Can indigenous music learning processes inform contemporary schooling?

This autoethnographic study investigated possibility of incorporating indigenous pedagogies into Ugandan school music and, possibly, general education. School music education in Uganda currently occurs within a colonial-influenced system that does not connect with learners’ indigenous cultures. The colonial system fosters belief that “western” is modernity and “indigenous” is backwardness that should be erased. School music learning is currently experienced in a teacher-dominated, “banking” (Freire, 1970) school system that disempowers learners and produces graduates who cannot address the musical needs of their worlds. Ugandan government measures to improve music and general education have not improved the situation. Literature on the role that indigenous pedagogies could play in a contemporary music education is limited. Through this study, I sought to understand what might happen when indigenous education pedagogies are incorporated in a contemporary, formal school setting. Informed by relevant literature, I interrogated and analyzed my own learning and teaching experiences in Ugandan communities and schools and found that embedding indigenous learning and teaching processes in music classrooms fostered growth in learner leadership, ownership, agency, and identity in the context of mutually shared participatory experiences that learners found relevant and meaningful—experiences that engendered joyful, passionate, collaborative learning, and reification of reflective practice among learners.

An Innovative Opportunity? Social Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and the Pedagogical Possibilities for Indigenous Learners

The need to indigenize curriculum in Canada is pressing. Education, however, is fraught and complex. Questions have been asked about the accessibility and applicability of traditional class-based educational paradigms and subject matter. Based on the limited courses currently on offer in Canada, the emergent social-innovation pedagogy seems to bear several points of sympathy or commonality with Indigenous pedagogies, including emphasis on experiential learning, reflection, and collaborative work. Indigenous pedagogies and ways of knowing cannot and should not be slotted into a Eurocentric educational paradigm. This article will begin to explore this possible pedagogical sympathy—an overlap between the two knowledge systems—with the support of a group of Indigenous business students interested in social innovation as a tool to help them build the resilience of their communities.RÉSUMÉIl existe au Canada un besoin pressant d’autochtoniser le curriculum. Il n’est pourtant pas toujours simple et facile de modifier le système éducatif, même si certains ont déjà mis en doute l’accessibilité et la pertinence du cours didactique traditionnel. À cet égard, on peut remarquer plusieurs affinités—y compris un accent mis sur l’apprentissage, la réflexion et le travail de collaboration par l’expérience—entre les pédagogies autochtones et la pédagogie émergente d’innovation sociale, malgré le nombre limité de cours de ce type offerts au Canada actuellement. Les pédagogies et manières de savoir autochtones ne peuvent pas, et ne devraient pas, être insérées dans un paradigme eurocentrique. Cet article entame l’exploration des affinités entre les deux systèmes de savoir en consultant des étudiants en commerce autochtones intéressés par l’innovation sociale comme outil pouvant les aider à rendre leurs communautés plus résilientes.

Editorial

This special issue of the Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, titled ‘South-South Dialogues: Global Approaches to Decolonial Pedagogies’, aims to contribute to the field of Australian Indigenous Studies and Education by further diversifying the perspectives, conversations and conceptual tools to engage with Indigenous pedagogies. Through a south-south conversational and conceptual approach, this special issue expands the conversation of Indigenous pedagogies internationally and conceptually from a global south location. At the same time, this special issue means to be a re-iteration of the first ‘South-South Dialogues: Situated Perspectives in Decolonial Epistemologies’ conference held in November 2015 at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, which displayed a south-south conversation lead by local and global Indigenous perspectives. This special issue further theorises what many local and global scholars view as implied in Indigenous education: that the mainstream field of education can be re-examined using a decolonial viewpoint, one that is led by the views of Indigenous peoples and people of colour from the ‘global south’. This issue also responds to a re-awakening of decolonial theories that have been embodied in ‘Southern Theory’ (Connell, 2007), Indigenous Standpoint Theory (Nakata, 2007), coloniality/decoloniality (see, for instance, Maldonado-Torres, 2007), among others that continue to re-examine the conditions in which colonisation continues to be epistemologically exerted and continue to propose ways to contest it. This re-invigorated conversation is one that can be addressed by a genuinely horizontal intercultural dialogue lead by the southern perspectives. This was, one way or another, what was observed and lived in the ‘South-South Dialogues’ conference that felt like the starting point of a newer form of knowledge production and pedagogy.