Introduction

Abstract

This collection is an outcome of teaching a course on cultural knowledge and colonial education for eight years. The course has created space for critical dialogical engagements with educators, learners, activists, and students involved in the process of reclaiming their Indigenous knowledge or making sense of their Indigeneity. A key to the many dialogues during class discussions has been to move the learning debates beyond the halls of academe or beyond goals of bringing about change that focus on issues of cognition, inclusion, discrimination and integration, to an emphasis on critical self-reflexivity that would allow for the interrogation of individual beliefs, values, biases and hence, work towards uncolonizing the mind. The dialogues have taken into account the social, political and cultural changes that impede transformation, and have called for a rethinking of the dominant seductive ideologies that serve to marginalize other people’s ways of knowing. The course readings have pointed to different ways of conceptualizing and engaging in transformative learning and uncolonizing procedures. The readings attempted to challenge the status quo and offer alternative ideas and interpretations that allow for the dismantling of the persistent ambiguous connections between the known and the unknown; the self and the constructed other.