Indigenous literacies

This graduate project examined the stories of Katzie community members in order to bring forward intergenerational wisdom and practices connected to their lands and waters that are specific to Katzie people in an education context. My research process included interviewing 11 participants. Research grew out of five protocols of Coast Salish people I learned through my upbringing: starting with the local; acknowledging and expressing gratitude for place and people; getting an education; listening to one’s elders; and, loving one another. Findings from this study include four story themes and recommendations from participants’ interviews, ten methodological principles, and six pedagogical practices, that guide an understanding of Katzie literacy and pedagogy. Teachings from these stories compose a land-based pedagogy, including the sky and water, grounded in important relationships to the territorial places of Katzie people. Listening to the words of Katzie people is a first step toward reconciliation and restitution in local education systems.

In English and Spanish. Catalog from the exhibition "Andrés Sánchez Gallque y los primeros pintores en la Audiencia de Quito" held at the Museo de Arte Colonial in Quito, Ecuador (2014). This is the galley proof. The footnotes for my article are unfortunately off by one number.
Catálogo de la exposición celebrada en el Museo de Arte Colonial en Quito, Ecuador (2014). Este es el machote. Lamentablemente, las notas al píe de página de mi artículo están corridas por un número.

The purpose of this research is to seek out Indigenous perspectives on literacy in Indigenous Language Revitalization (ILR), and to explore the role of print literacy in ILR in British Columbia. The central research question of this study is: does print literacy play a role in language revitalization? Through qualitative interviews and an extensive literature review, this thesis explores community-based language revitalization initiatives in Indigenous communities, as described by Indigenous language champions and scholars. In international forums, literacy is often discussed in terms of development goals, functionalism, and economic success. However, literacy is “socially and historically situated, fluid, multiple, and power-linked” (McCarty, 2005, p. xviii), and it is inextricably linked to political, historical, and cultural contexts (Grenoble & Whaley, 2005). This study concludes that these contexts are vital to defining the role of literacy in Indigenous communities. Every community has its own historical, political, social, environmental, technological, and philosophical context for language learning, and as such, literacy plays a different role in every community. Furthermore, the role of literacy can be expected to change over time, much like languages shift over time. This research also demonstrates that literacy, situated within Indigenous-controlled education and language initiatives, can contribute to larger goals of decolonization.

The educational space for critical literacies in such dire situations of conflict may be in promoting critical reflection on one’s own context. In situations of conflict violent confrontation could be avoided if both sides involved read their positions critically, seeking to understand their own positions and their differences. Here we remember Paulo Freire’s reflections of the relations between “word” and “world”. Freire (2005:151) spoke of the need to move away from “naive” ways of reading the world in terms of ‘common sense’, where meanings are taken to be given, apparent and uncontested (a form of knowledge described by Freire as “made from experience”), towards a more analytical (“rigorous”) form of reading the world which Freire defined as ‘learning to listen’. This paper offers a critical literacy reading of the recent development in the Israel/Palestine conflict.

This paper reflects on the lessons learned in the design and development process of the project Through Other Eyes (TOE). It explores the justification and theoretical framework of TOE in the context of development education and global learning by outlining some of the challenges and tensions of translating postcolonial theory into pedagogical practice and of negotiating complex issues of language, representation and ownership in a context of North-South dialogue.

From the exhibition catalog "De presencias y evocaciones: la infancia en el arte ecuatoriano" (Quito, 2016). A study of the educational materials and methods in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Quito (with particular emphasis on relationships between alphabetic literacy, artists, and artistic production) that incorporates a range of unpublished documents.

Supervisory Committee Dr. Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins, Department of Linguistics Supervisor Dr. Tim Anderson, Department of Curriculum & Instruction Outside Member The purpose of this research is to seek out Indigenous perspectives on literacy in Indigenous Language Revitalization (ILR), and to explore the role of print literacy in ILR in British Columbia. The central research question of this study is: does print literacy play a role in language revitalization? Through qualitative interviews and an extensive literature review, this thesis explores community-based language revitalization initiatives in Indigenous communities, as described by Indigenous language champions and scholars. In international forums, literacy is often discussed in terms of development goals, functionalism, and economic success. However, literacy is “socially and historically situated, fluid, multiple, and power-linked” (McCarty, 2005, p. xviii), and it is inextricably linked to political, historical, and cultura...

Since the demarcation of the Indigenous Territory of the Upper Rio Negro in the Brazilian Amazon in 1996, indigenous language literacy and specialized indigenous schooling has been prioritized by the indigenous governing authority. This paper illustrates how the centrality of indigenous language literacy to indigenous self-governance, and the particular form which it takes, grow out of three kinds of engagements with literacy in the region; (a.) instruction in Portuguese reading and writing (and the marginalization of indigenous languages) in Catholic boarding schools set up by Salesian Missionaries in the first half of the 20th century; (b.) the translation of the Bible into indigenous languages by Protestant missionaries and its close relationship to conversion experiences; (c.) the phonetic transcription of indigenous languages, especially of myths, by anthropologists and linguists. The paper how the values of literacy naturalized through these various encounters, as they interact with indigenous language ideologies, constrain and condition the manner in which reading and writing in indigenous languages takes place in the Northwest Amazon today.