River as Relative: Distance and Closeness in Indigenous Water Education

• In Event: Vice-Presidential Session. Co-Designing Educational Justice in Chicago and Evanston: Examining Learning and Change-Making Across Time and Place

Abstract

This paper examines how participants in a land- and water-based summer program for Indigenous youth and families developed relations with the Chicago River through a series of learning engagements with the river. Using distance/closeness as a lens (Medin & Bang, 2014; Trope & Lieberman, 2010), we demonstrate how the river became more physically and psychologically close for participants over the course of the program and how increased closeness supported axiological thinking and complex socioecological reasoning with the river.

This work primarily builds with three strands of literature: work on nature-culture relations (Bang & Marin, 2015; Bang et al., 2016), cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) (Engestrom, 2001; Cole, 1998), and work on Indigenous axiologies, ontologies and epistemologies or Indigenous AOEs (Deloria & Wildcat, 2001; Cajete, 2000; Simpson, 2017). At the intersection of these three stands, we examine closeness with the natural world – and specifically with the Chicago River – as a goal for learning towards more healthy nature-culture relations and cultivating Indigenous AOEs.

The context of the study is an Indigenous STEAM (ISTEAM) summer program. ISTEAM is a multi-site community-based design research project (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) that seeks to build thriving communities, composed of human and more-than-human (MTH) life, through the regeneration of Indigenous land- and water-based educational models. Audiovisual data was collected at ISTEAM using a series of stationary cameras, mounted GoPros, and audio recorders. The study uses video data from a series of learning activities involving the Chicago River that spanned over 3 days. A total of 3 hours 27 minutes and 5 seconds of video data was used for analysis.

Analysis was primarily split into two components: corporeal and conceptual. For the corporeal analysis we traced shifts in movement in relation to the river to show how participants became more physically close with the river over the 3-day course of activity. We then layered a conceptual analysis onto this to show how shifts in physical closeness were accompanied by shifts in psychological closeness through axiological thinking and complex socioecological reasoning. Together, these analyses build with work on the joint roles of mind and body in creating conceptual and material resources to produce joint activity towards more relational futures (Marin, et al., 2020; Vossoughi, et al., 2019; Goodwin, 2000).

Our findings demonstrate the ways that community-based research can be leveraged to cultivate relations and build thriving futures for human and MTH communities. We offer closeness as a lens for understanding consequentiality in educational research. Through ISTEAM we show how community-based research can generate closeness as a kind of axiological innovation (Bang et al., 2016) that supports wellbeing and relationality and human and MTH participants. [434]

Authors

• Forrest Bruce, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author

• Megan Bang, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author