Indigenous Education and the Ecology of Community

Abstract

This paper begins from the premise that indigenous community-based education can usefully learn from attempts to define and implement 'community education', even in settings far removed from the indigenous context. The first section shows how 'community education' has been developed on the basis of four fundamentally different concepts of community, all of which have some relevance to the challenges of indigenous education but are ultimately inadequate as a guide to practice. The second section shows how these flaws can be traced back to an overly simplistic model of community rooted in European history. A way of extending this model is proposed which is compatible with a more complex and dynamic 'ecology of community'. This idea is developed in greater detail in the third section, employing a model of 'cultural negotiation' developed by Canadian ethnographer Arlene Stairs, and incorporating many insights offered by Chickasaw educator Eber Hampton, as a means by which indigenous community-based education might proceed.