Intergenerational Learning in the Home With Indigenous Mothers and Children: Envisioning Education Beyond Schooling Structures

• In Event: "As We Have Always Done": Resurgence, Resistance, and Fostering Educational Lifeways for Collective Liberation

Abstract

In this symposium presentation, the author centers the stories of the five Indigenous mothers (Coast Salish, Salish, Wampanoag, Lakota, Inupiaq) and their children. San Pedro spent one year with the families listening and learning with them about the ways lessons of Indigeneity (the enacting of living and being Indigenous) were shared intergenerationally in the homes and communities of these families. In so doing, the project decentered schooling as a central and sole location of education as it is often framed in western education paradigms, while, simultaneously recentering education in the home, around dinner tables, along walks to sacred places, in difficult conversations about how to navigate schooling systems that continue to silence, ignore, and story past their tribal histories and knowledge systems. In so doing, we were deconstructing a false parallel: Education happens only in schooling spaces (see Eagle Shield, Paris, Paris & San Pedro, 2020). It does not.
Paris and Alim help make this point clear stating that “Culturally sustaining pedagogy exists wherever education sustains the lifeways of communities who have been and continue to be damaged and erased through schooling” (Paris & Alim, 2017, p. 1). To push back on these western research norms and to situate the lessons taught through stories and conversation between Indigenous parents and their children in the home, I relied heavily on the intersections of Projects in Humanization (PiH), Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (CSP), and Indigenous Research Methodologies (IRM). Collectively, these research theories, pedagogical theories, and methodologies attempt to answer Davidson’s call: “We need … a methodology that allows us to be our authentic selves—that is, an extension of who we are as researchers, and human beings” (2019, p. 38-39).
The purpose of the stories shared in this work is to provide the context, the voice, and the emotional impact to what education looks like, sounds like, is like beyond schooling walls and into the homes and communities of Indigenous families or, as framed in our overall symposium, we need to better understand—"How education has operated as a social process outside of the White and hegemonic gazes.” This work bears witness to everyday actions of families and the ways those actions disrupt schooling education paradigms while envisioning and imagining what education can and should be for students (Sabzalian, 2019). Knowing the lessons learned between mothers and their children, these stories provide opportunities to see the richness and complexity of culture and language within the home.

Author

• Timothy J. San Pedro, The Ohio State University