Storywork Across the Landscapes of Home and School: Towards Indigenous Futures in Thailand

Abstract

Placed in an urban Indigenous school in northern Thailand, this dissertation makes visible ways that educators, young people, and their families collaboratively designed to expand possible Indigenous futures as a school. In a three-year participatory design research (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016), I explore how Tutoría, a pedagogy from Mexico that was initially introduced to disrupt dominant relations of power and expertise among teachers and students, evolved and expanded to include families’ land-based knowledge system, and their generative navigations across schools and home. Focused on the case of Sahasat school, I examine how teachers in particular, shifted how they re-imagined the politic and purposes of school through living out ethically different teaching and learning relationships with students, families, lands and each other. In Article 1, I examine the stories of teachers as they design with Tutoría (Cámara, Castillo Macías, de Ávilar Aguilar, et al., 2018; Rincón-Gallardo & Elmore, 2012). The Tutoría dialogue, practice, and system of learning intervenes in powered hierarchies in school and is a kind of participatory design that reaches for conviviality; that is, conditions of learning where individual freedoms are maximized through radical interdependence for the renewal of local communities’ lifeways and environments (Escobar, 2018; Illich, 1973). I find that through storywork (Archibald, 2008), teachers made sense of their roles and responsibilities to state-directives, young people, families, and tribes in increasingly heterogeneous ways that mattered for collective sense-making and social dreaming at school (Espinoza, 2008). Article 2, brings us to the landscapes and stories of two young people’s homelands, a Hmong and a Lanna Thai family. Through walking and storying lands with families (Bang et al., 2014; Marin & Bang, 2018), I illustrate how mathematics from within Indigenous contexts is often grounded in families’ axiologies in land – the ways that they come to know who they are and how to be in the world. Finally, in Article 3, I focus the analysis on unfolding dialogues between six teacher-student pairs, where young people were tutors to the adults-learners on an important practice from their homelands. I use social poetics as a framework to examine how moment-to-moment interactions can expand or foreclose emplaced possibilities for ethical and political shifts at school (Shotter, 2010). Sahasat’s case generates learning theory on how participatory designs and processes of partnership shift over time because of distinct subject-subject-object relations, and the importance of stories and land within that. It illuminates potential pathways of school-based work and teacher education towards Indigenous futures. It also adds to current literature by illustrating the ways self-identified Indigenous people in Asia are continually building and advancing movements for self-determination that are deeply relational, responsive, and responsible to lands and each other.