Origin Theories of Learning: Recentering Indigenous Strategies of Learning and Life in Comparative and International Education

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Intertwined within the rich biodiversity of earth, many Indigenous nations and diasporic cultural communities have regenerated their cultural lifeways since time immemorial (Cajete, 2000; Schuster et al., 2019). Despite centuries of colonialism, forced displacements, and human supremacy, these communities continue to actively cultivate their systems of governance, aesthetics, stories, and intricate place-specific knowledge systems to ensure their collective continuance across changing socioecological systems (Whyte, 2017). This panel centers Indigenous agency in coloniality to deliberately offer an antidote to the worries of global epistemicide (Santos, 2014). We present studies on “origin theories of learning” (Meixi & Nzinga, 2023) in five distinct contexts, including methodologies and conceptual contributions to learning and healing that offer insights to navigate today’s changing educational landscape, including its rapid digitization.

By origin theories of learning, we mean that we see science and social theory as fields of inquiry taken up by thinkers across thousands of years and across vast geographies, including global Indigenous nations, Latin America, Asia, Africa, Oceania, the Middle East, the diasporic communities that descend from these lands, and beyond. Origin theories of learning help us understand the deep resiliencies and complexities of human learning and development across generations and geopolitical contexts. Drawing from perspectives across the learning sciences and comparative education, we offer theoretical and methodological insights grounded in distinct and diverse Indigenous knowledges born from and grown alongside struggles for self-determination and social movements.

The past decade(s) has witnessed the field of comparative and international education recognizing its own complicity in “colonial entanglements of knowledge” and the wholescale export of modernity projects (Takayama et al., 2017). Furthermore, our current cannon of scholarship mainly developed in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Developed) contexts is impoverished, given the hegemonic pride, violence, and deliberate erasure of Global South epistemologies, philosophers, scientists, and artists (Connell, 2014; Santos, 2014). This panel builds on this rich momentum to expand the current reaches of our scholarship that does not begin from negation nor coloniality. Instead, origin theories of learning return to the more natural, original flows of life. Origin theories are not “alternate”, “otherwise” or “against the dominant frameworks of coloniality.” It is colonialism instead that runs counter to the norm. By positioning ourselves as outliers or on the margins, we can unintentionally make ourselves peripheral, self-marginalize and delegitimize our ancestors’ age-old theories of life (Meixi & Nzinga, 2023).

Session Papers
The first paper examines Ngano as methodology as embedded within Shona knowledge systems and philosophy. Within women’s entrepreneurship training in Zimbabwe, this paper offers Shona axio-epistemologies and related practice-based methodologies. The second paper is a broad literature review of origin restorative practices and theories of intergenerational healing and learning. The authors explore difficult knowledge as a concept to uncover nuances within origin theories and the forms of reconciliation that is required when examining origin theories of learning from lenses of power and hegemony. The third paper is focused on traditional ecological knowledge in Malawi as foundational to a community’s local governance over lands and education. Specifically, this paper illustrated how origin knowledges are foundational contributors to decolonizing climate change education through African Indigenous epistemologies and relationships to place. The fourth paper illustrates the role of Land as teacher and interlocutor in community theory-building in a Mayan ancestral community in Chiapas, Mexico, highlighting the ways that storywalks as pedagogy sustains intergenerational theories of life. Finally, the fifth paper investigates the emerging body of Hmong scholarship focused on the reclamation of Hmong knowledge as a means to envision and construct future possibilities for the Hmong community.

Navigating East-West & North-South Binaries
As we position origin theories as central to the field of both comparative education and the science of human learning and development, it is also important to complicate the boundaries of East and West, North and South as part of how to navigate the power and plurality of epistemologies that we live in everyday. We do so for a few reasons. First, it is critical to name the ways that power and Western hegemony, the theft of knowledges from the Global South, and settler structures of knowledge and knowing that continue to insidiously influence our everyday activity, the politics of citation, and our scholarship. All the scholars on this panel experience the pains and joys of existing within and being “trained” in the West while yet still strive to maintain our Global South stories and epistemologies. At the same time, binary thinking and erasure are forms of epistemic violence common to Eurocentric knowledge systems. Engaging in the very same practices can reproduce problematic practices that go against many Indigenous knowledge systems of relationality, natural laws of interdependence, and pluriversality (Bang & Medin, 2010; Cajete, 2000; Escobar, 2018; Kawagley & Barnhardt, 1998). We too must acknowledge the vestiges of uneven power relations and hegemony within multiple spheres, including the “East” and the “South”.
What might be a comparative education from our origins? How do we support these navigations and contested politics of knowing in ways that help us enact international education research “beyond the confines of modernity and its violences’ (Shahjahan et al., 2017, p. S68)? These are some tensions and possibilities that we hope to explore here in this panel.

Session Organization
This session begins with brief remarks by the session Chair and then is followed by 10-minute presentations by each of the paper presenters (50 mins). The audience will then be invited to small breakout discussions with each paper presenter (15 mins). Finally, our discussant will offer closing remarks and pose questions to each of the panelists and engage with a whole-group questions and answer session with the audience (25 mins).

Contribution
As comparative education moves towards making room for Indigenous scholarship and educational agency, we offer the vigorous study of origin theories of learning as important strategies of Indigenous resurgence and decolonization. In considering the digitization of learning, origin theories offer important insights to navigate colonial entanglements of knowledge, strengthen Indigenous lifeways from within our communities, and support planetary thriving through Indigenous theories of life.

Sub Unit

• Indigenous Knowledge and the Academy SIG

Chair

• * Meixi, University of Minnesota

Individual Presentations

• Ngano Methodology - Enet Mukurazita, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities - Minneapolis, MN

• Healing Knowledge: Power, Pain, and Intergenerational Healing in Learning Theories - Yilin Wei, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities; Xun Yu, Univ. of Minnesota

• Integrating Community Knowledge in Pre-Service Teacher Education for Climate Change Education: Addressing Eco-Colonialism in Malawi through Participatory Design-Based Research - Sunga Kufeyani, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

• Relational Learning on Storywalks: More-Than-Humans as interlocutors in Knowledge and Theory-Making - Giselle Caretto, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities; Maria Cecilia Schwedhelm, Independent Scholar; * Meixi, University of Minnesota; Erma Fetić Mujić, University of Minnesota Twin Cities