The Ojibwe language, also referred to as Anishinaabemowin, is the language of the Ojibwe people in the Great Lakes region of North America. It has many mutually intelligible dialects and variations, making it one of the largest Indigenous languages in North America. While Ojibwe is an endangered language, with most speakers in the United States over the age of 70, it is also one that is being revitalized. In Minnesota and Wisconsin, the Ojibwe language is very widely taught and supported in both formal and informal educational contexts. It is taught in many preschools, elementary schools, and secondary schools and in tribal colleges and universities. Outside of institutions, families and individuals have made great strides to reclaim Ojibwe as their home language. Language camps, family language gatherings, and language tables are popular and can be found throughout the year. One of the most outstanding examples of reclamation is the Waadookodaading Ojibwe Language Immersion Institute in northern Wisconsin. Waadookodaading impacts the entire area’s Ojibwe language-learning communities by showing that an immersion school can indeed produce highly proficient second-language speakers. Immersion schools, preschools, and family language camps are numerous throughout the midwestern United States and Canada, and many families now trying to use Ojibwe as their home language. However, the economic hurdle remains; that is, jobs that demand Ojibwe language as a daily useful skill are sparse. Although there are many institutions that teach Ojibwe as a subject, this teaching can sometimes only be a doorway to language appreciation rather than fluency. Despite these challenges, the resilient spirit of individuals connecting language and identity loss directly to the colonization of Ojibwe and other Indigenous people is a fierce one.
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Ojibwe Language Education in Minnesota and Wisconsin
Mary Hermes
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Indigenous Language Revitalization
Anne Marie Guerrettaz and Mel M. Engman
Countless Indigenous languages around the world are the focus of innovative community regeneration efforts, as the legacies of colonialism have created conditions of extreme sociopolitical, educational, and economic adversity for the speakers of these languages—and their descendants. In response to these conditions that Indigenous people face globally, the burgeoning field of Indigenous language revitalization and maintenance has emerged since the 1990s with the goal of supporting speakers of these languages and future generations. Indigenous language revitalization involves different but often interlocking domains of research, practice, and activism. Given the uniqueness of each community and their desires, history, values, and culture, the significance of the local is critical to the global phenomenon that is language revitalization. For instance, cases on five different continents offer valuable insights into this field, including the Hawaiian language in Oceania; Myaamia in the United States (North America); Básáa in the Cameroon (Africa); Sámi in Finland (Europe); and, Cristang and Malay in Malaysia (Asia). These offer examples of both local resources and common challenges that characterize revitalization efforts.
The field of Indigenous language revitalization is interdisciplinary in nature, exemplified through five lines of inquiry that significantly contribute to this area of research: (a) theoretical linguistics and anthropology, (b) applied linguistics, (c) education, (d) policy studies, and (e) critical studies, including postcolonial studies, Indigenous studies, and raciolinguistics. Questions of research ethics are central to the field of Indigenous language revitalization since reciprocity and collaboration between researchers and Indigenous communities matter as the lifeblood of Indigenous language revitalization work. Finally, we believe that the notion of Indigenous language revitalization pedagogies along with underexplored Indigenous concepts (e.g., from Yucatecan and Māori scholars) offer compelling directions for future research.
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Key Instances of Holistic Curriculum as an Alternative to National Curriculum
John P. Miller
Holistic education as a field of inquiry began in the 1980s. Previously this field was referred to as humanistic education, confluent education, affective education, or transpersonal education. The work of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow inspired many educators working in these areas. In 1988 The Holistic Education Review under the editorship of Ron Miller was first published along with The Holistic Curriculum by John Miller. However, as a field of practice holistic education can first be found in Indigenous education. Historically, Socrates, Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel, Bronson Alcott, and Tolstoy can be viewed as working from a holistic frame.
What is that frame? It is educating the whole person: body, mind, and spirit. At every level, education tends to focus on skills and a narrow view of the intellect. The body receives little attention while the spiritual life of the student is ignored. One image of the student from this approach is as a brain on a stick. In contrast, the holistic curriculum attempts to reach the head, hands, and heart of the student.
The other main principle of holistic education is connectedness. Connectedness is one of the fundamental realities of nature. In contrast, the curriculum at every level, except perhaps for kindergarten, is fragmented as knowledge is broken down into courses, units, lessons, and bits of information. Rarely are there attempts to show how knowledge is interconnected. Holistic education seeks to be in harmony with how things actually are by focusing on connections. Six connections are at the core of the holistic curriculum: connections to the earth, community, subject integration, intuition/logic, body/mind, and soul. There are many models of holistic education in practice. They range from more structured approaches, such as Waldorf education, to schools such as the Sudbury Valley School that give students a great deal of choice. Despite these differences these schools view the child as a whole human being.
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Fostering Indigenous Educational Sovereignty in the Navajo Nation
Jon Reyhner and Joseph Martin
After a long history of U.S. government efforts to take away their independence, culture, and language, since the 1970s the Diné (aka Navajos) have been working through their elected leaders to re-establish their sovereignty and pursuit of self-determination on their terms, including decolonizing the education their children receive in schools. This process has occurred through the strengthening of their elected government, establishing an education division, and adopting educational and accreditation standards that promote the teaching of Diné government, history, and language so that Diné citizens can knowledgeably exercise their democratic rights of self-government. This is important because it has a powerful influence in schools as it defines the important elements of a school and the manner in which Navajo school community members operate. These efforts are part of a global Indigenous movement, leading the United Nations to adopt the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007 and UNESCO to declare 2022–2032 the International Decade of Indigenous Languages.
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Indigenous Teacher Education in Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand
Celia Haig-Brown and Te Kawehau Hoskins
Indigenous teacher education has proven to be a powerful influence in the resurgence of Indigenous cultures and languages globally. In Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand, while there are numerous distinctions between the countries in size, linguistic and cultural diversity, and the histories of Indigenous peoples and colonization, an Indigenous commitment to schooling has shaped long-term and recent aspirations in both contexts.
Within Canada, the proliferation of Indigenous teacher education programs is a direct result of a 1972 landmark national policy document Indian Control of Indian Education. This document written by Indigenous leaders in response to the Canadian government was the culmination of a decades-long, relentless commitment to creating the best possible schooling systems for Indigenous students within the provinces and territories. In 2015, despite some significant gains, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada completed its work articulating Calls to Action that reinforce the original recommendations, particularly the focus on Indigenous control of education. In the Aotearoa New Zealand context, the establishment of Māori language schooling pathways and Māori medium teacher education programs has been made possible by activism focused on the recognition of Indigenous-Māori rights to language and culture guaranteed by the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. Forms of constitutional recognition of the Treaty of Waitangi mean that New Zealand endorses a social policy of biculturalism.
From the 1970s and 1980s, responses to exclusionary and racist colonial policies and practices have led to the creation of teacher education programs in both Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand transforming universities and schools and establishing spaces of Indigenous authority, activism and expertise. While the pace of change varies radically from place to place and from institution to institution, and the specific contexts of the two countries differ in important ways, the innumerable Indigenous graduates of the programs make ongoing contributions to Indigenizing, decolonizing, and educating Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities alike. The growth and strengthening of an Indigenous education sector have led to significant policy and curriculum reforms across the education systems and to ongoing engagement in critique, advocacy, research, and practice. Throughout their development, Indigenous leadership and control of the programs remain the immediate and long-range goals.
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Social Geography, Space, and Place in Education
Aspa Baroutsis, Annette Woods, and Barbara Comber
Society is constituted by both historical and spatial elements; however, education research, policy, and practice often subordinate the spatial in preference for the temporal. In what is often referred to as the “spatial turn,” education researchers have acknowledged spatial concepts to facilitate understandings and inform debates about identity, belonging, social justice, differentiation, policy, race, mobility, globalization, and even digital and new communication modes, among many others. Social geographers understand place as more than a dot on a map, instead focusing on the socio-cultural and socio-material aspects of spaces. Space and place are core elements of social geography. Schools are composed of architectural, material, performative, relational, social, or discursive spaces, all of which are, at least in some respects, socially constructed. Schools and education contexts, as social spaces and places, produce and reproduce modes of social interactions and social practices while also mediating the relational and pedagogical practices that operate within. Pedagogical spaces are also about the exercise of power—a spatial governmentality to regulate behavior. Yet pedagogy can focus on place-based and place-conscious practices that highlight the connectedness between people and the nonhuman world. A focus on the socio-spatial in education research is able to foreground inequalities, differences, and power relations that are able to speak to policies and practices. As such, in this field, there is often a focus on spatial justice, where inequalities based on location, mobility, poverty, or indigeneity are analyzed using spatial understandings of socioeconomic, political, or environmental characteristics. This brings together connections between place and space in powerful combinations around justice, equity, and critical thinking.
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Land Education
Austin R. Cruz
Land education from an Indigenous perspective can be understood as the learning of deep social, political, ethical, and spiritual relationships on and with land. By extension, the approach of land-as-pedagogy applies the understanding that the primary and ultimate teacher is the very land itself. Land education offers scholars and students a nuanced, culturally responsive, and responsible critique of the notion of place and field of place-based education, particularly with regard to historically minoritized students and communities such as Indigenous peoples throughout the world. Building from Indigenous scholarship and drawing connections between global examples of Indigenous relationships to land, the educational implications of land education and land-as-pedagogy compel everyone involved in enacting curricula and pedagogy to center such ideas into all learning irrespective of academic “subject” or discipline. By acknowledging where events, relationships, experiences, and understanding happen, communities and learners are afforded the opportunity to reassess and reaffirm the ontological and epistemological basis that all knowledge is contextualized and that contextualization starts with/in land. Examples of the positive educational outcomes of such curricular, pedagogical, administrative, and educational policy change around land include the affirmation and strengthening of Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty, self-determination, and self-education, as well as the larger enculturation of non-Indigenous learners to more applied, reflexive, and explicit alliances and interdependencies with land and other communities. Repositioning land education and land-as-pedagogy from a marginal to central place within formal and informal education initiates the logical consequence and responsibility of such pedagogy: the complex, ethical, and historically informed process of Indigenous land repatriation.
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Gender and Indigenous Education and Practice
Edwina Pio
The unfolding of the term Indigenous is clustered within rich, powerful, diverse, decolonial, and hegemonic worldviews. Inhabiting more than 90 countries, the approximately 370 million Indigenous people on Planet Earth are wisdom carriers of traditional ancestral knowledge entwined with eco-spirituality. Powerful extractive institutional structures have ensured that Indigenous peoples have harvested historical legacies of domination, disruption, and disrespect. Indigenous women tend to live in the shadows, encountering invisibility, lack of voice, and stark inequality. International instruments such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, as well as a range of voluntary, private, and government-funded organizations and Indigenous communities, serve as catalysts to augmenting impactful liaisons and interventions in and through evocative educational pedagogy and practice. Gender and Indigenous diversity in education and practice distills narratives of voice and praxis to provoke, nudge, and prompt collective change.
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The History of Education in Australia
Troy Heffernan
Education in Australia’s history stretches back tens of thousands of years, but only a small number of changes have altered its shape in that time. The first period of education lasted for thousands of years and was an Indigenous education as knowledge of religious beliefs, society, and laws was shared from one generation to the next. Knowledge of Australia’s significant environmental diversity was also taught because possessing the skills to find appropriate shelter for the conditions, while developing methods of hunting, gathering, and fishing, was knowledge that needed to be taught to ensure survival.
Education changed when Europeans invaded Indigenous lands. Settlers who brought children as well as those who gave birth to children wanted their offspring to be part of an education system that mimicked England’s. Ex-convicts and later members of the Church provided this service and began the tradition of non-Indigenous education in Australia. It was during the 19th century as cities and towns increased in size, and the population more generally, that the final two significant periods of Australian education began. The nation’s wealthiest required religious and grammar schools that prepared children for secondary education and for university overseas, as well as in Australia as universities were established and slowly increased in number. When private education began, it was largely the only option for those seeking university degrees for their children, but this began a series of events in Australia that still sees approximately one-third of all school students attending private schools.
Public and compulsory education began in the late 19th century and gradually became more accessible. Public education, in some respects, began as governments saw the benefit in the social advantages of education, and economic incentives in creating educated laborers. However, even through the austerity of world wars and financial depression, successive generations of publicly educated individuals saw the need for increasingly continuing education beyond the compulsory school age. Public education subsequently increased in popularity through the 20th century as a growing number of students stayed beyond compulsory schooling age. Education in Australia is still seeing policies change to make schooling accessible and open to all members of society regardless of background. In the 21st century, secondary schooling is being completed by most demographic groups, and university has become accessible to a diverse group of students, many of whom may not have had access to such options only a few decades ago. This is not to suggest that systemic issues of racism and ostracism have been eradicated, but steps have been made to begin addressing these issues.
