The Integrity of Good Relations: Indigenous Approaches to Respect, Relationality, and Reciprocity in Higher Learning

Abstract

Globally, we are reminded that education has always been, and will always be, essential to human survival and, delivered in its ideal form, can result in achieving our full potential. According to UNESCO, education is a basic human right that works to raise men and women out of poverty, level inequalities, and ensure sustainable development. The recognition of education as a means to increase social standing underlies its rights designation; yet, as Indigenous scholars working within a postsecondary context in Canada, we believe that education holds the potential to be so much more. In this chapter, we maintain that institutional efforts around decolonizing and Indigenizing in postsecondary settings shed light on colonial capitalist systems that are the grounds for many of the current crises within academic integrity. Given these mounting concerns, we argue that the valuing and inclusion of Indigenous principles within educational spaces hold the potential to shift education out of its current crisis into the realm of what is holistically possible. The consideration of a more holistic definition of academic integrity, inclusive of Indigenous principles, requires fellow educators to identify what values are embedded in their system of education and to ask themselves why these things matter. Furthermore, we propose solutions for what is transpiring as critical concerns in academic integrity will be found in collectivist traditions that have endured across ages and are now found in contemporary classroom practices.