The Child Is Capable: Anishinaabe Pedagogy of Land and Community

Situated within a post-Truth and Reconciliation Commission Canadian context, educators are seeking Wisdom to create space in schools for Indigenous Knowledges, perspectives, languages, and histories. An Anishinaabe scholar invites readers to make meaningful connections to knowledge from experience that centers the child within the context of an Anishinaabe summer harvest camp, a competition powwow, and a smokehouse. The storyteller takes an inward turn, exploring features of the communal learning process conducive to the learning spirit, self-evaluation, and participation in learning and teaching that matches one’s readiness and skill. The story is powerful for connecting the heart and mind, stimulating receptivity to assessment-making opportunities for teachers that are relevant to Indigenous student community teaching-learning traditions. True to the storytelling method, the stories here are meant to stimulate remembering, reflection, and a process of deep knowing. The author invites educators to think with the stories for inspiration toward personal possibilities of praxis. Positive educational transformation is set into motion as teachers connect with Indigenous peoples to honor the diversity of children, co-create a relational curriculum inclusive of family and community to embrace Indigenous Knowledge that comes from the Land, and create space to generate and transmit new knowledge through story.

Teacher Implemented Communal Learning in Math: Boosting Learning with African American Elementary Students

The current study examined lasting learning effects of communal contexts for 124 African American third and fourth-grade students using a mathematics fractions unit with students’ regularly assigned teachers. Teachers in two experimental conditions received training on implementing communally or individually structured fractions curricula, and a naturalistic control was included whose participants did not receive the intervention. Findings revealed that students in the communal condition outperformed those who learned individually, and students in both intervention conditions outperformed those in the naturalistic control group. Survey of communal home-socialization obtained a relationship with identifying fractions performance. Implications for facilitative effects of culturally informed learning environments and teacher training toward enhanced academic achievement are discussed.

Communal and Individual Learning Contexts as They Relate to Mathematics Achievement Under Simulated Classroom Conditions

The current study builds on previous communalism research by exploring the enduring facilitative effects of communal learning contexts on academic achievement for African American children over extended time and while calling on critical thinking skills. In addition, this study sought to explore the communalism construct in a more applied academic environment that approximated real classroom conditions. This study examined performance differences in fraction problem solving among 96 low-income African American students in Grades 3 to 6 participating in either a communal or individual learning context. Pretest to posttest gains showed that students randomly selected for the communal learning context significantly outperformed students who learned in the individualistic context. Additionally, communal learning students outperformed their individual counterparts during each weekly domain assessments. Several promising results obtained draws the communalism construct to a more applied culturally relevant pedagogical tool.