Foundational Paradigms

I attended a presentation from Dr. Leroy Little Bear who spoke of the need to challenge the foundational thoughts and experiences that make up the paradigms of our colonized society. He said that all of us are experiencing the world around us from the lens made up of the interaction of our respective cultures and belief systems. However we have come to a point in time that we no longer challenge our systems. We take them to be pillars of our societies and that in order to be successful we must interact in a way that continues to enhance the dominant paradigms.

I thought this had great implication for policy creation or revision connected to Indigenous education. There has been ample evidence where policy has made surface level attempts to acknowledge the needs of Indigenous students but lacks the ability to disrupt the paradigm that has been established in our colonized system. This type of paradigm continues to perpetuate its dominance as we aimlessly believe the structure to be of immense quality and beneficial to all learners which could not be farther from the truth.

Dr. Little Bear speaks to the Blackfoot emphasis of creating order of the constant flux that we experience in our lives. In Blackfoot culture, everything is in motion and is living in a web of interrelationships. Therefore, taking this into account policy should look to foster the living relationship of knowledge rather than a commodity that can be owned or manipulated. It is through valuing the interconnected nature of Indigenous culture that our teachers and school administrators can come to understand that our students should not be learning in isolated subject areas but in a constantly changing and evolving flux that supports life long learning founded upon the development of character and spirituality not just on how we can use knowledge for individual gain or mastery. I now have a further understanding of the importance of challenging the dominant paradigm in order to carve out spaces in education through policy that no longer solely serves the majority.