Teaching Across Epistemologies: Navigating Epistemic Responsibilities With Indigenous/Tribal Curriculum

• In Event: Epistemic Responsibility and Sense-Making With Multiple Epistemologies in Social Studies Education

Abstract

Objectives
Indigenous education movements are rippling across the globe, yet research suggests challenges for non-Indigenous teachers with historical content from Indigenous perspectives (e.g. Kanu, 2011; Sabzalian, 2019; Scott & Gani, 2018). Curricular materials including textbooks (Calderon, 2014; Stanton, 2014), curriculum standards (Shear et al., 2015), and online curriculum (Author, 2019) relegate Indigenous peoples to vanishing roles. Devaluing Indigenous knowledges ignores their expansive learning potential (Jacob et al., 2018; Marker, 2016; McGregor, 2014), constituting an epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007) for Indigenous students and communities. This qualitative study investigated how teachers engaged Indigenous knowledges in K-12 classrooms, and what epistemic frames supported their teaching of history.

Theoretical Perspectives
Prominent history education scholars (e.g. Bain, 2005; Bain & Mirel, 2006; Barton & Avery, 2016) describe epistemological knowledge as central to ambitious history teaching. Yet scholars from Canada (Lévesque & Clark, 2018; Marker, 2011), the U.S. (Girard & Harris, 2018), and the Netherlands (van Boxtel & van Drie, 2018) acknowledge that epistemic understandings in history education reflect a Western consensus. Historians (e.g. Richter, 2007; Rifkin, 2017) and geographers (e.g. Gregory, 2004; Said, 1978) reveal how Western/colonial understandings of time and space have shaped historiography around the destruction and nostalgic romanticism of Indigenous peoples. When historians or teachers delegitimize oral histories as myths, and overlook narrative and memory as epistemologies (Archibald, 2008; Battiste, 2007), this positions Indigenous knowledges as static, primitive, or stereotypical (Higgins, Madden & Korteweg, 2015; Million, 2009). Educators’ epistemic responsibilities (Medina, 2013) include examining which knowledges and power systems structure the disciplinary knowledge they promote.

Data Sources and Methods
This qualitative study connects two comparative case studies conducted between 2018 to 2020. Each centered a purposeful sample (Patton, 2002) of experienced teachers nominated by local Indigenous educators for their work teaching Indigenous knowledges. I conducted three semi-structured interviews and classroom observations with two secondary social studies teachers in urban schools (study one), and five K-12 teachers in rural and suburban schools (study two). Ten student interviews and analysis of lesson materials, classroom resources, and student work offered triangulating data and methods (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). Identifying themes of repetition (Ryan & Bernard, 2003) and codes of contrast (Coffey & Atkinson, 1996), enabled generalizations by testing representativeness (Miles, Huberman & Saldaña, 2014).

Results and Conclusions
Teachers developed epistemic frames for teaching Indigenous knowledges through three mediating relationships: with local Native peoples; lands; and personal racial/ethnic and cultural communities. Those who most consistently engaged Indigenous knowledges in practice were both teachers of color (Latinx, Mexican heritage) and two white teachers with strong ancestral/ethnic family connections (one Appalachian, the other French). Three teachers who identified as white alone centered dominant/Western epistemologies in curriculum and instruction, and showed limited connections with Indigenous peoples and lands.

Scholarly Significance
Connections between Indigenous education and history education reform efforts are sorely needed (McGregor, 2014). This study’s clarification of educators’ epistemic engagements with Indigenous communities and knowledges supports such efforts. Attention to varied positionalities and disciplinary learning here may offer practical and theoretical utility in understanding epistemic responsibilities across contexts.

Author

• Jenni Conrad, Temple University