Negotiating the Sociopolitical in Critical Multiliteracies: Research to Walk With and Alongside Urban Indigenous Communities

• In Event: From Research to Transformative Action: Interpreting Research Critically From Raced, Decolonial, and Womanist Perspectives

Abstract

During my critical ethnography research in an urban indigenous community several critical incidences occurred as my participants’ lives unfolded in the crosshairs of poverty, gender, and racism. I analyze these struggles to produce knowledge that informs potential directions for culturally responsive classrooms and institutional practices while also respecting Indigenous communities’ self-determination.

I draw from on-going ethnographic research that I have been conducting with an urban indigenous community that is impacted by poverty, gender, bias, and racism. For the past three years I have been invited into alternative education institutions to work with youth from First Nations backgrounds who have been pushed out of mainstream educational institutions. As a critical multi-literacies researcher and teacher educator, I have established solid relationships of mutual respect with teachers and the administration of two alternative schools which permit me to work closely with university pre-service teachers at these sites.

Despite the generous support to conduct research, I have identified struggles with various institutional and intercultural barriers that have limited my inquiry. These barriers reduce options available to teachers and students to develop and sustain academic literacies in English. Revisiting data from my ethnographic field notes, teacher interviews, reflections, and student artifacts, I analyze also how these barriers have constrained the transformation of instruction and systematic use of indigenous funds of knowledge to support academic literacy in culturally relevant ways.

However, the use and benefits of this knowledge are not taken for granted. Rather, they has been tempered by cautious restraint in deference to the Indigenous community's self-determination and differences over what counts as learning and as knowledge. To illustrate, I share specific vignettes of struggles that represent key negotiations with Indigenous community members, students, teachers and administration. I also present elements of my continued process of engagement to confirm what I am coming to know about indigenous alternative middle learners’ experiences, which include sustained dialogue about my representations, relationship building, and critical reflection. Overall, the struggles over socio-political choices that emerged could not have been anticipated by my prior reading and research.

Author

• Fatima Pirbhai-Illich, University of Regina