Transforming Research and Indigenous Education Struggle

Abstract

This section of the Indigenous Education Handbook focuses on “transforming” both the processes and outcomes of education and schooling to more effectively meet the learning and socio-cultural aspirations of Indigenous peoples. The ambiguity in the title of this section is intentional. This is to highlight the dual concerns related to how education and schooling structures in colonized societies function to re/produce dominant social, cultural, and economic interests on the one hand and in turn maintain outcomes of persisting social, economic, cultural, and learning underdevelopment and marginalization on the other. In this regard, schooling and education needs to be struggled over in at least two ways. First, there is a need to critically unpack the functioning of schooling in colonized settings and second, there is a need to work at ways to improve schooling and educational outcomes for Indigenous students. The overarching point here is that we will not have a sustainable social, cultural, and economic revolution of the high and disproportionate levels of Indigenous underdevelopment without a prior or simultaneous education revolution.