Learning through youth and community engagement: moving forward by looking back and connecting to place

Learning through youth and community engagement: moving forward by looking back and connecting to place

In a remote First Nation reserve in Northern Ontario, the community is undergoing rapid change due to mining development. This study will explore the nature of collaborative partnerships between community and school, examining relationships that support youth in successful school engagement and transitions in a changing social economic landscape. The study focuses on community driven learning that is relational, cultural, and place based, creating an ethical space and a natural decolonizing process in a colonizing world. Within overlapping borderland spaces of Indigenous and Western knowledge, constructive and collaborative dialogues of tension and resistance, and visionary possibilities are re- presented as a critical performative process and framed within post-colonial theory and critical pedagogy to explore notions of power and agency, positionality, multivocality, identity, history and place using a narrative participatory action research approach. Performative forms of textuality as lived experience, ecologically connected to the local culture and environment, constitute the primary and secondary data. This included art, storytelling, critical personal narratives, audio/visual recordings, conversations, unstructured interviews, student work and researcher's reflective field notes and journals. Participants include teachers, parents, students and community Knowledge Keepers. Emerging themes are examined for practices that are conducive to dynamic community partnerships, and reflective of learning communities in a process that is sustainable and generative to change. The findings include performance indicators that may contribute to positive transitions that underscore effective community partnerships and healthy school outcomes, and that from this study may have broader application to other Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities.

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