Facilitating a Collective Prefigurative Political Act to Restructure Settler-Colonial System of Exclusion

• In Event: Indigenous survivance in schooling contexts
  In Paper Session: Indigenous Survivance in Schooling Contexts

Abstract

American Indian students experience harsher and more frequent exclusionary discipline in U.S.schools than white students. To address racial disproportionality in school discipline, the Indigenous Learning Lab was enacted at a rural high school serving American Indian youth. Learning Lab is a community-driven, problem-solving process through which local school stakeholders analyze systemic challenges in the existing school system and design a new, culturally responsive behavioral support system. The collective design process was a prefigurative political act. Prefiguration is a present embodiment of new social relations that resemble what can be considered possible futures. The purpose of this study is to examine how Learning Lab facilitated school stakeholders’ prefigurative politics that bring decolonizing efforts into the participatory design process.

Authors

• Dosun Ko, Wichita State University

• Aydin Bal, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Aaron Bird Bear, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Linda Orie, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Dian Mawene, University of New Hampshire