Global Education from an ‘Indigenist’ Anti-colonial Perspective

• Main Author: George Dei
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Alberta 2015-02-01
• Series: Journal of Contemporary Issues in Education
• Online Access: https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/jcie/index.php/JCIE/article/view/24090

This paper troubles the dominant ways of pursuing of “global education” pointing to the possibilities of such education through an Indigenist anti-colonial lens. The intellectual objective is to ensure that global education helps destabilize existing power relations, colonial hierarchies, and re-centers key questions of equity, power and social justice in education. An important question is: How do we frame an inclusive anti-racist future and what is the nature of the work required to collectively arrive at that future? It is argued that one of the many hallmarks of the contemporary neo-liberal corporate agenda in education is the intensification of private and corporate commercial interests in schooling and education. Education is being tailored to suit the needs of the current labour market with funding being preferentially diverted to economically viable disciplines, the streaming of students to ensure a blue-collar workforce and with complete disavowal of education as a social and public good. The paper introduces an ‘Indigenist anti-colonial’ lens highlighting Indigenous democratic principles for effective educational delivery. Indigenous communities see education both as a process and as something that happens at a place or site where learners openly utilize the body, mind and spirit/soul interface in critical dialogues about themselves and their communities. There is a shared understanding in these communities that people come to know through the simultaneous, dialogical and trialectic engagement of body, mind and spirit/soul, reinforcing the power of Land and Earth teachings; a need to understand the learner and the learning space; the nexus of society, nature, and culture; bringing an embodied connection to education; the importance of ethics, consciousness and responsibility; and engaging the coloniality of power. It is concluded that for the Global South, a rethinking of schooling and education has to take us back to our roots to examine our histories and cultural traditions of knowledge production, dissemination and use. We need to look at education from this source in terms of its connections with family life, community and social relevance. This means drawing from the lessons of how knowledge is impacted through early socialization practices, child-rearing practices, teaching and learning responsibilities of community membership, and the application of knowledge to solve everyday practical problems within one’s backyard and beyond.