Learning lab as a utopian methodology for future making: decolonizing knowledge production toward racial justice in school discipline

ABSTRACT

Students from minoritized communities in US public schools face harsher exclusionary discipline, leading to negative academic, social, and emotional outcomes. Racial disproportionality in school discipline is a critical inequity that requires ecologically valid solutions with local stakeholders. The Indigenous Learning Lab (ILL) was implemented to address racial disproportionality that American Indian students experience at a rural high school serving a band of an Anishinaabe nation in the United States. ILL is an inclusive systemic design process informed by cultural historical activity theory and decolonizing methodology. This study explores how ILL facilitated local stakeholders’ utopian future-making by means of Ruth Levitas's (2013) three modes of utopian methodology–utopia as archeology, architecture, and ontological becoming–to dismantle an oppressive settler-colonial school discipline system.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. “Language is imbued with power and history. We recognize the term American Indian is both factually incorrect and politically significant. As a mixed group of Indigenous, immigrant, and settler authors, we intend to use the language preferred by people indigenous to the Great Lakes region. Therefore, we use both American Indian and First Nations to refer to Indigenous peoples of this land, and intentionally use the more specific names Anishinaabe and Ojibwe when appropriate. We continue to learn from local Indigenous communities and young people about new movements in language.” (Mawene et al., p. 2, under review).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the The UW-Madison School of Education’s Grand Challenges.