Dreams, Healing, and Listening to Learn: Educational Movements in the Everyday

Abstract

In this article, co-authors Eagle Shield, Munson, and San Pedro connect with and extend the new vision and direction as guided by Equity & Excellence in Education’s new editorial leadership. They do so by first historically framing the distinct differences between assimilative schooling systems and community-based educational resurgence efforts, and then centering Indigenous Knowledges in their stories of resistance and vitalizing efforts with their communities. Relying on collaborative storying whereby conversations are dialogic and reciprocal, the co-authors emphasize personal experiences of the ways educational movements are enacted in their everyday circumstances. Particular emphasis is placed on the way broad movements such as Black Lives Matter and Water is Life are connected to local community-based reforms. Eagle Shield emphasizes the lessons she learned while opening and directing the Mní Wičhóni Nakíčižiŋ Owáyawa (Defenders of the Water School) during the Standing Rock Movement and how those lessons and dreams are continuing to be realized beyond the movement space. Munson details the ways she has been guided by tribal leadership to expand a teacher education program that emphasizes both language vitalization and the centering of tribal knowledges. Listening closely and carefully, San Pedro shares the ways their lessons connect to, extend, and support pedagogical theories and scholarship that forward BIPOC-centered and justice-driven movements. Their stories address the article’s central question: What does education look like when it is supported and directed by the dreams, hopes, and aspirations of community leadership?.