Recentering Indigenous Paradigms Through Storying-as-Literacy

• In Event: 21.020 - Reimagining Intellectualism: Challenging Academia to Sustain Pluralistic Productions of Knowledge

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 paper 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. In relying on storying-as-literacy (San Pedro, 2017), this paper focuses upon the visual representation within a high school that historically and currently construct damaging deficit perspectives for students of color (Johnson, 2014; Morrell, 2008; Tuck & Yang, 2013). Johnson (2014) states: “From the building, to the signs and symbols associated with school culture and learn- ing, to the people within its walls, school as place is an important factor in the shaping of the educational experiences of students” (p. 1). To provide an example of such disconnects from the lived realities of Native American students outside of school to the visual representations of themselves—their cultures and histories—inside of schools, I restory my visual journey into one particular high school located in the urban Southwest U.S. while centering youth voices through story. In doing so, this paper shares in process answers to the central questions: Whose stories are visible in schooling spaces? And in their visibility, validated? Concurrently, whose stories are invisible? And in their invisibility, invalidated? In what ways were students storying (Kinloch & San Pedro, 2014) the in/validation of being in/visible in the school’s curriculum?
Cumulatively, this lesson emphasizes what Kinloch and San Pedro (2014) call Projects in Humanization (PiH), which are “experiences we have with people that are directed by the desires for social, political, and educational change that can only happen if relationships are forged in light of, and because of, human differences” (p. 28). It also emphasizes McCarty and Lee’s (2014) conceptualization of culturally sustaining and revitalizing pedagogy (CSRP), which forwards the “desire to heal forced linguistic [and cultural] wounds and convey important cultural and linguistic knowledge to future generations” (p. 117) so as to revitalize knowledges and ontologies that have been negatively impacted through settler colonization. Through the visual, written, and oral stories shared in the restoried lesson plan, participants and the presenter highlight the importance of creating greater fertile spaces between storytellers and story hearers where our lives, our realities, our joys and our pains can be shared as we begin to create trusting and caring relationships grounded in sacred truth spaces. In such spaces, our realities, our hearts, our knowledges can be shared and, if productive, reciprocated.

Author

• Timothy J. San Pedro, The Ohio State University