When Learning Is Life Giving: Redesigning Schools With Indigenous Systems of Relationality

This article illustrates how designing schools with Indigenous systems of relationality can be life giving for a healthier post-COVID world. Indigenous systems of relationality—the worldviews, beliefs and practices, and moral precepts of being in relation with the rest of the living world—are the cornerstone of Indigenous knowledges, and the cornerstone of Indigenous families and communities. We consider the ways in which Indigenous systems of relationality can offer strategies for educators, families, and communities to redesign approaches to learning in schools in ways that sustain and promote life. Drawing on three case studies of schools in Thailand, México, and Colombia, we show how educators might respond to the specific needs within their communities, repair the fracturing of humans from nature, and orient us to life-giving forms of activity that are beneficial beyond our current crises and into the future.

Exploring Curation as a Path Towards Decolonizing Education

As part of my Doctor of Education program, I was asked to study Dr. Marie Battiste’s (2017) book Decolonizing Education: Nourishing the Learning Spirit. In response to that assignment, I built a WordPress site as a way to experiment with crossing boundaries of physical and digital places, between different Indigenous knowledges and notions of teaching and learning. While building the site, I looked for localized examples of Battiste’s concepts and ideas among the Inuvialuit, the Indigenous group with which I am the most familiar, in what became an exploration of the wonderful work being done in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region to preserve the culture and decolonize ways of thinking. I knew some of these resources existed, but was surprised by the depth and variety of materials available. In this paper, I present that website as an experimental example of digital curation that stitches together the book, a series of digital artefacts found via Internet searches and my own reflections on those artefacts. While building it, I did not seek out answers but instead explored the possibilities of curation as a path to decolonization education. The resulting site design is both personal and incomplete. Through this process, I hope to open generative cracks that provoke new ways of thinking about digital curation as a means of supporting active engagement in the complicated and necessary conversations regarding decolonization.

In Conversation with Fikile Nxumalo: Refiguring Onto-Epistemic Attunements for Im/possible Science Pedagogies

This chapter elucidates critical concepts of place in relation to Black-feminist and more-than-human geographies in the context of early childhood education. This conversation helps get at pressing political contexts for science education that are often excluded in white educational spaces. Our conversation with Dr. Nxumalo offers practical starting points for researchers interested in playing with the messy intersections of materiality, settler-colonialism, white supremacy, Indigenous knowledges, and more-than-human kin.

Decolonising the Marketing Academy: An Indigenous Māori Perspective on Engagement, Methodologies and Practices

In a context where the marketing discipline and its institutions has no choice but to face up to its embeddedness in social issues it is therefore important and timely to consider how marketing in colonial states – in which indigenous lands were/are appropriated, cultures systematically discriminated against, and identities, language and generations stolen – acknowledges its past and confront its future. This essay calls for the understanding and incorporation of indigenous knowledges and worldviews. It further asks for considerations of cultural control, nonappropriation and participatory approaches in marketing. Acknowledging that a university or business school is sited on indigenous lands, or opening a meeting with greetings or formal introductions are relevant, but they become little more than indigenous tokenism unless they are part of a wider journey of change and understanding. Any incorporation of indigenous worldviews into marketing education and research must be cognisant of the potential for exploitation.

Pursuing Self-determined Responses to Climate Change in the Cook Islands: Exploring the Interface between Government Organisational Directive and Local Community Engagement with Climate Change Adaptation

<p>Small island communities are considered to be amongst the most ‘at-risk’ populations in the world to the impacts of climate change. Global, regional and national entities have framed the plight of Pacific communities through climate change discourses. This study contributes to an emerging line of inquiry that investigates how applying the concepts of ‘vulnerability’ and ‘resilience’ to frame communities might contribute to community empowerment, or marginalisation. Focused on the institutional setting of the ‘Strengthening the Resilience of our Islands and our Communities to Climate Change Programme’ (SRIC Programme), this thesis explores the engagement between government organisations of the Cook Islands and communities of Aitutaki to form adaptation responses to climate change. Qualitative methodologies coupled with Pasifika methodologies provide a culturally responsive approach to the research. This approach accommodated local narratives and indigenous knowledges throughout the study. The findings from semi-structured interviews suggest that Cook Islands government organisations increasingly frame Aitutaki communities through the concept of ‘resilience’. Interviews with community representatives suggest that Aitutaki communities use indigenous knowledges to make sense of changes in their local environment, without always understanding the science-based notions of climate change. Engagement approaches such as ‘knowledge sharing’, could offer a pathway to increasing community autonomy and confidence in climate change discussions, whilst also contributing to enhancing socio-ecological resilience. To maintain a ‘critical’ political ecology approach, governmentality theory was used to explain how power relations might be embedded in resilience discourse. Insight is offered into how the government-community relationship could enable ‘technologies of government’ as the SRIC Programme progresses. It is suggested that the social conditions of Aitutaki communities could pose sites of resistance to governmentality. Recently implemented, the SRIC Programme demonstrates potential for supporting self-determined responses to climate change and enhancing socio-ecological resilience in Aitutaki.</p>

Pursuing Self-determined Responses to Climate Change in the Cook Islands: Exploring the Interface between Government Organisational Directive and Local Community Engagement with Climate Change Adaptation

<p>Small island communities are considered to be amongst the most ‘at-risk’ populations in the world to the impacts of climate change. Global, regional and national entities have framed the plight of Pacific communities through climate change discourses. This study contributes to an emerging line of inquiry that investigates how applying the concepts of ‘vulnerability’ and ‘resilience’ to frame communities might contribute to community empowerment, or marginalisation. Focused on the institutional setting of the ‘Strengthening the Resilience of our Islands and our Communities to Climate Change Programme’ (SRIC Programme), this thesis explores the engagement between government organisations of the Cook Islands and communities of Aitutaki to form adaptation responses to climate change. Qualitative methodologies coupled with Pasifika methodologies provide a culturally responsive approach to the research. This approach accommodated local narratives and indigenous knowledges throughout the study. The findings from semi-structured interviews suggest that Cook Islands government organisations increasingly frame Aitutaki communities through the concept of ‘resilience’. Interviews with community representatives suggest that Aitutaki communities use indigenous knowledges to make sense of changes in their local environment, without always understanding the science-based notions of climate change. Engagement approaches such as ‘knowledge sharing’, could offer a pathway to increasing community autonomy and confidence in climate change discussions, whilst also contributing to enhancing socio-ecological resilience. To maintain a ‘critical’ political ecology approach, governmentality theory was used to explain how power relations might be embedded in resilience discourse. Insight is offered into how the government-community relationship could enable ‘technologies of government’ as the SRIC Programme progresses. It is suggested that the social conditions of Aitutaki communities could pose sites of resistance to governmentality. Recently implemented, the SRIC Programme demonstrates potential for supporting self-determined responses to climate change and enhancing socio-ecological resilience in Aitutaki.</p>