Restorying Relations to Land in Science Education: Chicago Is Indigenous Land

• In Event: 52.012 - High School Students as Social Justice Researchers, Connecting Praxis and Theory: A New Generation Emerging

Abstract

Science education is a critical site of issues of social justice for Indigenous people because it typically reifies the epistemic, ontological, and axiological issues that have shaped Indigenous histories (Brayboy and Castagno 2008). Thus a central challenge to creating more effective science education is grappling with the ways in which learning environments implicitly or explicitly position and construct narratives of human relations to land that are rooted in settler colonial discourses (Bang et. al, 2014). This paper/presentation draws from a larger research project that occurred in the Chicago American Indian community in which teachers, community members, and researchers collectively developed science learning environments that centered Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies by (re)storying our relationships to Chicago as altered, impacted, yet still, always, Indigenous Lands –whether we are in currently ceded urban territory or not. Further the project worked to engage youth in both Indigenous and western scientific ways of knowing to engage in a range of scientific disciplines and local socio-scientific issues through views of learning as always cultural (Nasir et. al, 2006).

There are approximately 40,000 Native Americans living in Cook County. The Indian community in Chicago is tribally diverse and the American Indian Center of Chicago (AIC), one of the oldest and largest urban Indian centers in the country, is one of the primary cultural resources for Native Americans residing in Illinois. The design team included elders, parents, teachers, community content experts, content professionals, other interested adult community members, and youth. The team developed and implemented curricular units that explored diverse ways of knowing science. The units developed over time have ranged from early-childhood learning environments to middle-school high school and cross-age learning environments. The curriculum was built around the big idea of living in relationships and emphasized relationships to place. Further teachers, who were also Native American, worked to continually attune to their students’ thinking and how that expanded learning opportunities that actively supported students using their own funds of knowledge to engage with scientific practices and at the same time connected meaningfully to the students’ community histories, values, and practices.

We will present findings about shifts in students’ engagement with disciplinary knowledge and desires for possible futures collected through pre and post interviews as well as hear perspectives from students themselves. While this program certainly had significant impacts on participants knowledge of the natural world, we contend that the narrative transformations about identity and land in relation to social justice, fostered not only stronger sense of identity and agency in Indigenous youth but also cultivated much deeper disciplinary learning as well. Student presentations will demonstrate the ways in which they constructed and intertwined narratives of belonging and land with environmental and scientific concerns. As an assessment practice in our learning environments we engaged youth in digital storymaking which supported narrative transformations about the natural world and their relations to it. Students will present and discuss their own digital stories produced as part of our science learning environments.

Author

• Megan Bang, University of Washington