Culture, Chaos, and Complexity: Catalysts for Change in Indigenous Education

• In Event: Getting to Bedrock: Diverse Perspectives on Emergence, Nonlinearity, and Relationality in Education

Abstract

Education in one form or another has been an essential ingredient contributing to the cultural and physical survival of the indigenous peoples of Alaska for millennia in an oftentimes harsh and inscrutable arctic environment. The accumulated knowledge systems, world views and ways of knowing derived from first-hand engagement with that environment were integrated into the fabric of the indigenous societies and were passed on seamlessly from one generation to the next in the course of everyday life. Education was an integral part of a self-sustaining cultural system.

With the arrival of the early explorers, traders, missionaries and teachers, a collision of world views occurred, including the introduction of competing ways of learning about and understanding the world in which people lived, thus disrupting the balance in the traditional system,. Gradually, a new form of education was introduced in the form of “schooling,” operating on the assumption that the introduction of western ways through western institutions would transform Native people into citizens of the “modern” world. However, after 100 years this new system has been found wanting on the river banks and ocean shores that Alaska Native people call home, providing for neither the cultural nor the academic well-being of most of the Native students entrusted to its care.

As a result of the many years of continued frustration and broken promises at the hands of outside educational experts, Native people themselves are now asserting their own ideas for transforming schooling into a more culturally adaptive form of education, and they are finding ways to improve the quality of education for all students in the process. This presentation will describe how schools throughout Alaska are being reoriented by bringing together the deep traditional knowledge of Alaska Native people with western based constructs, principles and theories — particularly those emerging under the banners of the sciences of chaos and complexity. The insights derived from the study of complex, adaptive physical (e.g., weather), biological (e.g., animal behavior) and economic (e.g., the stock market) systems are being applied to our understanding of the dynamics associated with the convergence of diverse cultural and educational systems (i.e., schools in indigenous communities).

The principles of self-organization associated with the study of complex adaptive systems are being brought to bear on education in rural Alaska through a comprehensive educational reform strategy under the auspices of the Alaska Native/Rural Education Consortium, representing over 50 organizations impacting education throughout rural Alaska.

The central focus of the reform strategy is the fostering of connectivity and complementarity between two functionally interdependent but largely disconnected complex systems—the indigenous knowledge systems rooted in the Native cultures that inhabit rural Alaska, and the formal education systems that have been imported to serve the educational needs of rural Native communities. Within each of these evolving systems is a rich body of complementary knowledge and skills that, if properly explicated and leveraged, can serve to strengthen the quality of educational experiences for students throughout rural Alaska.

Author

• Ray Barnhardt, The University of Alaska - Fairbanks