Synopsis
There is a recognised need for individuals who are able to work with multiple, including Indigenous, knowledges to address the urgent environmental issues facing both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. However, the practice of what is often described as ‘knowledge integration’ is not yet well understood, which limits the capacity of post-secondary institutions to develop appropriate programming for future practitioners. Understanding this practice instead as ‘constellating knowledges’ is one of the key findings of this research.
In stage one, I looked at practice from the as-yet-unstudied perspective of individuals in Canada who are using multiple knowledges to find solutions to such place-based issues as habitat restoration or environmental assessment. Through an iterative narrative process, sixteen practitioners and I co-created a Knowledge Constellation Story to depict how they think about using knowledges in their work. This narrative details Knower, Processes-of-Knowing, and Content-Knowledge stars that individuals actively constellate into their knowledge constellations. The Knowledge Constellation Story allows us to characterise different knowledges in terms of unique and valuable constellations.
The educational implications of this story were then discussed in stage two with a group of five participant colleagues familiar with post-secondary Indigenous-and-Environmental education. Together we finalised a Teaching-Learning Story of Re*constellating that describes practice in terms of identifying and bringing together stars from different knowledge constellations. The Teaching-Learning Story outlines principles of practice such as clarifying the informative or decisive intent of re*constellating. These educators confirmed the need to teach students about the established conditions of emergence of re*constellating, for example, articulating similarities while appreciating differences.
Findings include recommendations for post-secondary institutions preparing students to practice re*constellating when engaging with communities to meet environmental challenges. Such programming will also assist current and future practitioners to meet legislative and policy requirements as well as to undertake research efforts that would benefit from a clearer understanding of practice.
Of special interest is the innovative complexity-inspired interpretive approach I used, including coherent conversations and narrative synthesis. These complexity-inspired methods provided in-depth insights into how practitioners think about knowledges. Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous participant colleagues expressed appreciation for this respectful co-learning approach to research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Conferring University: Trent University (Peterborough, Ontario, Canada), 2016
[email protected]
https://digitalcollections.trentu.ca/objects/etd-464