Reclaiming the Classics for a Diverse and Global World Through OER

In the 2019–20 academic year, I redesigned a course on the classics to make both the texts and the context in which they were taught more accessible for and relevant to the predominantly female students of Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame. The course was re-centered on the dialogue between the ever-evolving and diverse cultures within Greece and the Roman empire and surrounding regions such as Egypt, Ethiopia, and Persia; issues caused by slavery and economic inequality; conceptions of gender roles and sexuality, race and ethnicity, and migration and citizenship; the troubling appropriation of classical motifs and texts by fascist groups in the twentieth century and some alt-right groups and sexual predators in the twenty-first century; and on recent initiatives meant to demonstrate the diversity of both Greek and Roman cultures through documentary, artistic, and archaeological evidence (particularly in the digital humanities and in museums and libraries). I also wanted to make the course close to zero cost for students and to shift to digital texts which lent themselves to interactivity and social scholarship. Our librarian, Catherine Pellegrino, obtained multi-user e-books for modern reinterpretations of classical works still in copyright. A LibreTexts grant enabled the co-authors of this article—the course instructor (and lead author) and two paid student researchers—and a team of summer-employed student collaborators to edit, footnote, and create critical introductions and student activities for various key texts for the course. Many of these texts are now hosted on the LibreTexts OER platform. Beta versions of enriched OER texts and activities were user tested in a synchronous hybrid virtual/physical classroom of twenty-five students, who were taking the course (HUST 292) in the fall semester of 2020.

Teaching Indigenous Language Revitalization over Zoom

In this teaching reflection, co-authored by an instructor and a teaching assistant, we consider some of the unanticipated openings for deeper engagement that the “pivot” to online teaching provided as we planned and then delivered an introductory course on Indigenous language documentation, conservation, and revitalization from September to December 2020. We engage with the fast-growing literature on the shift to online teaching and contribute to an emerging scholarship on language revitalization mediated by digital technologies that predates the global pandemic and will endure beyond it. Our commentary covers our preparation over the summer months of 2020 and our adaptation to an entirely online learning management system, including integrating what we had learned from educational resources, academic research, and colleagues. We highlight how we cultivated a learning environment centered around flexibility, compassion, and responsiveness, while acknowledging the challenges of this new arrangement for instructors and students alike. Finally, as we reflect on some of the productive aspects of the online teaching environment—including adaptable technologies, flipped classrooms, and the balance between synchronous and asynchronous class meetings—we ask which of these may be constructively incorporated into face-to-face classrooms when in-person teaching resumes once more.

Is Digital Scholarship Meaningful?: A Campus Study Tracking Multidisciplinary Perceptions

Increased computational and multimodal approaches to research over the past decades have enabled scholars and learners to forge creative avenues of inquiry, adopt new methodological approaches, and interrogate information in innovative ways. As such, academic libraries have begun to offer a suite of services to support these digitally inflected and data-intense research strategies. These supports, dubbed digital scholarship services in the library profession, break traditional disciplinary boundaries and highlight the methodological significance of research inquiry. Externally, however, these practices appear as domain-specific niches, e.g., digital history or digital humanities in humanities disciplines, e-science and e-research in STEM, and e-social science or computational social science in social science disciplines. The authors conducted a study examining the meaningfulness of the term digital scholarship within the local context at University of Colorado Boulder by investigating how the interpretation of digital scholarship varies according to graduate students, faculty, and other researchers. Nearly half of the definitions (46 percent) mentioned research process or methods as part of digital scholarship. Faculty and staff declined or were unable to define digital scholarship more often than graduate students or post-doctoral researchers. Therefore, digital scholarship as a term is not meaningful to all researchers. We recommend that librarians inflect their practices with the understanding that researchers and library users’ perceptions of digital scholarship vary greatly across contexts.

The Miiyupimatisiiun Research Data Archives Project

The Miiyupimatisiiun Research Data Archives Project (MRDAP) is a digitization and data transfer initiative between medical anthropologist Naomi Adelson and the Whapmagoostui First Nation (FN) in the territory of Eeyou Istchee (in northern Quebec). This report provides an overview of phase one of the MRDAP from three distinct perspectives: the researcher, the archivist, and the community. The authors discuss the history of the relationship between Adelson and the Whapmagoostui FN, the digitization process, and the work that is required to transfer the digitized materials to the community for access and safekeeping. The report also foregrounds how the project team is working to ensure that the community has full control over how the data is managed, stored, accessed, and preserved over the long term. The report provides a case study on how Indigenous data sovereignty is being negotiated in the context of one community.

Evolving Knowledge

Interview with Inuk artist Barry Pottle from Nunatsiavut in Labrador (Rigolet). Photographs are selected from ten years of photography based on his experiences and observations as an urban Inuk. This conversation provides insight into Pottle’sphotographic practice, particularly the artist’s process of learning the art and technical processes of photography and why his photographs matter in the process of Canadians facing their complicities in Canada’s ongoing colonialism. Pottle’s practice produces unique knowledge about Inuit culture and history through his eyes as an urban Inuk photographer.

Dah Dzāhge Nodesidē/We Are Speaking Our Language Again

As a member of the Tahltan Nation, I carried out research that centred on community experiences of language reclamation. The investigation focused on how language reclamation is connected to health and healing, as well as what has been done and what still needs to be done to revitalize and reclaim the Tahltan language. Language reclamation is the start of a process in which our people heal from the impacts of colonization and assimilation by reclaiming our language, culture, and identity, thereby allowing our voices to become stronger and healthier. From what was learned from community co-researchers, scholars who have worked with our communities, Indigenous community language revitalization experts, and international language revitalization scholars, I developed a Tāłtān Language Reclamation Framework focusing on governance; language programming; documentation; training and professional development; and resiliency, healing, and well-being. This report will discuss the ways in which this framework has been implemented in community over the last decade, highlighting examples such as the formation of a language governing body, Dah Dẕāhge Nodeside (Tahltan Language Reclamation Council); the implementation of language nests; the development of a Tāłtān language school K–8 curriculum; the creation of learning materials based on old and new recordings of first language speakers (e.g., digital apps and videos, websites, alphabet book, grammar resources); post-secondary fluency/proficiency community programming; and documentation training. Finally, we continue to focus on the relationship between language reclamation, intergenerational trauma, and healing, resiliency, and well-being. This will be done through community-based immersive programming that focuses on the nurturing of relationships with first language speakers in order to create not only learning resources, but safe and supportive environments for all speakersーlearners, second language speakers, silent speakers, and first language speakers.

Grease Trail Storytelling Project

Background: Indigenous learners and community members are often excluded from online learning environments, as both consumers and producers of knowledge, resulting in an educational digital divide. Further, Indigenous knowledges represented through digital practices and online spaces risk misrepresentation and appropriation, which leads to stereotypes and deficit thinking about Indigenous people, their histories, and their current realities. There is a need for educational approaches that give space, voice, and agency to Indigenous people. Aim: This article is a reflection on a teaching enhancement project that weaved together local land-based learning, Indigenous storytelling, and digital media. Project Overview: Indigenous pre-service teachers created an open educational resource, the Grease Trail Digital Storytelling Project, to enhance the preservation and accessibility of Indigenous histories, stories, and memories embedded in local landscapes. Their approach to Indigenous digital storytelling uses the principles of respect, relevance, responsibility, and reciprocity to document and curate their digital storytelling practices and Indigenous knowledgetraditions. Discussion: The Grease Trail Digital Storytelling Project may serve as a helpful resource for those interested in learning how Indigenous digital storytelling could be approached for the preservation of Indigenous intellectual traditions that bring together land, story, and memory in online spaces and integrated as a tool for teaching and learning in school and community settings.

More Than Personal Communication

In this project report, I introduce the citation templates for Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers that I created in partnership with the staff of the NorQuest Indigenous Student Centre. These citation templates have been adopted/linked to by twenty-five institutions across Canada and the United States. They represent an attempt to formalize something that Indigenous scholars have been doing for decades: fighting to find a better way to acknowledge our voices and knowledges within academia. I outline how the project was developed, highlighting the importance of stable, respectful relationships, before delving into some of the literature and personal experiences that provided the reasoning for why more culturally responsive citation is needed. Part of the background is acknowledging my own experiences as an Indigenous scholar, but I also draw on literature from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars to illustrate the interdisciplinary need for these templates. I provide in-depth explanations of each element in the new citation templates to explain the reasoning behind and/or importance of each element. For example, I outline why including the individual’s nation/community is important for breaking down the pan-Indigenous stereotype and helping scholars to recognize the variation of knowledge across the hundreds of unique Indigenous communities. While the main focus of this paper will be these specific citation templates, I hope that it will also empower, inspire, and provide a case study of how academia can make small changes to improve the respectful recognition of Indigenous knowledges and voices. Given the recent focus in educational institutions on being more inclusive of Indigenous ways of knowing, I think it is only right that we also look at reconsidering how we treat things like Indigenous oral knowledge in academia and whether there are systems in place that implicitly prioritize written knowledge over oral knowledge in a form of ongoing colonialism.

Cedar Project: Conducting Health Research with Indigenous Peoples in a Good Way

The Cedar Project is an interdisciplinary, community-driven research project responding to the crises of HIV and Hepatitis C infection and contributing to the healing of young Indigenous people who use or have used drugs. We are a collective membership of Indigenous Elders, health/social service experts, researchers, and non-Indigenous allies. We situate our work in the context of strength, resilience, and rights to self-determination for Indigenous peoples while also acknowledging the ongoing impacts of historical, intergenerational, and current trauma, specifically those related to the child welfare systems. We provide epidemiological and qualitative evidence that reflects Indigenous perspectives of health and wellness. In this paper, we highlight over seventeen years of shared learnings on conducting research with Indigenous communities in a good way. Specifically, we elaborate on four key components of our unique project. First, our paradigm is to build on young Indigenous people's strengths while acknowledging grief and historical trauma. We recognize that Cedar participants are not statistics—they are relatives of Indigenous partners governing this study. Second, our processes are determined by Indigenous governance, led by Elders and rooted in cultural safety. Third, our research ethics are determined by terms of reference created by the Cedar Project Partnership and by embracing guidelines of TCPS and community-based research. Fourth, we are informed by multiple perspectives and research relationships between Elders, partners, students, academics, and research staff. Sharing our learnings with the larger research community can contribute to decolonizing research spaces by centering Indigenous knowledges and privileging Indigenous voice.

Indigenous Knowledge Systems in Environmental Governance in Canada

This contribution addresses key issues around the application of Indigenous knowledge in contexts where such knowledge is neither generated nor held (academy, industry, governments, etc.). Effective models for the ethical incorporation of Indigenous knowledge into environmental governance in Canada have remained elusive despite decades of attempts. The predominant research paradigm of “incorporating” Indigenous knowledge into environmental governance is one of extraction by the external interests who seek to include specific aspects of such knowledge in their undertakings. This approach continues to fail because Indigenous knowledge exists as an integral component of Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS). It is often hollow and potentially damaging to consider any knowledge without understanding the societal systems and peoples that produced it. Indigenous knowledge is not just “knowledge” (a noun) but a way of life, something that must be lived (a verb) in order to be understood. Indigenous knowledge is inseparable from the people who hold and live this knowledge. Although government policy and legislation have evolved in attempts to treat Indigenous knowledge more holistically, the overriding paradigm of extraction remains essentially unchanged. Even the most recent frameworks will meet with limited success as a result. Appropriate and effective inclusion of Indigenous knowledge requires recognition of the systems that support it, which in turn necessitates support for Indigenous self-determination.