Creating Third Spaces in K-12 Socio-Environmental Education Through Indigenous Languages: A Case Study

• Main Authors: Audley, Shannon, D’Souza, Angela B.
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: Smith ScholarWorks 2022
• Subjects: Decolonizing; indigenous languages; socio-environmental justice; pluriverse; colonial matrix of power; science education; Education; abenaki
• Online Access: https://scholarworks.smith.edu/celebratingfacultyscholarship2021pubs/7; https://scholarworks.smith.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=celebratingfacultyscholarship2021pubs

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.