Losing Our Other-Than-Human Teachers: Stories From Iñupiaq Elders (Poster 48)

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

On October 5 , 2022, World Teachers’ Day, UNESCO’s Director-General Audrey Azoulay alerted the world that we are facing a global teacher shortage crisis. This crisis, however, is more severe than Azoulay fears, because as we struggle to find enough human teachers to educate our children, we are also quietly experiencing a simultaneous loss of other-than-human teachers. Many Indigenous epistemologies and theories of learning place other-than-human entities as critical interlocutors in the teaching and learning process. In fact, knowledge itself is often described as emerging through these relationships, what Cajete (1994) refers to as “living in a sea of relationships.” As the climate shifts, these relationships are changing or disappearing, resulting in a loss of the teachers themselves and their ways of participating in knowledge construction and sharing. Reshaping thought around who and what play important roles in teaching and learning to include the other-than-human allows for a more nuanced and expansive understanding of education and adds further motivation to the pressing need to confront climate change. In this poster—part of a larger ethnographic study based in Alaska—I draw from interviews with Iñupiaq Elders and community members and decolonial participatory action research to explore what it means to be a part of an ecologically inclusive learning environment, identify the members of this ecosystem of practice, and investigate how this Alaska Native population is experiencing loss as their relationships with the other-than-human disappear, change, and adapt along with the shifting climate.

Author

• David E. K. Smith, University of Pittsburgh
  Presenting Author