Carly Bagelman writes…
I was very pleased to attend and participate in the Mexican Ministry of Culture’s first International congress on Indigenous education and language revitalization in Oaxaca, Mexico (June 15-17). The congress involved a diverse group of delegates from educational, linguistic, policy-making, visual art and writing backgrounds, and had sessions ranging from keynote and panel presentations, workshops, and traditional story-telling in Indigenous languages.
I presented on a panel called: Migration, Language Diversity & Education with two other education scholars doing on-the-ground work with different communities. During my presentation, I spoke to educational programs I have developed and participated in on the west coast of Canada with a number of Indigenous bands that focused on Indigenous-language revitalization, Indigenous-food-system revitalization and telling critical histories of Canada’s colonial relationship to Indigenous peoples. Through this discussion, I aimed to contextualize pedagogical discourses, such as culturally-relevant teaching. You can watch a video of the discussion here.
During the workshop I led, I discussed the use of multi-modal texts (such as picturebooks) for making multi-lingual and multi-modal records of ‘threatened knowledge’ (e.g. knowledge of Canadian Indigenous languages [dying due to assimilative education practices]). We parsed/deconstructed useful picturebook examples to identify their pedagogical affordances, and I discussed tangible methods used to read and make multi-modal texts for social justice learning.
I attended many wonderful sessions in which I gained new insights on addressing educational inequalities/challenges faced by Indigenous students and, relatedly, refugee and asylum seeker students (which is my current research focus).
