The lack of Indigenous cultural knowledge and perspectives in the school curriculum has been identified as a significant factor in school failure amongst Indigenous students. This thesis includes a literature review of Indigenous education, as articulated by Indigenous scholars. Issues of identity, self-determination, local control, community, culture and a return to a traditional-holistic model of education are investigated. An analysis of experiential and place-based educational models is taken as these alternative practices have shown success in addressing Indigenous students needs. The fundamental significance story, narrative and the concept of place has in Indigenous culture and knowledge development is explored, as well as the effects colonial influences have had on Indigenous story, voice and sense of place. Using self-study methodologies and the formation of a "narrative identity" through reflexive writings, the author attempts to uncover his motives and reasoning as a non-Indigenous educator and researcher in pursuing research in Indigenous education and to develop principles that understand, are respectful and conducive to Indigenous thought.

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Aboriginal educations is an ambiguous field of study that presents many challenging dilemmas for educators today. A major part of this ambiguity stems from the tendency to emphasize traditional cultural values, Aboriginal identity, and experiences as distinct and unique, and therefore essentially different from mainstream approaches to education. By drawing upon the memories and narrative of my own Metis family as well as the history and memories of the people of the Kainai community from the Blood Reserve in Alberta, I confront some of these dilemmas in both personal and collective ways. Following Eduoard Glissant, Francoise Lionnet, and Mark Zuss, I explore the character of the Kainai community as a tetissage of texts and genres which overlap, interact, juxtapose, and mix the textual contributions of an elder, a student, and a teacher (myself) to create a more complicated portrait of the Kainai community that stretches beyond the 'us versus them' binary. These texts are then interpreted using a (post)colonial framework largely based upon the works of Frantz Fanon, Gerald Vizenor, Homi Bhabha, and Neal McLeod. / vi, 206 leaves ; 29 cm.

This master's thesis is written by an indigenous person who sees education as a healing process. In the tradition of narrative inquiry (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000) I interweave autobiographical texts with reflections on colonialism, indigeneity and multiculturalism. I am Amazigh (Kabyle) from the country now called Algeria, where my people have lived for some 5,000 years. I was raised in France, where I experienced a racism which I became conscious of when I arrived in Canada. I draw on the Medicine Wheel teachings given by First Nations Elders in Canada as the philosophical framework of my text, a framework based on the balance of spiritual/emotional/physical and mental dimensions of experience. I provide the context for my story, explain my methodology, and offer narratives that I then reflect on as part of my life-journey through societies, cultures, belief systems and educational contexts.

This study will explore the texts created by individuals associated with Taíno Indigenous culture and which express aspects of Taíno Indigenous worldviews in Western mainstream contexts. The purpose is to highlight strategies to navigate Western mainstream worldviews to express non-Western worldviews that educators could explore with Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CLD) students in secondary and tertiary educational settings. Strategies for CLD students to seriously engage with their cultural worldviews in academic settings can provide opportunities for them to have a voice in representing their knowledge systems and add yet unexplored perspectives on their worldviews as well as on the Western mainstream worldviews espoused in academic contexts, thus contributing to a pluralization of perspectives. The study is guided by the following research questions: 1) What specific strategies do participants use in their texts when expressing Taíno Indigenous worldviews in Western mainstream contexts? 2) How are these strategies situated in the larger Taíno Indigenous context in which participants affirm Taíno Indigenous worldviews? These questions will be explored through a qualitative analysis of participants’ texts, interviews with participants, and participant observation which will be organized into a collective case study with an instrumental purpose. The study uses a Critical Indigenous Research Methodologies Framework as conceptualized by Brayboy et al., (2012) and is guided by borderthinking as conceptualized by Mignolo (2011) as well as Interculturalidad Crítica as conceptualized by Walsh (2010). This dissertation will use the Multiliteracies concept of a metalanguage to focus on identifying intercultural strategies that participants used in their texts to present non-Western worldviews in Western mainstream contexts. The concept of intertextuality is used as the unit of analysis to explore how participants' texts draw upon a variety of elements, including Western mainstream elements, to convey information about Taíno Indigenous worldviews.

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This study investigated the survival strategies adopted by the San in Cunene Province in Southern Angola. The study intended first to gain understanding of the economic activities that the San in Cuanhama municipality districts of Kafima Centre and Etale La Mulovi employ to sustain their livelihoods. Secondly, the study explored how accessible the basic social services of education and health were to the San in these communities. Utilising qualitative research methods, face-to-face interviews and focus group research were conducted. From the data collected on education the study findings show that none of the children from both communities were enrolled at any school. To this end, at Kafima Centre the main hindering factors that contributed inter alia included hunger at school, stigmatization by the neighbouring community and poverty among San communities. At Etale La Mulavi San community there was lack of educational facilities near the San habitations, constituting a key hindering factor to accessing education. On health, the closer the public health centre was to the San community the more the San utilised the health services for treatment and management of common diseases like Malaria and cough as well as other diseases. On survival strategies both San communities “okunhanga” ‘go.. and look for..’ (fending for food) was the primary survival strategy the San were involved in for the sustenance of their livelihoods. The findings informed the recommendations in chapter five of this study.

In this dissertation, I explore and continue to ponder the work of intercultural teacher education in Chile in a context of ongoing and varied violence over territory. I analyzed how teacher educators talk about their work and looked at how the programs address or not, the context of violence and Mapuche resistance. In addition, how the programs present themselves in different documents to see what questions arise from this exploration of teacher education discourse.I asked: 1. In what ways do teacher educators talk about intercultural education? 2. In what ways do program documents, in two teacher education programs discuss intercultural education? I am not trying to provide answers on how to improve teacher education, rather to provoke, inform, generate, and open questions about teacher education in settler contexts. In Chile, the struggles over land for the Mapuche are ongoing and a constant focus of governments and industry that continually label and persecute this struggle as acts of terrorism. This conflict is part of the everyday lives of students and teachers across the area where the Mapuche claim ancestral land. In teacher education there is an increasing amount of scholarship around land education (Calderon, 2014), and place-based education that focuses on bringing, alternately, place, land and water, and territory into the conversations of teacher education. In the various articles and debates about this focus, there are critiques of the ways in which earlier scholarship engaged with place without considering how it came to be occupied through settler violence, as well as with the lack of reflection of indigenous communities in that same land. In my research, I build on this work to examine the work of intercultural teacher education through two theoretical frameworks, settler colonialism, and Foucauldian theory of power/knowledge and discourse to think through this context. I used a case study methodology and interviewed nine teacher educators from two different programs in intercultural teacher education. One program is one of two fully intercultural programs and the other a branch from one of the two most prestigious universities in Chile. I also collected documents and kept a multimodal researcher journal with photos, descriptions, feelings, memos, and other items like news, op-eds, Facebook posts from Mapuche communities. I analyzed my data through three conceptual frames, place, education sovereignty, and personhood. In my analysis of place, I considered the context of intercultural education and examined how public and government-sponsored areas communicate an ideal of peaceful coexistence between two cultures, and how, while I was there, and before, and since, this discourse is interrupted and resisted by Mapuche communities. I also analyze the architecture of the programs and the ways on which teacher educators talk about place in their work to look at the ways in land, territory, and place are in tension in the work of intercultural teacher education in this specific context. On education sovereignty, I examined my interviews and documents from the lens of indigenous education sovereignty and from the concept of sovereignty as necropolitics. In the ways in which teacher educators talk about their work there are differences regarding the ways in which they frame why they teach their students what they teach them and for what purpose. The Mapuche teacher educators, across programs, express ideas of understanding their context and history of dispossession and the work of intercultural education as survivance, through reculturation, language, and self-determination. In my analysis of personhood and the ways teacher educators talk about teaching their students, I looked at how the focus on identity relates to ideas of diversity and inclusion that are related to the concerns some Non-Mapuche professors have about indigenous radicalism or supremacy. I traced these ways of talking about their work to the notion of culture as a way of classifying otherness to their pedagogical approaches to teaching diversity by looking at the Mapuche communities as those who are the most different. I explored their ways of talking about their work through the lens of productive inclusion, and how their concern over the inclusion of newly-arrived, migrant families can be deployed to erase the reculturation, self-determination of indigenous intercultural education. This research will contribute to the literature in Chile regarding intercultural teacher education as well to broader conversations about including settler colonial perspectives in teacher education in general. I hope that it will also help teacher educators and new teachers have an increased sense of the assumptions of intercultural education discourse in their processes of education as well as inform discussions regarding what these discourses do in initial teacher education.

Since the collapse of apartheid and the first democratic elections of 1994, education in South Africa has undergone fundamental transformation and part of this transformation was the reconstruction of the school curriculum. The new curriculum, known as Curriculum 2005 and developed in 1997, introduced Technology as a new learning area. This study is based on the inclusion of ‘indigenous technology and culture’, a new aspect introduced in a revision of Curriculum 2005. The broad goal of the study was to examine and explore pedagogic practice in relation to the inclusion of ‘indigenous technology and culture’ in the revised National Curriculum Statement for Technology. The study was informed by an examination of literature pertaining to philosophy of technology, indigenous knowledge systems and technology education. The review of the literature highlighted the contested nature of ‘indigenous knowledge systems’. Philosophies on the nature of technological knowledge were reviewed in order to explore the meaning of ‘technology’, and a comparative review of curriculum reform in regard to technology education in various parts of the world was conducted. This study presented an attempt to determine the rationale for the inclusion of ‘indigenous technology and culture’ in the revised National Curriculum Statement for Technology in South Africa and to explore and examine what teachers’ existing practices were in this regard. It also examined a process of participatory co-engagement with a focus group of teachers. This process was an attempt to implement ‘indigenous technology and culture’ of the curriculum in a more meaningful way. A case study approach using an in-depth, interpretive design was used. A questionnaire, document analysis, interviews and focus group discussions were used to conduct the investigation. What emerged from the data analysis was that there was unanimous support for the inclusion of ‘indigenous technology and culture’ in the technology curriculum, but implementation had been problematic. This was partly due to difficulties with the interpretation of this aspect in the curriculum as well as a lack of meaningful teaching and learning for various reasons. The study revealed that teachers face multiple dilemmas in implementing ‘indigenous technology and culture’ as an assessment standard. These dilemmas are pedagogical, political, conceptual, professional and cultural in nature. The intentions of the study were to build a comprehensive understanding of ‘indigenous technology and culture’ and to determine how a focus group of teachers were dealing with this new inclusion. The interpretive study concluded with implications and recommendations for further studies.