Partnering to Perpetuate Diné Futurity: Centering Indigenous Knowledge in Sites of Critical Indigenous Pedagogy

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 8:00 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Pedagogy and Indigenous Spaces (Table 9)

Abstract

This presentation shares learnings from a qualitative study meant to enhance professional learning through shared inquiry into collaborative processes. The focus is on how a university and the Navajo Nation department of education partner to support Indigenous self-determination and contribute to perpetuating Diné futurity. Within the curriculum and assessment building project that grounds the partnering work, certain spaces of resistance, or what the presenters identified as epistemological collisions were revealed when Diné epistemologies were centered in curriculum for Western educational structures. They conclude that embracing the epistemological collisions as sites of Critical Indigenous Pedagogy where significant learning happens, important decisions are made, and Indigenous philosophical foundations stabilized provided important implications for ways that universities partner with Indigenous nations.

Authors

• Hollie Anderson Kulago, Pennsylvania State University

• Logan Rutten, University of North Dakota

• Dorthea Litson, Navajo Nation Department of Diné Education