Indigenous Insights Driving Systemic Change at Northwoods High School

• In Event: Toward Equity-Oriented Special Education Through Empowering Minoritized Communities

Abstract

Objective

Indigenous Learning Lab (ILL), as a multi-year intervention study, describes both the platform and process in which the participating public high school serving Indigenous youth grapples with long-standing patterns of racial disproportionality in academic and behavioral outcomes.

Theoretical Framework
ILL seeks a cross-pollination between the Learning Lab methodology (Bal, 2011; Bal et al., 2014, 2018) and decolonizing methodology (Brayboy, 2013, Smith, 2012) to create systemic changes driven by leveraging local histories, knowledge(s), and Indigenous futurity. As each research site involves a unique intersection of historical, geospatial, sociopolitical, and cultural factors, ILL’s collaborative theoretical stance centers on Indigenous culture and ways of being, affirming the local tribe’s legal right to self-determination and equal participation within public schools serving reservation youth. Following tenets of TribalCrit (Brayboy, 2013), ILL as a platform and process centers on tribal epistemology, cultural assets, and sociopolitical imaginations.

Methods & Data
ILL follows the process-oriented framework developed by Bal (2018), adapted to prioritize decolonial methods and local commitments to tribal sovereignty, self-determination, and leadership of students and community members based in the unique research context of Northern Wisconsin. Researchers upheld tribal participants’ requests to hold some meetings on reservation grounds, and supported efforts to decolonize research participation and recruitment by using stakeholder nomination, open invitation to community, and continually asking, “Whose voice is missing?” Maintaining a core group of ten to fourteen participant-members across three years of the current partnership project involved three phases: Design, Implementation, and Sustainability; including a mix of administrators, teachers, students, tribal community members and balancing age, gender and institutional roles.

Monthly whole-group meetings and small-group agenda meetings comprised the main site of data collection, including video and audio from in-person meetings and recordings from virtual platforms. Year Three team members decided team goals would better be served by small group meetings that served as working groups focused on implementing particular aspects of the new culturally responsive, positive behavioral support system (CRPBSS). At the end of Year Three, Four Pillars of Implementation emerged from the new system, solutions generated, and everyday constraints and personnel leading each: Professional Development, Building Relationships, Culturally Responsive Curriculum, and Universal School Values.

Findings

Growing locally-meaningful, effective solutions to persistent school problems requires a historical, spatial, intersectional and adaptable approach that builds on positive interpersonal and institutional-community relations while interrogating generations of racial/class conflict embedded in institutional and community memory. ILL’s explicit decolonial acts to support tribal sovereignty included basing team interactions in Indigenous members’ cultural practices, evidenced by use of smudging, pipe ceremony and intergroup norms based on The Seven Grandfather Teachings. ILL actions also aligned with McInnes’s (2019) framework for demonstrating Respect, promoting Revitalization, and working towards Reconciliation between mainstream institutions and Indigenous Peoples in education research.

Significance
Recognizing that ILL participants each bring diverse perspectives, ideas, seeds for new relationships and solutions to the team, ILL processes promote organic growth imbued with the spirit of socially-just human interactions centered around a common object, the creation and implementation of the new CRPBSS which includes more possibilities for all youth to be socially and academically successful.

Authors

• Linda Orie, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author

• Aydin Bal, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author

• Aaron Bird Bear, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author

• Dosun Ko, Santa Clara University
  Presenting Author

• Dian Mawene, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author

• Boris Krichevsky, University of Washington
  Presenting Author

• Jahyun Yoo, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author