66.032 - Challenging Colonial Legacies in Education: Reclaiming Indigenous Culture, Language, and Heritage in the Americas

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This session investigates culture, language, and heritage in education, by accentuating institutions of schooling as frontline battlegrounds for Indigenous communities around whose knowledge is considered legitimate or not and subsequently whose knowledges are normalized (Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006). We further examine multiple venues of teacher preparation and student agency to challenge the perpetuation of colonial legacies and to assert spaces within the institutional structures. Our work steers toward social justice for Indigenous people by way of cultivated alliances among Indigenous and non-Indigenous colleagues within educational spaces of power, and engaging Indigenous stakeholders at the local level in praxis-oriented educational change. This session offers four studies that draw upon critical sociocultural ethnography and language policies in the United States and Mexico.

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 4: Social Context of Education Policy, Politics, and Praxis

Chair

• Eunice Romero-Little, Arizona State University

Papers

• Language Education Policies: Embracing Mexicano in Schools - Rosalva Mojica Lagunas, Arizona State University - Tempe

• "Teach, Grounded in Who You Are": Advancing Democratizing Possibilities in Indigenous Education, Research, and Praxis - Sheilah E. Nicholas, The University of Arizona

• Cultivating Alliances: Appropriating Power and Privilege as Tools for Language and Cultural Reclamation in Indigenous Education - Vanessa Anthony-Stevens, The University of Arizona

• Nohwiltag: Academic Raiding as Apache Student Agency and Praxis - Philip Stevens, The University of Arizona

Discussant

• Eunice Romero-Little, Arizona State University