Pedagogy and Indigenous knowing and learning

Abstract

In 2021, UNESCO released their report on 'Reimagining our Futures Together: the New Social Contract for Education'.They opened the report by boldly stating:our world is at a turning point [. ..] but global disparities -and a pressing need to reimagine why, how, what, where and when we learn -mean that education is not yet fulfilling its promise to help us shape peaceful, just, and sustainable futures (UNESCO, 2021, p. 1).As we face a world in polycrisis, it is becoming increasingly clear that education practices and paradigms need to be rethought (see, for example, Ainley, 2016; Sutoris, 2022, Gough 2021).One key way with which to begin such re-imagining, and to critique contemporary knowledge frameworks and produce new ones, is through the description of the learning and teaching practices of Indigenous 1 communities across the globe.Through this work, asking fundamental questions about the nature of the world and our existence, including what it means to be a (morally upright) person in cross-cultural contexts, strongholds of anthropological enquiry, urge us to rethink not only how we do education (pedagogy) but what education is actually meant for (purpose and value), and to what extent it can liberate itself from the inertia of reproducing paradigms counterproductive to life's purpose.Education across the world is entangled in lifeworlds and onto-epistemologies which dialogue, to varying degrees, with the premises of advanced neoliberal global capitalism and the manifold global challenges we face.The contributions to this Special Issue combine anthropologically informed ethnographic fieldwork with anthropological and educational theory and practice, to illustrate otherwise peripheral non-western paradigms of teaching and learning.We consider holistic learning modalities that support expanded processes of human development.Many of these circulate around epistemologies that are supremely relational, focus on attention and presence rather than (knowledge) transmission (Ingold, 2001), and are unfinished, open-ended and emergent: an education that 'that always overshoots its objectives' (Ingold, 2017, p. 43, see also Lave & Gomes, 2019;