Youths' Relationships With the Land, Each Other, and Their Community Understood Through Navigations Among Epistemologies

• In Event: Critical and Emergent Perspectives on Transdisciplinarity in Learning

Abstract

Objectives

The Cartesian study of learning and becoming in science has ensured a focus on the individual and the individual as apart from, rather than in relation to, and with others, the community, or the land. Youth themselves have been codified in particular ways in the literature with an emphasis on what they fail to do instead of focusing on the intersections of their personal, social, political and pedagogical embodied actions tied to agency and transformation. In this paper, we develop a different narrative grounded in a transdisciplinary discourse with a focus on the heterogeneous learning lives of youth in Inuit Nunangat (Kalluak, 2017).

Modes of Inquiry and Theoretical Framework

The theoretical framework implies a transdisciplinary lens by engaging with Inuit relational epistemology or what Inuit have always known to be true (Tagalik, 2011). We essentially step away from Western models through navigations among epistemologies and transdisciplinary work (Bang, 2017). We attend to the educational contributions of an Inuit-led community driven youth program, to local capacity building, leadership and community well-being. We rely on qualitative data gathered over time (interviews and informal dialogue from 2014 onward), with youth participants and mentors in the Young Hunters Program, which engages Inuit youth with their land, culture, and community through trips on the land, dialogue with elders, and the fabrication of culturally relevant materials. The program also engages youth in environmental stewardship (e.g., monitoring of health of country food through necropsy, etc.). The project is embedded in the complex political fabric of education in Nunavut, in part assumed by Inuit, yet still deeply grounded in Western ways.

Warrants for Arguments/Point of View and Scholarly Significance

Through stories of learning and becoming within those two program dimensions (Young Hunters & Environmental Monitoring), we engage in the documentation of learning and identity work deeply grounded in a holistic worldview and de-colonial reading of educational success. Through a space-time reading of learning and becoming, we also engage with lifelong learning at multiple scales, paying attention to the interrelations of youth with the land, with each other, and with their community (Tagalik, 2011). We offer new insights into why the current educational system fails youth, and in doing so, move beyond a positioning of youth as failing.
In conclusion, we reflect on our own positionality in this research endeavor and the contradictions long-term respectful and collaborative projects and commitments to communities in Inuit Nunangat imply, once deeply grounded in and committed to indigenous methods, and reciprocal and respectful relationships with the land and culture, and the care of each other (Wilson & Hughes, 2019). That kind of relational accountability, however, contradicts current institutional pressures for fast paced research practices. In fact, higher education defines such work as soft science and perceives of youth and community voice driven research as too subjective. To bring such contradictions to the foreground, however, can result in new possibilities and social change driven by and committed to equity and social justice, as we will make evident in this paper.

Author

• Jrene Rahm, University of Montreal