OLPD5122: Indigenous Education: Research, Policy, and Practice

This course examines the relationship between Indigenous communities (broadly defined and in relation with more than humans), cultural practices, knowledges, and in and out-of-school education. We pay particular attention to local Indigenous educational experiences and in broader global contexts, which are examined using chronological (histories/time), thematic (topical yet interconnected ideas), and vital approaches (issues requiring urgent attention and their interventions), including analysis of trajectories of Indigenous education, the expansion of mass schooling, education/language ideologies and policies, and resistance, innovation, and Indigenous-driven resurgence through educational design. The course assumes Indigenous education as part of an array of anti- and decolonial strategies for Indigenous self-determination that is inextricable from good human-earth relations; thus, as a class, we take a holistic and connective approach towards understanding education as part of Indigenous knowledge systems. The course also assumes diverse forms and definitions of education and epistemologies (the study of knowledge/how we know what we know) proposed by Indigenous and critical scholars. We therefore examine a) the formal schooling of Indigenous children historically designed by non-Indigenous groups, b) education as ancestral birthright/Indigenous socialization and nature-mediated (Kawagley, 2006), and c) education as advancing Indigenous sovereign pedagogies (Goodyear-Ka’ōpua, 2013). Further, the course expands understanding of the links and disruptions between different educational practices, in and out-of-school and across diverse geographies, communities, and ideas and practices of peoplehood—from U.S. American Indian and Alaska Native communities to Indigenous communities in the highland Andes to Pacific Island Nations and beyond. Central to student work in this course is learning how Indigenous communities shape learning experiences according to place relations and how Indigenous knowledge systems are foundational in this work. Three organizing concepts assist in this course’s design, reflected through readings and lectures: We pay attention to patterns in policies impacting Indigenous peoples with special attention to explicit environmental/land, language, and educational development; we consider the role of families, communities, and place-based pedagogies in formal and out-of-school education; and we exercise creative educational proposals for Indigenous self-determination and self-development that are linked with Indigenous educational research. Students are asked to carefully examine contexts of the education of Indigenous peoples under local, national and transnational pressures and amidst other variables, specifically economic and political shifts, environmental development-degradation, and climate change and to offer their own proposals toward transformative Indigenous education design and research agendas that inform educational development in and with Indigenous peoples—meaning, the course is most interested in cultivating dialogue and exchanging ideas because there are no singular, closed, or universal solutions to Indigenous environmental challenges and educational design as interventions. For students interested in topics related to identified course themes, please note that the course has a strong environmental and land-based foundation and is linked with these keywords: Indigenous Knowledge Systems, land kinship, place-based education and more than human relations, nature-mediated education, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Indigenous community-based education, Indigenous language reclamation, and decolonial educational research and design. Students are invited to cultivate their own focal areas in relation to prior knowledge and current study interests.

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