Engaging Native Youth in Learning and Making Change: Land, Story, and Art Elsewhere to Climate Change

• In Event: 25.033 - Designing for Learning With Digital Media Alongside Indigenous Communities: Ethics, Allyships, and Technocultural Change

Abstract

This paper presents findings from a community-based design research project aimed to engage Indigenous youth, artists, community members and scientists to create learning environments about climate change that were based in Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and making. Engaging youth in cutting-edge science, technology and art simultaneously, we focused on the ways in which human-nature relationships were mobilized, framed, and re-imagined as a part of learning about living with climate change, and imagining and working towards possible futures. There were six major artscience making themes that youth engaged in including: clay work, digital productions, visual art, theater, weaving and textile arts making. Each of these were embedded within the learning environment such that the activities were part of the flow of ideas and practices and became the central place for exploratory sense making and where students created narratives of climate change counter to the doom narratives that saturate the mainstream or what Heath (1986) has called “narratives of life.” Instead youth focus on the roles, relations, responsibilities and possible futures that are inter-twined amongst all life forms and the ways those are changing, have changed in the past, and could change in the future (Cajete, 2000; Massey, 2004). More specifically, we ask how learning about climate change and engaging in artscience practices are sites in which the construction of human-nature relations are central (Bang & Marin, 2018) and may afford expansive possibilities in change making that Native, and other non-dominant youth are routinely not afforded in science learning environments.
A group of learning scientists, community artists, marine scientists, families, and youth collaborated to design a two-week artscience inquiry into climate change. The inquiry was structured by a repertoire of practices of cultivating attention, interpreting, making, and communicating focused on land-based ecosystems and ocean ecosystems in the pacific northwest and the many different narratives of change shaping our understandings, imaginings, and decision making.
In this paper, we draw on interview and video data from two cycles of participatory design research. Interviews were conducted individually with 45 youth. Here we focus on students’ responses to their narratives of change and to lands and waters as well as their change making projects planned as part of the program. Further we explore youths art making during this program which was deliberately positioned as ways of sharing knowledge and making change.
We found that youth are routinely navigating across temporal and spatial scales in their constructions of changing lands and water. Further, youth have a deep sense of critical historicity and analysis of power. Most importantly we found that when youth are deliberately supported, they readily engage in imagining and enacting Indigenous futurities not enclosed by settler-colonialism. Over time with these kinds of instructional practices youth no longer needed those supports. We argue this is an important finding because it suggests that learning environments and educators must more rigorously attend to supporting these forms of engagement or they may reproduce colonial paradigms (Tuck & Yang, 2012).

Authors

• Megan Bang, The Spencer Foundation

• Nikki McDaid-Morgan, Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy Learning Sciences

• Mario Guerra, Northwestern University