Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2-28-2022
Publication Title
Globalizations
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
DOI
doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2022.2038833
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Rights
Licensed to Smith College and distributed CC-BY under the Smith College Faculty Open Access Policy.
Recommended Citation
Audley, S., & D’Souza, A. B. (2022). Creating third spaces in K-12 socio-environmental education through indigenous languages: a case study. Globalizations, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2022.2038833
Comments
Peer reviewed accepted manuscript.