Further Reflecting on the Six-Year Primary Project of the Institute of Education, University of Ife: The Key Players

African linguistic complexity is often defined in terms of its multilingualism and a complicated colonial sociolinguistic heritage. Tis colonial heritage is seen in the prevalence of European languages, especially English and French, in the lingual Franca of sub-Saharan states. A corollary to the latter assertion is that education in Africa, south of the Sahara, is primarily Eurocentric and quite unAfrican in context. More often than not, it is disempowering rather than empowering if we go by Paulo Freire’s notion of education as being central to empowerment and poor education as the primary agent and metaphoric vehicle for modern day disempowerment, a knowledge base that does not liberate the mind or embrace the cognitive progression of the learner.1 After all, the original goal of colonial education was to train the “natives” in European languages so as to be able to communicate with and, ipso facto, serve their colonial “masters,” and help him to rule the same “natives.” The proverbial “Food for the slave” is relevant here; and as the saying goes, “it is not given to provide the slave nourishment or enhance good growth, but to provide just enough energy to keep on serving the malevolent master.” Such is the unfortunate paradigm that captures the essence of colonial education in which the lingua franca of the indigenous learner is not only backgrounded but altogether demonized in some cases. Otherwise, how else could the common warning in the typical colonial classroom “Vernacular speaking is prohibited”? The so-called “vernacular” in question is the Yoruba language!

Unschooling and Indigenous Education

This article draws from autoethnography and historical analysis to examine how racialized people pursue educational justice, consent, inclusion, and enjoyment through non-hegemonic learning. A historical analysis of U.S. colonial education systems imposed upon Diné and Philippine peoples grounds a comparative study on two forms of anti-colonial pedagogy: Indigenous education and critical unschooling. These two lines of inquiry underpin autoethnographic analyses of our own experiences in non-hegemonic learning to offer direct insights into the process of experiential, and decolonial growth intimated in relational learning environments. Indigenous education and critical unschooling literature both affirm the notion that all learners are always already educators and students, regardless of their age, ability, or status. This notion reorients the processes and aspirations of education toward an understanding that everyone holds valuable knowledge and is inherently sovereign. These relational values link together to form systems of circular knowledge exchange that honour the gifts of all learners and create learning environments where every contribution is framed as vital to the whole of the community. This study shows that because these principles resonate in multiple sites of colonial contact across Philippine and Diné knowledge systems, through Indigenous education and critical unschooling, and in our own lived experiences, it is important to examine these resonant frequencies together as a syncretic whole and to consider how they can inform further subversions of hegemonic educational frameworks.

School as a hostile institution: How Black and Immigrant Girls of Color Experience the Classroom

The paradox of girls’ academic gains over boys, across race and class, has perplexed scholars for the last few decades. Through a 3-year longitudinal ethnography of two predominantly economically marginalized and racially minoritized schools, I contend that while racially marginalized girls may have made academic gains, school is nevertheless a hostile institution for them. Focusing on the case of Black girls and recent immigrant girls of color, I identify three specific ways in which school functions as hostile institution for them: (1) gendered racial harassment from teachers, (2) erasure of intellect, and (3) estrangement within their communities. Furthermore, the denigration of immigrant girls becomes the conduit for misogynoir. I find that the gains of some racially marginalized girls in school often justify hostility against all of them. Bringing into conversation a feminist analysis of schooling that rejects girls’ educational gains as ubiquitous evidence of a gender revolution with a Black-colonial education framework that emphasizes schooling as a technology of oppression, I explore the current role of school as a hostile institution for Black girls and immigrant girls of color.

A Vast Expansion, Yet a Sorry Infrastructure: A Paradox of the Decolonization of Indonesian Education, c. 1950s

The multitude of infrastructural problems in the Indonesian educational sector which had to be dealt with during the 1950s was counterpointed by the sector’s massive expansion. The aim of this paper is to explore this paradox in the framework of Indonesian decolonization. The government policy was to greatly expand education at all levels because it believed education was a gateway to “fulfilling independence (mengisi kemerdekaan)”. This paper argues that this expansion was a strategy of decolonization by which the education legacy of the colonial past was to be delegitimized. However, severe budgetary limitations, and a lack of infrastruture and facilities forced the government to continue its dependence on the inherited colonial education facilities and on foreign aid, hence made the strategy of decolonization unrealized in this process of expansion.

Ngā Waihotanga Iho: Self-determination through Indigenous environmental education in New Zealand

This paper discusses the use of an estuary monitoring toolkit Ngā Waihotanga Iho as a central part of a Māori-centred education project undertaken by Kaipara hapū (sub-tribe), Te Uri O Hau, in Northland, New Zealand. The toolkit was designed by New Zealand’s National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA). In this project, Te Uri O Hau collaborated with NIWA and regional high schools in order to use this toolkit as a mechanism for kaitikaitanga (environmental guardianship) and Indigenous-led environmental education. This paper demonstrates that approaches such as this can be powerful vehicles for Indigenous self-determination as Māori actively undertake tribal development and environmental guardianship, and strengthen the place of Indigenous knowledge, priorities and approaches within an evolving ‘post-colonial’ education system.