"We a Family, Not a Class": Recentering Indigenous Paradigms in Colonizing Schooling Spaces

• In Event: Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Educational Justice in a Changing World

Abstract

This paper discusses how an ethnic studies course focused on re-centering Indigenous knowledges impacted multi-tribal and multicultural students’ critical consciousness development. Ms. Bee, the classroom teacher of the 12th-grade, English-elective course titled Native American literature (NALit), rooted her teaching practices upon the main tenets of humanizing and culturally sustaining/revitalizing pedagogy (CSRP) (Paris, 2012; Paris & Alim, 2014; McCarty & Lee, 2014) by creating spaces to develop empathy, perspective taking, and co-understanding in order to co-construct a safe “family-style” classroom space. This counter-curriculum asked students to consider whose paradigms, ontologies, and epistemologies were included in their schooling, and whose were silenced, excluded, and storied over. In the re-storying of students’ exposure to this unique curriculum, this article discusses students’ navigations of identity, praxis, and conscientizacao (Freire, 1970) as they considered the impacts colonization and oppression had on their schooling and community environments. The article begins by discussing the community/university partnership that formed to construct this course and the goals/purposes of this course. It then explores how Indigenous students interacted with an Indigenous-centered classroom as well as how one White student moved from resistance toward ally-ship. The conclusion provides implications such ethnic studies courses rooted in CSRP has upon educational research, pedagogical development, and humanizing schooling spaces.

Author

• Timothy Jose San Pedro, The Ohio State University