Creating third spaces in K-12 socio-environmental education through indigenous languages: a case study

ABSTRACT

To recognize and respond to the social injustice of climate change impacts, children require curriculum/pedagogies that render settler colonialism visible while dialoguing across pluri-versal perspectives. We present a case study of a school in Northeastern United States that taught the Abenaki language and knowledge on traditional Abenaki Land to non-indigenous students in a 4–5th-grade classroom. Utilizing Mignolo's [2011. Geopolitics of sensing and knowing: On (de)coloniality, border thinking and epistemic disobedience. Postcolonial Studies, 14(3), 273–as283] concepts of ‘epistemic disobedience’ through ‘de-linking’ and ‘de-centering’ to challenge structural/curricular settler colonialism, we found that the school must first be open to, and appreciative of, non-dominant epistemologies to set the stage for epistemic disobedience. We identified teaching the language of the Land, on the Land as de-coloniality as praxis. However, we also identified curricular epistemic frictions with the Science teacher and their pedagogies which attempted to epistemically recentre students' thinking around the Standardized Account of science.

KEYWORDS:

• Decolonizing
• indigenous languages
• socio-environmental justice
• pluriverse
• colonial matrix of power
• science education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Animacy is not the only organizational feature of the Menominee language.

2 Abenaki Tribal council member told us that Algonquian languages were derived from the Abenaki language, but that European settlers who were transliterating the language either did not know or did not care about the distinctions, ‘once you give that kind of nomenclature to something, it kind of defines it.’

3 The approach the school took to creating the garden was reflective of the school’s approach towards its ‘social justice cultural themes.’ For example, during the Kwanzaa unit, the school brought local arts organizations associated with African American Vermonters so that the white faculty and mostly white student body were not just ‘standing up on a perch and looking in from the outside,’ which is still emblematic of settler colonialism.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shannon Audley

Shannon R. Audley, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Education and Child Study at Smith College. Before academia, she was a high school science teacher. Dr Audley received her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Memphis. Her primary research examines (in)justice in schools, focusing on understanding how youth and their teachers think about, experience, and respond to instances of (in)justice within the school context. She is also interested in how nature-based schools shape youth’s development of ecocultural identity, how ecocultural identities inform environmental behaviours, and how teachers integrate social justice into their science curriculum.

Angela B. D’Souza

Angela D’Souza is a doctoral student in Mathematics, Science, and Learning Technologies at University of Massachusetts, Amherst's College of Education. She holds a MA in Anthropology from the New School for Social Research and a MAT in History from Smith College. Before shifting to science education research, D'Souza taught undergraduate anthropology courses, high school environmental science and history, and middle school humanities. Her research interests include science and technology studies and the environment; indigenous pedagogies; and post-colonial and Marxist critiques of global and U.S. history curricula.