A Neoindigenous Perspective on Language Silencing in Science Education

The authors draw on their own experiences as practitioners, one as a Biology and Agriculture teacher in Kenya, and the other as an educator in a summer science program serving African American youth in a city in the Midwestern United States. They document and analyze moments of language contestation and explore the use of the construct of neoindigenous to see in what ways it illuminates new understandings of continued colonization through language silencing in relation to science teaching and learning. A self-study methodology is used, which includes memory work, narrative, and conversation, and allows the researchers to fuse personal narrative and sociocultural exploration. What emerges are glimpses of what is lost and rendered valueless when English and the language of science are positioned as elite and correct. The research also shows the difficulty for educators of diminishing the power of science that is sustained by access to its language, even when they intentionally try to create hybrid spaces that value non-dominant student language.