Beyond Wordism: Decolonizing Systemic Transformation in Action

• In Event: Communities Doing Futures: Research-Practice Continuum for Justice and Expansive Learning

Abstract

In the United States, Native American youth receive exclusionary disciplinary actions more frequently and severely for more subjective reasons such as disrespect (Whitford et al., 2019).

Disproportionality in school discipline is a result of historically accumulated contradictions arising from a racist, settler colonial society (Artiles, 2019; “Author,” 2017). Addressing inequity requires a situated conceptualization to help develop systemic solutions led and owned by community members in response to school communities’ diverse and often conflicting histories, interests, and goals.

In this longitudinal formative intervention, we examined a community-based, inclusive problem-solving intervention that aimed to facilitate the design of a culturally responsive school-wide behavioral support system in partnership with the Anishinaabe people and school staff at a rural high school in Wisconsin between 2019 and 2023. We addressed the following question:
1. How did Indigenous Learning Lab facilitate the collaborative problem-solving and systemic design and implementation process with Indigenous and non-Indigenous members of the school community for the systemic transformation?

Theoretical Framework:
Indigenous Learning Lab is grounded in Cultural-Historical Activity Theory and Decolonizing Epistemologies (Engeström, 2016; Smith, 2012; Tuck & Yang, 2014). Indigenous Learning Lab builds upon “refusal” of metanarrative in social science research and leverages “resistance, reclaiming, recovery, reciprocity, repatriation, [and] regeneration” (Tuck & Yang, 2014, p. 244).

Methods:
Indigenous Learning Lab included Indigenous youth, educators, parents, community members as well as White-settler school administrators and teachers. Members participated in video recorded Learning Lab sessions and follow up interviews. They followed a cycle of expansive learning actions consisting of questioning, analyzing, modeling, testing, and stabilizing new solutions to resolve the systemwide problems of practice (Sannino et al., 2016).

Results:
Forming Inclusive Problem-Solving Group
The research team worked with the community and school liaisons to hold initial meetings on the reservation to disrupt asymmetrical power relations embedded in the bureaucratic school system. Each session started with a pipe smudging ceremony.. The American Indian education mentor led the pipe ceremony. Anishinaabe members introduced Seven Grandfathers Teachings as inclusive group norms to run a mutually respectful problem-solving process. The Seven Grandfathers Teachings are orally passed-down moral principles by elders to educate future generations for living a good life.

Collective Analysis of Systemic Contradictions in Settler-Colonial School System
Members mapped out the school’s existing discipline system as a mediating artifact and identified multiple systemic breakdowns in the existing system that contribute to (re) production of the racialization of school discipline.

Designing and Implementing Systemic Solutions
Members designed a new, culturally responsive school-wide behavioral support system. Members used the system map to generate solutions for the inner contradictions in their system in 2019-2020 AY. Members led the implementation and sustainability of the new system between 2021 and 2023 during the COVID -19 Pandemic and its aftermath.

Significance
To offset the cumulative effects of colonial harms through education systems, critical indigenous scholarship has emphasized the necessity of building culturally decolonizing systems (McCarty & Lee, 2014). Learning Lab can be utilized to address historically accumulated contradictions through strategic community-school-university coalitions for building a socially just school system for all.

Author

• Aydin Bal, University of Wisconsin - Madison