Land Education Design Project
PI Eve Tuck
Community Collaborator Legacy of Hope Foundation
Years active
2021
Abstract
This study is concerned with how best practices in land education can be engaged to create spaces for meaning learning, and change at both the personal and social levels. We hope to learn how Indigenous community organizations can facilitate, and in many cases, recover for themselves, a positive and meaningful relationship to land and waters for residential school survivors, Sixties Scoop survivors, and their families. In partnership with the Legacy of Hope Foundation, researchers seek to understand best practices in the community-led creation of land education programs.
The study consists of three components across one year: 1) a workshop series on community based research, Indigenous methodologies, and participatory design research organized by graduate student researchers for Legacy of Hope Foundation staff; 2) a youth summer project inviting young people in Tkaronto to imagine how they would design a youth land education program; and 3) an incubator to support Indigenous-led community organizations.
Method
Participatory design
Ethical Framework
A significant pillar of the partnership is in the deep connections and relations each member has with various communities that will allow for meaningful, explorative, and extensive exploration and contribution to the ongoing research of land-based education, design-based research, and research facilitation. The research team’s commitment to graduate student development and engagement ensures tremendous academic opportunities for the next generation of scholars. The approaches to learning, education, curriculum development, and pedagogical structures that integrate land-based approaches, community-driven movements, Indigenous cultural values and Elder/knowledge keeper affiliations ensures that these academic contributions as a result from this partnership offer positive reparatory relationships with especial focus on the needs, values, and structures of universities’ surrounding communities.
Theories of Change
Land education as a field is evolving, in no small part driven by the work of Indigenous community organizations, whose work has extended not only land-based knowledges and Indigenous languages, but also extends into economics, property law, private land management and land-use public policy. Thus, training the next generation of land education scholars necessitates a multi-sited, in situ training that is interdisciplinary and interrelational. Such training would position new scholars to attend to the pressing questions about the relationships between Indigenous, Black, POC, migrants, settlers as framed by settler colonialism, and largely ignored by conventional environmental education (Nxumalo, 2019) as well as mainstream approaches to climate change. By creating this project as a land education program incubator, we offer crucial research support to community organizations doing important environmental knowledge-based work while also bringing students into relation with some of the most active theorists and practitioners working outside of the academy in this field.
Knowledge Mobilization
Mini podcast on youth dreams for land education programs
Program materials (e.g. plans, curriculum, program designs) per community organization
Web-based toolkit of materials to prompt planning of future land education program
Keywords
Participatory design, land education
Discipline
Indigenous studies
Project funded by
Connaught Fund: Community Partnership Research Program