Listening ethically to indigenous children: experiences from India

ABSTRACT

An act of respect when researching with indigenous children is recognising the community’s code of ethics, its intellectual and environmental property, and acknowledging its right to self-determination. Within India, the indigenous communities constitute over 84 million people, but their voice has been marginalised particularly in the context of education. This paper foregrounds ethical considerations when researching with indigenous groups, specifically outlining dilemmas that arose from working alongside Sabar children of Jharkhand, India. It identifies how ethnomethodological methods and participatory tools have empowered this marginalised voice, enabling multinodal expressions and access to data that other methods may not have elicited. Findings highlight children as legitimate meaning-makers of their world, as ‘beings’, and not merely ‘becomings’. The paper discusses the ethical strategies adopted in consideration of its indigenous participants that have enabled generation of data beyond barriers of language, power and privilege. It navigates the nature and practice of ethics examined in the context of indigeneity through acknowledgement of ‘paradigmatic’ and ‘situated’ ethics, and an ethic of reciprocity. It concludes the relevance of ethics of difference in postcolonial education and research.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous research
• ethical strategies and tools
• ethical listening
• situated ethics
• paradigmatic ethics
• reciprocity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Pallawi Sinha is a recent doctorate from the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. Her research interests lie with arts, culture and Education, Place-making, postcolonialism, comparative education and the marginalised voice. She is a trained educationist and product designer. Pallawi’s previous research with street-children was published as a book chapter in Education, Childhood and Anarchism: Talking Colin Ward. Her doctoral investigation with the indigenous Sabar peoples of India locates a unique ethical and epistemic journey to establish sustainable educational ideals and systems.

Notes

1. With reference to India’s tribal communities, the term is rarely employed in official texts or literature since it raises questions of who may or may not be considered indigenous in India’s history. Contrarily, the author acknowledges their status as first-inhabitants who have ‘a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies’ (Martinez-Cobo 2004, 2), thus does not hesitate to employ the same.

2. The word translates as ‘adi’ – first, and ‘vasi’ – inhabitants. Referred to as Adivasis or Schedule Tribes by the constitution of India, indigenous groups comprise over 84 million peoples who reveal a similar history of struggle for existence, their identity and against oppression. A heterogeneous group with over 200 distinct groups speaking more than 100 dialects, they vary greatly in ethnicity and culture.

3. EM considers that making activities familiar to participants, unfamiliar, provokes the phenomenon of interest by producing reflections on ‘obstinately familiar world’ (Garfinkel 1967, 38). For instance, Sabar adults could effortlessly make bow-arrows but in teaching me they were put in an unfamiliar position wherein they needed to revisit appropriate steps systematically, and this demonstrated their teaching strategies.

4. Sabar children are curious but extremely shy of foreign technologies. An instance when I was showing them how to rewind the finished camera reel, it made a whirring sound. Upon hearing this unfamiliar sound, two of the children threw their cameras and ran afar.