Deeper analysis is required of the ways in which Indigenous knowledge and perspectives are perceived, and what “embedding” Indigenous Knowledge in university curricula truly means to various educational stakeholders. To achieve a deeper analysis and propose ways to invigorate the continuing decolonization of Australian university curricula, this paper critically interrogates the methodology and conceptualization of Indigenous knowledge in embedding Indigenous perspectives (EIP) in the university curriculum using tenets of critical race theory. Accordingly, we conduct this analysis from the standpoint that EIP should not subscribe to the luxury of independence of scholarship from politics and activism. The learning objective is to create a space to legitimize politics in the intellectual/academic realm. We conclude by arguing that critical race theory's emancipatory, future and action-oriented goals for curricula would enhance effective and sustainable embedding initiatives, and ultimately, preventing such initiatives from returning to the status quo.