Page 273 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

Chapter 19
Deconstructing Chinn and Hana’ike:
Pedagogy Through an Indigenous Lens

Suzanne L. Stewart

Introduction

Learning in Indigenous communities worldwide has changed drastically since the
exploration of Europeans, often seen as heralded by Columbus in 1492. The arrival
of shiploads of western Europeans across Indigenous lands from Canada to the South
Pacific heralded a change not only in the resident populations’ ways of knowing and
being but also in an entire way of life for Indigenous groups. Presently, the cultural
landscape of Indigenous country is constantly evolving. This evolution is a process in
which we interact and change through features of human knowing and their implica-
tions for human change. Attaining postsecondary education is one way in which
adults of all ages and cultures seek to change their lives through increasing capacity
for knowledge, skills, and employment. Through individual, group, and class-size
interventions, culturally responsive educators need to be trained and capable of meet-
ing the learning needs of culturally diverse populations in the postsecondary school
system; however, there is a realization that current education practices are not meeting
the challenges of the broad range of Indigenous cultural identities represented in
today’s colleges and universities (Malatest and Associates 2002). This is especially
true for teacher education within the postsecondary system. Educators are becoming
aware that the values in which the current systems of pedagogy are rooted in
European-North American (i.e., Eurocentric) culture and that those values and those
of culturally different students, such as those with Indigenous ancestry, frequently
come into conflict in learning processes (Barnhardt 2002).
My position as author is one of Canadian Indigenous woman, parent, academic,
and psychologist. My formal education and vocation as professor in counseling
psychology within faculties of educations in Canadian Universities has afforded
both a detailed and broad view of some of the issues relevant to Indigenous educa-
tion in the postsecondary context. In a review of the current literature on Indigenous
learning in postsecondary school contexts in Canada, I seek to identify and describe

S.L. Stewart
University of Toronto

D.J. Tippins et al. (eds.), Cultural Studies and Environmentalism, 247
Cultural Studies of Science Education, Vol. 3, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3929-3_19,
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010