Toward Indigenous Collective Continuance Through Designing Our Own Learning Environments

• In Event: Processes of Partnering: Local Development of Methods to Democratize Knowledge Production in Research on Learning

Abstract

Objective
In this paper I explore how a group of designers in a community based design experiment negotiated understandings of 1) settler-colonialism, 2) identity, and 3) different ways of knowing – what I propose are powered and historically informed dimensions of the group’s axiological positionings. I trace how these conceptualizations dynamically shaped the groups theories of change and both enabled and constrained imagined possibilities for learning environments and role re-mediations.

Perspectives
Lemke (2002) argues that axiological positionings are a routine dimension of activity and further, that social contestation must move beyond counter or critical articulations. Indeed he suggests we must develop “a mode of articulation that undermines the deepest grounds of an ideological claim for the ‘necessity’ of some formation (Lemke, 2002, p. 41).” The quality of these articulations I suggest are critical in supporting forms of just activity to emerge in designing and implementation. Building with axiological positioning I engage Whyte’s (2014) notion of Indigenous collective continuance in which he argues “can be seen as a community’s fitness for making adjustments to current or predicted change in ways that contest colonial hardships and embolden comprehensive aims at robust living” (Whyte, 2014, p.602).

Methods and Data Sources
This project included over 30 community members from the Chicago American Indian community in an effort to design family/community based early land based learning environments – a kind of Indigenous science education (Tuck et al. 2014). Our design processes included sitting and walking design meetings where we engaged in a kind of decolonial social dreaming (Smith, 2012; Espinoza, 2008) as we strengthened our own relations to the lands and waters of our community over a period of 4 years. These meetings occurred most frequently in the first 2 years of the project and typically lasted from 1.5 to 3 hours and were audio and video recorded. In addition, debrief conversations and field notes were taken. The data corpus for this analysis comes from these data sources that occurred over the course of project. This analysis will trace the development and evolution of the axiological positionings shaping the designer interactions over this period.

Results
This analysis demonstrates the multiple levels that designers held and negotiated while thy imagined learning environments for their children. These levels included sophisticated navigation of complex social systems over multiple time scales. Through this process designers both regenerated and innovated on their own theories of health child development but also parent and familial relations that they believed could both contribute to Indigenous collective continuance and adequately resist settler-colonial enclosures. I argue that through this process of design a kind of decolonial ethic emerged (Author, 2016) but so did a form of radical hope (Lear, 2006).

Significance
As forms of participatory design work continue to unfold the need to understand power and historicity shapes both processes of partnering and the emergent design decisions is critical. This analysis helps to understand how designer understandings and relations evolved over the course of project leading insights into possible pathways of partnering relations.

Author

• Megan Bang, University of Washington