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

Abstract

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 implications 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 meeting 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).