Abstract
Settler colonialism strives for the dissolution of Indigenous societies by establishing a new colonial society on seized land with the elimination of Indigenous people as an organizing principle. In the United States, education has been used as a tool for downward assimilation with the widespread use of boarding schools until the late twentieth century that separated American Indian children from their families and communities, cut their hair and forbid them to speak their languages or practice customs, forced them to learn English and practice Christianity, leading to cultural genocide that current generations still carry. Today, Indigenous students are more likely to receive harsher discipline more frequently than white counterparts. Exclusionary discipline may result in adverse academic and life outcomes.
At this seminar, we will present a longitudinal formative intervention study, Indigenous Learning Lab, implemented at Northwoods High School through a coalition of an Ojibwe Nation, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, the Wisconsin Indian Education Association, and a research center at a local university. The aim of the intervention was to design and implement a new, inclusive school-wide behavioral support systems where Indigenous students’ cultural identity, agency, ingenuity, and joy are fostered in order to address violence and disparities American Indian students faced at Northwoods High.
The city where the school is located was the epicenter of Wisconsin’s Anti-Indian movement of the 1990s, refereed as Walleye War. Tribal members were physically attacked or prevented from practicing their treaty-guaranteed harvesting rights on lands ceded in treaties with the U.S. government. As they harvested walleye fish, tribal members risked injury as they encountered hostile crowds of local White men, women, and children who threw rocks and other objects and held signs that said, “Spear an Indian! Save a Walleye,” and “Spear a Pregnant Squaw. Save Two Walleye.” An Indigenous Learning Lab member remembers seeing his teachers at the boat landings, shouting and throwing objects at his family on the weekend–then having to face them on Monday morning in the high school. In the last decade, the school administrators and teachers strived to develop positive and reciprocal relationships with the Ojibwe community, including indigenous cultural practices and addressing disparate academic outcomes that Indigenous youth experience at the school. As a result, they decided to implement Indigenous Learning Lab in order to address discipline disparities with Ojibwe students, parents, and educators.
Over the 11 meetings in the 2019-2020 academic year, eight Indigenous community members (three students, two parents, two teachers, and one government member) worked with six non-Indigenous school staff and a research team including Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars from a local university. As decolonizing methodology, Indigenous Learning Lab honors the sovereignty of the Ojibwe Nation and followed three epistemological principles: Respect, revitalization, andreconciliation. The members examined their discipline system and designed a new system that is responsive to diverse and often conflicting histories, interests, resources, and goals. We will discuss how local school community members expanded individual agency to transformative agency and engaged in future-making.
Indigenous Learning Lab is a part of a multi-site formative intervention project, called Learning Lab. Learning Lab is an inclusive knowledge-production and systemic design process at schools adopted from the Change Laboratory method. Learning Lab contributes to the fourth generation of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). Learning Labs have been implemented since 2012 at 11 public schools at four school districts in the states of Wisconsin and Florida in USA, including a school district serving an Ojibwe Nation, to design culturally responsive school-wide behavioral support systems to address the racial disparities.
This academic year, a Learning Lab will be implemented in Rio, Brazil at a special education school for blind students in designing an inclusive curriculum for teaching students with multiple disabilities. In addition, five Learning Labs will be implemented at public schools in the U.S. to address the racial disproportionality through culturally responsive school-wide multi-tiered behavioral support systems with students, parents, teachers, staff, community members, NGOs, school and district leadership, especially those from historically marginalized communities. We will discuss the implications of Indigenous Learning Lab for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers who are interested in partnering with Indigenous and historically marginalized communities through the fourth generation of CHAT and formative interventions.
Bios of the Speakers
Aydin Bal is a professor of education at UW-Madison. His research focuses the social justice in education, family-school-community-university collaboration, systemic transformation, and expansive learning. He has conducted multisite formative interventions to address the racialization of disability. As a practitioner and researcher, Dr. Bal has worked with youth from minoritized communities and refugees experiencing academic and behavioral problems in schools, hospitals, and prisons from the United States, Turkey, South Sudan, Syria, the Russian Federation, and Ojibwe Nation.
Aaron Bird Bear (Mandan, Hidatsa, and Diné, enrolled Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold Indian Reservation) was appointed as the inaugural Tribal Relations Director at the UW-Madison in 2019. Bird Bear previously served as Assistant Dean for Student Diversity Programs in the UW-Madison School of Education. Bird Bear joined UW-Madison in 2000 to support the retention and graduation of indigenous students. In 2009, Bird Bear began supporting historically underrepresented students in the School of Education, and in 2012, Bird Bear began supporting the School’s efforts to integrate First Nations Studies into public PK–16 education, creating the educator resource wisconsinfirstnations.org.