EDST UBC: Education, School and Social Institutions F2015 (original) (raw)
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Aboriginal "Ways of Being": Educational Leaders, Students and Traditional Aboriginal Knowledge
2009
We once thought you came to live with us. You still could have that chance. We're still here, and we live on this land. We don't live in your libraries in the pages of your books…. We have a long surviving and sacred tradition and an experiential wisdom that's been passed on for more centuries than you can imagine. This is your chance to benefit from that. All you have to do is to be quiet and listen and quit worrying about proving and believing." Mad Bear Tuscarora Holy Man of the Tuscarora Nation of the Six-Nation Haudenosaunee Confederacy The School System and Aboriginal Students It is well known that students from Indigenous societies around the world overwhelmingly demonstrate a distinct lack of enthusiasm for schooling in its conventional form, most often attributed to an alien institutional culture (Battiste, 2002). The statistics bear this out. In Canada, for example, only 47% of Aboriginal 1 students graduate from high school, compared to 82% of non-Aboriginal students (Mendelson, 2006). 1 In this paper, we use the terms Aboriginal, Indigenous and First Nations somewhat interchangeably. Typically, Indigenous is a global term referring to original inhabitants on the land, and in Canada, Aboriginal refers to three groups of Indigenous peoples-First Nations, Metis, and Inuit. Our discussion in this paper centers on Indigenous peoples, who are Aboriginal and First Nations.
Learning from and with Aboriginal learners: Rethinking Aboriginal education in Canada
This chapter presents an overview of Aboriginal education in Canada that focuses on linking the transgenerational effects of colonialism with current issues. Educational models, partnerships, and programs already exist that make an enormous impact on outcomes for children and youth in and from Aboriginal communities. Examples of six successful programs that were developed in partnership with Aboriginal communities and range from elementary school through post-secondary school are highlighted.
Canadian Journal of Educational Administration and Policy, 2014
Learning involves conceptual frameworks embedded in worldviews and values. The overarching problematic of Aboriginal post-secondary education is complex and multifaceted. Normative and institutional forces as well as the credentialing and certification agenda of post-secondary education limit the degree to which Aboriginal education at any level can simply go its own way. To what degree and in what ways should Aboriginal post-secondary education differ from mainstream post-secondary education-and can it? The parity paradox (Paquette & Fallon, 2010, p. xii) prevails in post-secondary as in lower-level education. Education that purports to be meaningfully "Aboriginal" must fulfill two seemingly opposing purposes: provide education that is grounded in Aboriginal cultures but also provide a reasonable degree of parity with the content and quality of mainstream education. In short, Aboriginal post-secondary education is situated at the nexus of colliding epistemic universes of hugely unequal power. What can and should be Aboriginal in Aboriginal post-secondary education? What is the Canadian experience to date in that respect-with particular focus on the British Columbia case example-and what can be learned from it? Introduction: Defining the Overall Problematic Learning is not a culture-neutral transfer of data. It involves conceptual frameworks embedded in worldviews and values. In many parts of the world, including Canada, Western education dominates teaching and learning and has replaced Indigenous/Aboriginal 2 approaches to learning. Wherever Western colonialism has taken hold, including Africa, Asia, Latin 1 Inspiration and material for this paper are drawn from a longer paper presented at the 2013 Canadian Society for Studies in Education conference. 2 We use the terms interchangeably to indicate peoples who inhabited an area prior to European colonization.
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Indigenous Education in Comparative Perspective: Global Opportunities for Reimagining Schools
International Journal for Cross-Disciplinary Subjects in Education, 2010
Despite the striking parallels in the educational experiences of Indigenous peoples in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, very little research of an explicitly comparative nature has actually been conducted. These modern states are all are products of European colonizing projects which marginalized Indigenous peoples, and currently members of Indigenous groups are among the most disadvantaged in terms of educational outcomes in all four jurisdictions. Closing the educational achievement gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous learners is, consequently, a shared and urgent policy priority. While the uniqueness and diversity of Indigenous groups militate against any simple application of global solutions to local circumstances, each country has much to learn from initiatives, both successful and unsuccessful, which have been developed in other jurisdictions. From a macro-analytical level it appears that educators in all four jurisdictions are moving away from deficit approaches and embracing cultural congruence and evidence based-practice as theoretical underpinnings for educational policy with respect to Indigenous students. Recent national, state and provincial-level initiatives have typically been informed by cultural congruence theory, by the School Effectiveness and School Improvement movements and by insights from research around "schools in challenging circumstances". The discourse of post-colonialism is exerting an increasingly powerful influence on educational policy in all four countries and serves as a strategy of state legitimation by liberal democracies to foster social cohesion. In all four jurisdictions publiclyfunded schools are seen as the institutions with the greatest capacity to foster shared understanding and respect among different cultural groups and remain possibly the best hope for forging harmonious and prosperous futures in these increasingly diverse and globalized societies.