Indigenous Education Research Articles

Challenges in Making Inclusive and Comprehensive Public Policy on Ethno-educational Processes

This article presents the results of intercultural processes stemming from challenges in making inclusive and comprehensive public policies on ethno-educational matters based on the current public policies in Latin American countries, particularly Colombia. This qualitative, ethnographic research examined the perceptions of Indigenous educators vis-à-vis (sustituir por: in face of) the contemporary public policies on aboriginal communities. In doing so, this study employed individual and focus-group interviews and drew on a descriptive, analytical design that also considered a systematic review of antecedents to such policies. The findings evidence that the realities of Indigenous classroom practices and approaches are distant from those of urban settings and the principles and norms established in Colombia’s legislation and other countries. Lastly, the study highlights the need for constructing public policies that benefit Indigenous communities in Latin America and Colombia.

Indigenous Education in Brazil—The Case of the Bare People in Nova Esperança: Transition to Work and Sustainability

Indigenous Education in Brazil—The Case of the Bare People in Nova Esperança: Transition to Work and Sustainability

Leaps in the dark

This study investigates how the desire to ascertain a sense of place for Black, Caribbean diasporic subjects living on Indigenous lands can be pursued through respectful engagement with Indigenous literary art. Although returning to our own ancestral homes may not be possible, I argue, as a diasporic person myself, that it is possible for diasporic subjects to find meaning and belonging on the Indigenous lands of Aotearoa, New Zealand and what is now known as Canada through analysis of works like the bone people by Māori author Keri Hulme and Monkey Beach by Haisla author Eden Robinson. Drawing upon each text’s use of narrative, incorporation of Indigenous language, and depiction of tradition, I develop frameworks towards finding belonging whilst respecting Māori and Haisla lifeways. Both personal experience and textual analysis colour this research, which was spurred by a longing for place as a subject of the Black, Caribbean diaspora. This paper argues that humble engagement with Māori and Haisla knowledges, as elicited by Hulme and Robinson’s novels, can contribute to a greater sense of belonging for such diasporic subjects to decolonizing ends. The paper focuses on place as a fluid concept, the importance of humility when engaging with Indigenous knowledge and practices, and the acceptance of Indigenous education without expectation of mastery. Belonging is not a rigid concept, and this paper is not a guidebook, but a launching pad towards a lifetime of learning, unlearning, change and acceptance.

Building Science Teacher Leaders for Indigenous Schools: Lessons from a Science Professional Development Workshop in Nepal

This is a case study of a science professional development workshop in Nepal with 17 teacher participants from four public schools. These schools mainly served Indigenous students in elementary, middle, and high school (Grades 9 and 10). The workshop focused on educating and building science teacher leaders for culturally relevant teaching and antiracist pedagogy by valuing and integrating Indigenous leadership practices and local knowledge. The teachers participated in a 2-day workshop co-organized by the local district education office and the local high school and led by the high school principal and a U.S.-based university faculty. Data were collected during and after the workshop through field notes, audio/video recordings of some sections of the workshop, and focus group interviews with a select group of participating teachers. The analysis of the data showed (a) struggles and opportunities to prioritize Indigenous science knowledge and Tharu sociocultural connections, (b) teachers seeking affirmation from principals to be science teacher leaders modeled on Indigenous leadership values, and (c) greater willingness for culturally relevant pedagogy among female and Indigenous teachers. The hope is that this paper will contribute to the value of a science teacher leadership professional development program (PD) in building awareness among science teachers about the value of culturally appropriate antiracist pedagogy in science teacher leaders. In addition, the PD also shows that science teacher leaders in Indigenous schools would benefit from the Indigenous relational model of leadership in leading their peers and students in antiracist and culturally relevant science teaching and learning. Finally, the study seems to indicate that a successful science teacher leader always incorporates local Indigenous community values, knowledge, and practices.

Educación de los pueblos originarios en Colombia, subalternización e injusticia cognitiva

This article has been derived from a documentary research work, which offers a balance of education for Indigenous Peoples in the Latin American sphere, in the Colombian sphere and in the specific sphere of the Nasa Indigenous People in Colombia. It also realizes the way in which the relationship between Own Education and the fight for territorial autonomy has been raised. Finally, for the Colombian case, some problematizations present in the relationship between Indigenous Education and state policy on education are collected. It is concluded that the ontological and epistemic violence that generates injustices in knowledge and understanding, and that affected the indigenous peoples under the colonial project, is resisted based on the educational experiences of the Nasa Indigenous People.

A Quest for Decolonization: Incorporating Indigenous Pedagogies to Foster Teaching and Learning at Higher Education Institutions in South Africa

A Quest for Decolonization: Incorporating Indigenous Pedagogies to Foster Teaching and Learning at Higher Education Institutions in South Africa

Indigenous pedagogies of love: Theorizing nonscalable worlds

Indigenous life in India is defined by development. Indigenous peoples in India are categorized as Scheduled Tribes, a constitutional category defined by a presumed backwardness, remoteness, and need for improvement. Indigenous life and community well-being is tracked via development measures and initiatives where development is seen as both a requirement for and vehicle of peace and stability. In this article, we propose Naga pedagogies of love as Indigenous modes of accounting for relations and narrating community wellbeing. We consider Naga storytelling about rice as an embodied Indigenous pedagogy of love that enacts Indigenous futurity in the here and now. Building on theorizations of Indigenous epistemologies, we demonstrate how dominant modes of development and scaling-up are unable to account for Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Instead, we explore forms of reciprocity and sociality that are embedded in Indigenous community and allow us to claim past and future as Indigenous features that are outside the economic domain of expansion.

Editorial

We are pleased to bring you Volume 53 Issue 1 of The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education. We wish to thank the authors, reviewers, and editorial board members for their contributions to this volume. Thanks also to the Indigenous Engagement Division at The University of Queensland and Informit for their financial support of the journal. We hope you enjoy this volume of AJIE.

Fairness, tika and political science in Aotearoa New Zealand: Some “inconvenient evidence”

This article is a rejoinder to Annie Te One and Maria Bargh’s article, published in the previous edition of The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, exploring whether the political science discipline in Aotearoa New Zealand is keeping pace with change with respect to Māori politics content in university political science programs, the number of Māori employed in the political science profession and the content of New Zealand's Political Science journal. While acknowledging the importance of their case, an assessment of the empirical evidence and further analysis of the data and the methods used by Te One and Bargh refutes their allegations in relation to all three issues. As one of the co-editors of Political Science, I note that, from 2012 to 2022, the acceptance rate of articles on Māori politics was 91.7% and that of Māori authors submitting on a Māori topic was 100%. Recognition and change are underway.

“God Save Me from a Civilized Indian”: Labor Union Schools and Contending Visions for Indigenous Education in Ecuador, 1936–1963

From the 1930s to the 1960s, Indigenous activists in Ecuador unsettled the prevailing paradigm of acculturation, practicing literacies that advanced their capacities for political mobilization around labor and land rights. Leaders on the haciendas of Cayambe allied with the Communist Party of Ecuador to organize their locally grounded politics against an urban-based indigenista movement. Both movements highlighted the need for Indigenous emancipation from the confines of the feudalistic labor system but diverged in their visions of Indigenous agency. Labor activists recognized that landowners relied on education for social control, so they made autonomous schooling a central hallmark of their struggle. Previous scholarship, focused on 1980s state directives for intercultural bilingual education, has not explored the orientation of Cayambe's early schools toward labor rights pedagogy. Analyzing textbooks, periodicals, and oral histories, I argue that Cayambe's teachers pursued notions of national inclusion that fused citizenship rights with socialist ideals and practices of Indigenous autonomy.

Embera Children's Stories: A Strategy for the Preservation of Language and Cultural Identity in Indigenous Education

This study conducted in the Embera Chamí Navera Drua community, located in Darien, Colombia, investigates the impact of children's literature, particularly stories, on strengthening cultural identity and preserving the native language among the community's children. Utilizing a qualitative approach, an ethnographic and participatory action research design was implemented to deeply explore the community's worldview, its educational context, and the sense of cultural belonging developed by the children. The results highlight the importance of intercultural teacher training and the implementation of pedagogical strategies that promote the indigenous worldview through the narrative of stories, which capture the interest and imagination of children. It is concluded that children's stories facilitate the development of a sense of cultural belonging in children, youth, and adults while engaging with their native language. Therefore, it is necessary to train teachers within the community who can link storytelling as a strategy to facilitate the preservation of their language from childhood, allow community participation in preserving their worldview, and contribute to the development of the community's own cultural education.

Mancera-Valencia, F.J. & Mayagoitia, E.A. (2023) Cultural Heritage and Education. Universidad Pedagógica del Estado de Chihuahua Editorial

Although the topics of the research articles that are compiled in this book focus on a wide range of themes, such as the connection between school and museums, the use of radio as a schooling device for indigenous population or the unique architecture of Mennonite schools in the north of Mexico; they all share the same objective: to foster a debate regarding the relevance of heritage education. Some of the texts are research articles, others document intervention experiences in different educational contexts, both formal and informal. Most of them narrate practices that were implemented in Mexican territory (specifically, the states of Chihuahua, Nuevo León, Mexico City and Baja California), except for one project that was conducted in Spain. The articles cover topics like the implications of educational heritage, its purpose, didactic orientations, devices, and places. The book coordinators, Federico Mancera-Valencia and Eva Mayagoitia, prestigious Mexican researchers, argue that patrimonial education is in its gestational state, and, since it is a research field that is constantly evolving, it has its own tensions and contradictions. The book is composed of 12 chapters, created by authors of different backgrounds and fields: professors, researchers, educators, an archeologist, an anthropologist and a geographer, all of them with extensive experience in educational heritage. These articles are organized in four sections: a) Educational heritage: tensions and debates, b) Academic Cultural Heritage, c) Cultural Heritage of Indigenous Education and d) Museums, libraries and cultural heritage management.

Religious Education for Indigenous Communities and Kepercayaan Adherents in Indonesia

Since its establishment in 2016, the Indonesian government has conducted Pendidikan Kepercayaan (Belief Education) as religious education for indigenous communities and kepercayaan (belief) adherents in Indonesia. Various studies affirm that kepercayaan Education is the Indonesian government's way of eliminating discrimination against indigenous communities and kepercayaan adherents in the educational sphere. Other research on kepercayaan Education targets the challenges of implementation in the school context. This work attempts to examine the interconnectedness of kepercayaan education and the education of indigenous religions and kepercayaan adherents within the community context. The underlying question is does belief education represent the education of indigenous religions within communities? How does the education of indigenous religions in the community context contribute to and be included in the development of kepercayaan education? As a theoretical framework, I employ the concept of indigenization that has developed in the discourse of indigenous education in Canada. The method used in this research is a literature study. The results of this study indicate that belief education does not represent the education of indigenous religions and kepercayaan adherents within the community realm. Kepercayaan education is a service designed unilaterally by the state without recognizing and respecting the diversity and educational needs of indigenous communities in Indonesia. As an alternative, I propose a reconciliation and collaboration-based indigenization approach as a new framework for reconstructing kepercayaan education. The path of reconciliation and collaboration provides a space for children of indigenous communities to achieve the national educational aspiration of learning and practicing the teachings of their 'religion' in accordance with the educational model of their respective communities.

Educating the temporal imagination: Teaching time for justice in a warming world

Climate change has been called both a ‘slow emergency’ and an ‘urgent crisis’, it creates tensions between human and non-human temporalities, it asks some communities to ‘speed up’ and demands others slow down, and requires choices between present needs, historical responsibilities and future consequences. If students are to understand and confront climate (in)justice, then a ‘temporal imagination’ (Adam, 1998) is required that is alert to the ways that time is central to the politics of a warming world. This paper therefore explores how ‘teaching time’ can support the awareness of and attention to (in)justice. The paper discusses the limits of current approaches to teaching time in education and explores a range of practices for developing ‘temporal attunement’ (Jensen, 2023) that can be found in public arts, Indigenous education, educational philosophy, futures studies and decolonial praxis. It maps out five temporal educational practices of: relational time; rhythm; anticipation and reparation; temporal suspension; and critical time keeping. It argues that these practices can be put into dialogue as a basis for a ‘temporal pedagogy’ that comprises three moves: interruption (of habitual and dominant temporal frames and their production of injustice), attention (to the latent, situated, plural timings and rhythms of the situation), and encounter (through invitations to judgement about the temporal practices that should govern more just collective action in response to climate change). It concludes by working through an example of how such a pedagogy might be deployed to negotiate the conflicting temporalities of socio-ecological change.

The Sámi Pathfinders: Addressing the Knowledge Gap in Norwegian Mainstream Education

For at least two decades, lack of knowledge about the Sámi in Norway has been recognised as a reason for the perpetuation of stereotypes and discriminatory acts and hate speech towards them. Education about the Sámi, their lifeways, culture and rights is posited as a means of closing this gap, with the intention of influencing the majority Norwegian society’s attitudes towards the Sámi. The relatively new Norwegian curriculum (LK20) reflects this understanding. It requires teachers at every level of the educational system to include Sámi perspectives and themes in all subjects. This paper looks at how Indigenous Education is included in mainstream schools in Norway. It asks, if Indigenous Education can provide a counterbalance to existing stereotypes and discrimination of the Sámi People, then what kind of knowledge is sufficient to this end? To explore this, I specifically consider the efforts of the Sámi Pathfinders—a group of young Sámi adults (18–25 years) who visit and provide lectures about Sámi history, language and culture for Norwegian high school pupils. Through semi-structured interviews with five Pathfinders, I explored what kind of Indigenous Education they provide, how the Pathfinders interpret their role in relation to combatting stereotypes and discrimination, and their perception of the impact they have. Through reflexive thematic analysis, this study confirmed that there is a lack of knowledge about the Sámi in mainstream education. It also shows that most teachers did not prepare their pupils for the Pathfinders’ visit. Although the Pathfinders’ visit arguably improved pupils’ and teachers’ knowledge about the Sámi, this research suggests that how and how often knowledge is presented matters. It also suggests that who presents knowledge is a factor. Indigenous knowledge that is coupled with contact that is sufficiently close, positive and frequent has greater potential in altering discriminatory tendencies towards the Sámi.

Indigenous education and (re)existence through self-writing - for a pedagogy of sensibilities: dialogue between Paulo Freire and Maria Amélia Pinho Pereira

Based on decolonial thinking that originated in the late 20th century, we will discuss the importance of indigenous resistance practices promoted through “ taking the floor ,” a term coined by philosopher Michel de Certeau and appropriated in this research to refer to the development of research and literary productions carried out by indigenous researchers and writers in order to confront and resignify colonizing narratives about these peoples, indicating how these productions contribute to thinking about decolonial education, such as the school model proposed by pedagogue Maria AP Pereira and her Education of Sensitivity. Based on Catherine Walsh, Paulo Freire, Márcia Kambeba, Daniel Munduruku, and Albert Memmi, we understand that the colonizer finds in scientific-intellectual knowledge devices of knowledge-power that underpin oppressive Eurocentric structures to justify exploitation, violence, inequality, inferiority, and discrimination, bases that still exert a strong influence on the various sectors of contemporary society. It is identified in the contributions of the aforementioned researchers that an educational model critical of scientism and the hierarchy of knowledge is possible based on an educational praxis and that dialogues with the diversity of knowledge and cultures, where education is liberating, promoting the overcoming of the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy as proposed by Freire, and is applied in the Education of Sensitivity promoted by the pedagogue Maria AP Pereira.

Ashtam Ntotacinan/Come Listen to Us: Theatricalization of Life Stories for the Holistic Wellness of Indigenous Women Students

In Quebec, Indigenous cultural resurgence is expressed through all areas of creation, including theatre, which allows the expression of concerns related to identity reaffirmation and cultural reappropriation. In this movement, Indigenous women are particularly present in public space through art. As a path of resistance and resilience, artistic culture is an important factor of wellness for First Peoples. Anchored in a decolonial epistemology, this theatre-based research involves the implementation of a collective creation approach with Indigenous female college students. It questions the benefits of the theatricalization of life stories on learning related to the dimensions of holistic wellness. Faced with systemic obstacles resulting from colonization, Indigenous students follow atypical schooling trajectories, hence the importance of supporting them with culturally safe approaches based on traditional knowledge. Combining the fields of Indigenous education and theatre education, it is hoped that through this project, the narrative sovereignty of Indigenous women is strengthened and recommendations for the realization of culturally safe artistic educational projects with Indigenous youth and adults are provided.

Navigating Educational Crossroads: An In-Depth Analysis of the Indigenous Peoples Education (IPED) Program in Santol, La Union, Philippines

This study delves into the heart of indigenous education, unraveling the intricacies of the Indigenous Peoples Education (IPEd) Program in Santol, La Union, Philippines. Grounded in the dynamic global context of education as a fundamental human right and a transformative societal force, this research scrutinizes the successes, challenges, and areas demanding improvement within this focused educational initiative. Recent literature underscores the pivotal role of education in societal development, emphasizing its function as a catalyst for human rights, global sustainability, and the empowerment of marginalized communities. Despite commendable legislative frameworks in the Philippines and global initiatives like the Education for All (EFA) policy, challenges persist for indigenous populations. This research contributes to the ongoing discourse by presenting a meticulous analysis of the IPEd Program's implementation, examining the experiences of Santol, La Union. The findings promise to enrich educational policies and practices, aligning them with the evolving global and national educational landscape. By doing so, this study aspires to pave the way for more effective educational interventions that resonate with the unique cultural context of indigenous communities and foster a holistic approach to education, ensuring that no one is left behind in the pursuit of quality education for all.

The Lettered Indian: Race, Nation, and Indigenous Education in Twentieth-Century Bolivia

The Lettered Indian: Race, Nation, and Indigenous Education in Twentieth-Century Bolivia

Embedding indigeneity in formal schooling: a case of tharu teachers’ indigenous pedagogy in Nepal

ABSTRACT This paper explored the pedagogical approaches adopted by the Tharu indigenous teachers to pass on their community-based knowledge through the schooling system. The interpretive paradigm was used during the research process. Jitpur-Simara sub-metropolitan city, located in the central part of Nepal, was chosen as a research site where a significant number of the Tharus have been living for generations. The data were gathered from six Tharu teachers teaching in three public schools purposively selected for the study. In-depth interviews and document analysis were employed to gather qualitative information and the information then underwent transcribing, editing, coding, and thematizing to align with the research objectives. The findings unveiled a range of indigenous approaches such as storytelling, role-play, demonstration, question-answer sessions, discussions, and deductive methods employed by the Tharu teachers to convey their aboriginal knowledge, skills, and values to new generations. They developed knowledge of these strategies from their family and community and integrated them into dominant educating processes in the schools. These approaches to teaching were used by considering the context, nature of content and individual background. Such integration of indigenous approaches in the formal education system has been reported to have proven benefits in mitigating educational disparities among underprivileged and marginalized children, including Tharus.