Stay in Your Lane! The Theory-Practice Binary

• In Event: At the Crossroads: Enacting Anticolonial Responsibility in Social Studies Scholarship Through Community-Centered Participatory Research

Abstract

I am Amp-skaa-pi Piikani (Blackfeet), and I attended and taught in schools on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. As a Native student, educator, and scholar, I have endeavored to address curricular and scholarly inequities by allowing students to think critically using a lens that validates community epistemologies, experience, and needs.

When I began my career as a 7-12 grade social studies teacher in a rural school on my reservation, being “culturally responsive” was new and theoretical, and in the eyes of some, it was dangerous, antagonistic, and disrespectful toward the educational status quo. I was intentional in aligning my seven different courses and seven different curriculums with Indian Education or All (IEFA) best practices and privileging community funds of knowledge. Most importantly, I turned to knowledge holders when I needed to learn.

Even in accessing and implementing practical and community-centered knowledge, I encountered challenges. One IEFA conference appeared hyper-focused on educating non-Natives about Natives. At this conference, I realized how much of “Indian Education” is about an expected Indigenous performance for the white settler rather than a pedagogical self-examination. More broadly, educational research, especially in terms of teaching/learning social studies, enacts this performance as it seeks to communicate with white audiences using theories, methods, and modes that align with long-standing settler colonial ways of knowing.


Within academic research, there is a tendency to maintain a theory-practice binary that damages relationships with communities (Author). This forced separation between theory and practice, especially when combined with academic discourse, can make research processes and products inaccessible to practitioners, policymakers, and school leaders, and it can prioritize learning for the “mainstream” (i.e., white students, white teachers, white scholars) over “epistemological pluralism” (Windchief & Cummins, in press). Therefore, conventional research sends the message that theorists and practitioners should “stay in their lanes” and that only academic scholars can move between theory and practice.

Participatory research has the potential to unsettle binaries of researcher/researched and theory/practice by recognizing community-centered theory-in-practice. Such approaches reframe rigor and validity and involve community partners as co-researchers throughout all aspects of the research process, which reduces gaps between academia and public understanding, especially in contexts where practitioners/scholars are navigating between dominant and marginalized communities (Cheyney & Bowden, 2016; Hallett, et al., 2017).

As Brayboy (2005) notes in the ninth tenet of TribalCrit, for Indigenous communities, “theory and practice are connected in deep and explicit ways such that scholars must work towards social change” (p. 430). This interconnectedness is complex, especially for Indigenous social studies educators and researchers. My understanding of cultural knowledge shapes my decision-making as a teacher and scholar, and this knowledge is simultaneously theory and practice--such knowledge is co-existing, interconnected, in motion, and in relation with praxis. This understanding acknowledges community member expertise, positions teachers/scholars as learners engaged in reciprocal practices, and validates lived experience and cultural knowledge as both theory and practice. In these cases, there are no “lanes”—but dynamic paths that hold space for multiple epistemologies and complex, authentic, and relational identities.

Author

• Bradford R Hall, University of Montana - Missoula