Indigenous Storywork in Activity Beginnings: Moving Through Time and Place

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

Abstract

How a lesson or activity begins – what we refer to as “beginnings” – greatly impacts learning. (Jackson et al., 2013; González & Eli, 2017). In Indigenous pedagogies, we often use stories in these beginnings – a practice known as “storywork” (Brayboy, 2005; Archibald, 2008; Marin & Bang, 2015; Simpson, 2014). In beginnings, stories are our theories – frameworks that set the axiological, ontological, epistemological (AOE), and semiotic landscape for meaning-making (Goodwin, 2018).

How do stories appear and function in activity beginnings? Situated in an Indigenous STEAM-focused summer program, we analyzed how a Coast Salish story, How Nettle Saved the People, showed up in activity beginnings, how the story supported human relationships with the Nettle plant, and how the story traveled with youth to Chicago. Co-presenting with participants, we will narrate how youth related to the Nettle story and ultimately brought it to Chicago.

The Indigenous STEAM (ISTEAM) program was part of a community-based design research (CBDR) project (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016). The program was iteratively co-designed and implemented by Indigenous community members, including youth and Elders, as well as faculty members and graduate students. We used third generation cultural-historical activity theory (e.g., Engestrom, 2011; Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010) to analyze multiple interacting activity systems across time and place. To investigate how the Nettle story in activity beginnings traveled, we conducted a micro-longitudinal and “latitudinal” (DeLiema et al., 2015) ethnographic case study. We collected audio and multi-perspectival video recordings of the activities (Marin, 2013), using audio recorders, handheld cameras, and in some instances, chest-mounted GoPro cameras worn by youth participants.

We analyzed 500+ hours of audiovisual data across Seattle and Chicago and interviewed the participants who brought the story to Chicago. Using interaction analysis (Derry et al., 2010; Erickson, 2004; Jordan & Henderson, 1995), we content-logged and wrote analytical memos to understand the AOE landscape. To illustrate patterns that emerged, we chose a case study on the Nettle story. We chose this story because it traveled with youth from Seattle to Chicago and because Nettle is a culturally salient plant with important ecosystem functions in Seattle and Chicago where the program occurred.

Findings highlight how the Nettle story told in activity beginnings shifted over years of camp both in how the story was told and who told it. Human people were increasingly referred to using gender expansive pronouns, as was Nettle. As youth shifted pronouns in re-tellings of the story over time, both youth and story grew together in an orientation toward gender justice and more-than-human personhood (McDaid Barry & Bang, accepted). This is an important reclaiming of the youth’s traditional teachings around gender and plant-human relationships. Our findings also demonstrate how the story was told by adults, then told intergenerationally, and then by the youth themselves. In this, we witness how a community actively passed down story to the next generation across not just time but also place. These findings illustrate how ISTEAM supported Indigenous resurgence. This work has implications for the co-design and implementation of educational programs committed to resurgence and decolonization. [500]

Authors

• Nikki Barry (McDaid), University of California - Los Angeles
  Presenting Author

• Megan Bang, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author