Small Steps, Big Impact Episode 3 | Indigenous Pedagogy

Our guest today is Dr. Laura Pipe, director of the Teaching Innovation Center here at UNCG. 

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She is also the faculty advisor for the Native American Student Association, also referred to as NASA. 

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Our conversation today focuses on the importance of indigenous pedagogy and the role of storytelling. 

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So, Laura, 

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Thanks for joining me today to talk about indigenous pedagogy and the role of storytelling and how that plays out in our classroom environments. 

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What I would like to get us started out on is really just what is indigenous pedagogy. 

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I think this is a term that many of our faculty and listeners may not be as familiar with as some other pedagogical terms. 

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So talk to us a little bit about what is indigenous pedagogy so that there is no simple answer for what is indigenous pedagogy, 

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because we’re talking about indigenous and native communities in a very global sense. 

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Right. And a lot of the literature that’s out there on indigenous pedagogy is either taking place in 

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places like Polynesia or Australia and certainly kind of out west here in the US and in Canada. 

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Right. And that’s where a lot of the scholarship around indigenous pedagogy is taking place. 

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And really the consistent message in that is that. 

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You need to think about what are the indigenous communities within your space and where you’re at, 

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and that has to be where you define what indigenous pedagogy is going to mean for you. 

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Right. 

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And so particularly here in our shop, we started with looking at indigenous pedagogy of the US and Canada because there’s a lot of literature there. 

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Canada in particular, has done quite a bit on indigenous studies in indigenous pedagogy and how those practices 

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of using and including indigenous knowledge and the learning space that occurs. 

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And the challenge reality of that when I started digging into that is that leaves 

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out a lot of conversations for what’s happening here in the southeast of the US. 

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And the reason why there’s not a lot of literature coming out of the East Coast on indigenous pedagogy is because of the way colonization happened. 

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Contact happened here first. It was very rapid, very brutal. It was brutal as you continued west. 

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But the nearness in history, right, the memories and the stories are still intact in some ways as you get further west. 

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And so as we started looking at indigenous pedagogy, there were some common components that we could see coming up. 

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But what we actually did is we engaged our students here in UNCG and said, what is this look like here in this space for your communities? 

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And the students really were amazing and actually took it on as a project, interviewing elders and community members, 

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family members, fellow students to really come up with a framework for what indigenous learning looked like here in this area. 

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But indigenous pedagogy, often it starts sometimes with what it’s not right. 

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It looks at what Western processes for learning are and where colonization has really kind of shaped what learning looks like, 

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what the learning structures are. Right. And so there’s a lot of things that happen kind of in Western modern academia that are very the 

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antithesis of many cultural values of a variety of native nations here in the US and Canada. 

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So when I when I spoke with the students, 

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they really what resonated with them was the the kind of characteristics of white supremacy that came out of Tema 

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Jon Okun who’s an alum here of UNCG she wrote that list several years ago. 

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There’s about 16 different characteristics and things like urgency, like a sense of urgency, 

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really stood out to them as things that don’t necessarily have a place or an understanding and cultural values. 

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Right. That the idea that we have to learn this right now in this space, 

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In this time frame it is not necessarily how indigenous cultures operate here in the United States and Canada. 

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Things like the belief in objectivity. Right. I mean, when we get into talking about storytelling, 

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storytelling is by nature an ambiguous space because you’re meant to gather 

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different things from different perspectives every time you hear the same story. 

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Right. And so this idea that subjectivity can’t be part of inquiry is very much outside of how indigenous communities operate. 

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A paternalistic approach to teaching is very much outside of how indigenous communities operate. 

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They operate very much in a reciprocal learning space. What we’re constantly in a learning together kind of approach. 

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And so a lot of those things come out in indigenous pedagogy. 

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And when you look at the literature, what’s left of us and Canada in general, there’s some of those natural pieces that come out of all of them. 

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But our students were able to articulate it here. 

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The other big piece of indigenous pedagogy that comes up regularly is space in place and how essential space is, because indigenous kids, 

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particularly here in the United States and Canada, are very much anchored and rooted by the space right in the place where they are. 

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And that that connection, not just to land, but to all of the parts of a place, are essential to being. So Laura, 

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You talk to you talked about students here at UNCG. 

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Can you give our listeners a little bit of an idea of what exactly the native or indigenous population looks like here at UNCG? 

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So first, let me preface it with saying that the way we quantify identity is we know is. 

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Right, we know that that’s challenging across several identities, but in indigenous communities in particular, 

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it’s very challenging because of the way, particularly here in the United States, the way the federal government approached it. 

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Their response to native communities, it was it was very clear policies of eradication and genocide, right. 

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We know that from the history of the boarding schools, we know that forced removals. 

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And so what that has meant is that it’s challenging sometimes to identify who’s native and who’s not native. 

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Right. And who gets to make that decision. And choice is very different than maybe it is for other communities, 

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because even things like blood quantum’s an enrollment list and those kind of things were set 

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down through US federal policy in order for tribes and nations to be recognized federally. 

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So it’s different for everyone. 

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And so the example I like to give folks is that my family is descended from the Tuscarora and it’s down my father’s side. 

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It’s a paternal line. But the Tuscarora being part of the Hudner Shoni, the Iroquois, their maternal lineage, their maternal lines. 

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And so I’m not enrolled and I’m not considered Tuscarora, but I’m also definitely descended from Tuscarora. 

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Right. Those those cultural aspects are still there. And so. 

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How we count and quantify who’s indigenous is problematic and challenging, so what that looks like, though, 

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here at UNCG is we create a lot of spaces where students can self-identify, but we also start with a formalized kind of list. 

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So every fall I get a list from student affairs of here are the students who have identified as either native or native descent. 

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And that’s generally right around 400 to 450 students. 

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From a faculty staff perspective, when you go in and look at our racial equity dashboard that’s in there, 

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you can see there’s no faculty or staff indicated in there as being indigenous or of indigenous descent. 

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Right. They’re not claiming it in our demographic data. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have faculty who are indigenous here. 

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It just means that they’re not claiming it in that data. And there you also have to remember, too, this is a long answer. 

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Sorry. We all come to our indigeneity, I think, at different points, because of the way those structures were set up. 

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I mean, the boarding schools, for example, the intention was to destroy these cultures. 

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Right. Destroy these communities and destroy the stories. 

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Right. And stories are essential to how we know who we are and claim who we are. 

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So we have kids coming out of these boarding schools who have no connection back to their community. 

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And so you have their descendants, you know, in the boarding schools that ran until the 1980s and 1990s. 

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Right. Their descendants trying to reconnect and find their place in indigeneity and so many of us are at different places. 

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Some of us grew up and very strong, centered indigenous homes. 

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Maybe we grew up on the reservation. Maybe we grew up in urban settings. Right. 

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Some of us grew up with no connection to those communities and are now trying to find them others up, 

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you know, with grandparents to us telling stories. And those stories are what’s foundational. 

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So it’s a difficult moving target to quantify, but to quantify it, the numbers are right around 400 to 450 in the student population. 

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But likely you have many more in present, on campus. 

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Yeah, and I think it’s important to to also note that there I cannot remember the exact number, but there’s there’s, 

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I think over 500 different federally recognized tribal nations and that seems like a huge number. 

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I think sometimes we gravitate towards the Hollywood-ized versions of tribal nations. 

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So, you know, like the Cherokee, the Apache and everything that we see through this kind of media. 

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And I think we would do well to kind of remember there’s a lot more to tribal nations than just the Hollywood versions of it. 

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And, you know, having over 500 federally recognized tribal nations just within the U.S., 

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I think is is something that we need to kind of keep in mind as we’re talking about, 

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you know, indigenous pedagogy, the influence of Native Americans, indigenous peoples across the world. 

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Right. 

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And the other piece of that, Brad, is you have US federally recognized tribes and nations and then you have state recognized tribes and nations. 

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Right. So here in North Carolina, we only have one federally recognized tribe or nation. 

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And that’s the Eastern Cherokee. Right. But we have eight state recognized nations and tribes. 

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And then there are also many others who are not recognized. Still, like the Tuscarora, our history actually starts here in North Carolina. 

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The British were encroaching so rapidly and depending on who tells you the story. 

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So if you hear from Eastern Cherokee, it’s one version. Hear it from some Tuscarora, it’s another. 

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But the least Eastern Cherokee were working with the British to sell many Tuscarora into slavery. 

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And so the Tuscarora were invited north by the Seneca to join the Haudenosaunee. 

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Right. So the Iroquois. And so they did. But there was still a remnant that stayed here and was recognized while they were here. 

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But then at some point, the US federal government said, if you want to be recognized, you have to move north with the rest of the tribe. 

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And so there is there is still a band here that live here and have been actively 

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seeking recognition both at the state and the federal level and haven’t received it. 

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So you’re actually talking about thousands of nations. 

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Yeah, I don’t know that North Carolina is home to the Lumbee Tribal Nation, 

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who I believe is the largest tribe east of the Mississippi and the largest tribe. 

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And they’re kind of concentrated just in one area, almost all of North Carolina, and that’s down in the Lumberton area. 

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So, yeah, I think I think it’s just fascinating that we we sometimes don’t realize the magnitude 

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or the scope that tribal nations actually occupy within not only our history, 

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but also our land. 

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The other piece of what you said, though, that I think is really important, I don’t want to forget is this concept of the imagined Indian. 

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And there are several authors that talk about that. Thomas King is the one that I’ve been working with reading most recently. 

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And actually this semester we have a literary circle reading his truth about stories. 

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And so Chapter two, which many of us just finished, is called Not the Indian I. 

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was looking for. Right. And so he talks about this imagined Indian that we have developed in our mind as a community. 

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Right. That’s both kind of savage and romanticized. And this idea that we all have to perform to that imagined Indian in order to be recognized. 

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Right. And so that’s the other piece of this thing that is so important. So looking at me, I’m white and white coated. 

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You would not know of my family’s heritage and background unless I told you versus other people. 

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Do you know, I typify what we would consider that imagined space or what folks would assume is an Indian complexion or a native complexion. 

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And so that’s the other piece of this is really having folks check your own perception 

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of what you think indigenous looks like and what you think indigenous should be. 

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Because the other part, when I talk to the students, we we’ve done VOISES, as you know, 

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for several years and both times that we did it with native and indigenous students. 

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The invisibility they feel is heavy. 

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Right. They feel not only unseen, but they feel every time being native is being talked about, it’s being talked about as if they’re extinct. 

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So if they’re extinct and they don’t necessarily look like what we think they should look like, then they are so invisible. 

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Right. And so that’s the other piece, you might have students in your courses who are indigenous, 

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who you wouldn’t be able to tell by looking at them, and it might not even come out in their writing or conversations. 

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But, you know, eighteen to twenty four is when you’re struggling with your identity. 

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In many ways you’re trying to figure out. I always joke, right. 

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I’m trying to figure out do I like this toilet paper because I like this toilet paper or because it’s what my mom always thought. 

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Right. And I’m struggling with that. And then that’s amplified in every other way. 

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Right. And every other identity you can think of. 

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And so students are carrying that weight with them when they walk into your classroom. 

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And that can be a real struggle. So it’s so essential how we look at our own teaching and inclusive ways because our students are watching. 

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They’re trying to figure out who they are and they’re watching us. 

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And even the smallest thing we can send. Right that and saying, you know, indigenous communities happened way back when they no longer exist, 

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could send a student into a whole different headspace of whether or not they exist. 

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Right. So I think at the year you’ve segued into something that that I want to touch bases on. 

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So how should our faculty and I’ll even expand it to the kind of staff members and community in general, 

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how should we better support our native and indigenous students, you know, especially within the classroom environment? 

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Because sometimes classroom environments are pretty structured and, you know, there is a power dynamic that exists in everything. 

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And so our students may not feel comfortable, as you kind of talked about, 

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disclosing maybe that part of our idea of that of students may not feel comfortable disclosing that aspect or part of their identity. 

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And that could really be determined by kind of how the the the instructor kind of facilitates that classroom environment. 

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So what would you say are some things that that we as a community, but probably more specifically faculty members, 

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should take into account when working with our students around the indigeneity and and Native American populations. 

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So the first part of that is we’re here. We exist and we don’t just exist one month a year in November, 

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we exist 365 days a year and we’re present and we’re still thriving communities and nations. 

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So that’s the first piece. 

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And so what I talk with students, it’s very much the same thing we hear from students who are transitioning when we talk about pronouns. 

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Right. That that when a faculty member puts their pronouns on the syllabus and mentions that in class, 

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it gives me a signal that you’re at least open to having some conversations, right. 

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You’re open to certain communication. You might not be perfect at it, but you’re at least open to that space. 

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And the same thing happens for land acknowledgments, right? When a land acknowledgment is on your syllabus or you start your class with that. 

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And for those who don’t know you and sits on the land of the Catawba, Keyauwee and Saura nations, 

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when we don’t acknowledge those pieces, students don’t see themselves. 

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But when you start your class that way, you do a couple of different things. 

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One, you acknowledge the students who are indigenous. 

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That space and place are so essential to their being, right? 

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I mean, these are our ancestors. These are our futures, right? 

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We’re attached to the space and so many ways you’re doing that first, but you’re also acknowledging that you’re sitting on someone else’s land. 

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So one of our student leaders who is phenomenal and many folks know her quite well, 

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she had said it best when she said you’re raising your kids in someone else’s living room. 

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Right. So when you do a land acknowledgment, you’re acknowledging that. 

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But then you’re also opening that door and saying, I want that conversation to happen. 

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I want to create space for that conversation. If there’s moments that this needs to be there, I want you to know that I have created that space. 

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Right, just like with pronouns and how essential that is to students being able to say, OK, 

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I might not be one hundred percent comfortable in this classroom, but I also know that doors open with that faculty member. 

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Right. That I could have that conversation with that faculty member with some expectations of what that would look like. 

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Right. And so that’s one of the big pieces, the other piece is, you know, 

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on the front page of this podcast, there’s information about interrogating your discipline. 

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And I strongly encourage everyone to do that. Look at who’s in your cannon and who’s not. 

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So much of what we have as a society stems from indigenous histories and cultures and communities and structures. 

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And we don’t even acknowledge that. You know, I had a meeting with students last night and they were talking about the foods we eat. 

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Well, the foods that many of us eat are indigenous at their root, but we don’t even know it. 

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And so really spending that time to think about what are the concepts you’re teaching and follow 

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them back to the root and maybe your traditional canon isn’t really getting at the whole story. 

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And so making sure you’re having representation is so essential. 

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And to what you’re reading, what you’re discussing and how you address things, 

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ensuring that you’re not talking about indigenous communities as if they only exist in the past, 

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it mean the minute you do that, our students just shut down. 

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Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree with that and we can really see the intersectionality that can really happen. 

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So you mentioned like native indigenous students who may be transitioning. 

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And so we’re really layering kind of one marginalized identity on top of another. 

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And, you know, for for one individual to hold those, you know, 

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identities and to constantly feel like they’re being marginalized or othered, you know, is a lot to. 

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The deal with especially if you’re, you know, a young college student, so Laura, 

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I want to kind of talk about what are some takeaways that we can provide our listeners. 

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And I know that, you know, given the the the structure or the philosophy or background of indigenous pedagogy, 

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that it may not lend itself to a nice little checklist that, 

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you know, so many of us, I think, kind of look for when we’re talking about this, how can I be how can I be more knowledgeable? 

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How can I be a better person? Give me a checklist of things to do so I know what exactly to do. 

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What does that look like in perspective with indigenous pedagogy? 

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I’ll start this with a story, a kind of so we did an indigenous pedagogy workshop last fall. 

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It was led by the students. They got an undergraduate research grant to do all that work and they did phenomenal. 

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And they got all this great feedback from the participants. I mean, participants were floored and had an amazing time. 

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But the one kernel that they got was somebody who said that I really needed those takeaways. 

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I needed that list. And the students were just floored because they were like that. 

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Were you there for any of the workshop? That’s not how we operate. 

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And it was like we didn’t explicitly explain that we don’t operate in that way. 

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Right. We operate in a lot of ambiguity. And so, you know, an example of that is often through the role of how important storytelling is. 

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I could tell you the creator’s game story, right? 

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How the creator’s game lacrosse came into existence. And there’s two different stories that are typically accepted. 

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I grew up hearing about it as a game between the animals of the air and the animals of the land. 

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Right. But every time I get told that story, I pick something else out that I didn’t see the time before because I’m in a different place. 

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Right. And every person who tells that story, it changes slightly. 

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Right. Of because the person who’s telling it had something significant that they wanted to come out of that story. 

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And so these stories are meant to be ambiguous and they’re meant for you to develop your own individual kind of learning path. 

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Right. That’s that’s kind of the piece to think through is indigenous practice is a lot about trusting the learner, 

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trusting the learner to to unpack those pieces, to find those pieces. 

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And so when I teach in my undergraduate courses at a student point this out and in my indigenous students always got it right away, 

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many other students would pick it up. But I was constantly telling them, particularly when we worked with, like theoretical things, 

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like I would teach sports sociology and we’d be talking about the sociological imagination. 

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And I’d be like, I need you to like play with it, massage it, pull it apart with your hands, 

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like, really start to play it and like, pull it in, pull it in and see where it lands. 

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And then where it comes out is where we’ll start. And that’s that space of observation, wrestle, reflection. 

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Right. And so growing up, that’s how my dad always operated. 

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Right. I would observe him doing something and then I was expected to go off and wrestle with it. 

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And then come back and we would talk about it and then I’d go back and wrestle with it some more, 

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and every time I would gain something different because there was a different purpose even for the same action or the same story. 

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And so that’s very different than how we think in Western culture and Western culture. 

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We put the onus on the teacher. Right. You’re the one accountable to make sure it’s a very clear line. 

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This is how they’re going to learn it in indigenous communities. 

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There’s a lot more of reciprocal trust because you do. I always think of Kathy Jamison was my faculty advisor when I was going through my PhD. 

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And many folks probably remember her. She was in kinesiology and she’s phenomenal. 

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And I always used to laugh when she would give us an assignment. It was so ambiguous. 

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You’d be like, I don’t even know, like if I’m giving you anything that you want. 

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And so one day I think one of us said that to her and she said that was never the purpose of the assignment. 

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The purpose of the assignment was not for you to give me what I want. It was for you to show me where you needed to go with this, right? 

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Yes. It was like, I don’t want to stifle you from really some beautiful places. 

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You could go write your creativity or your interest, your inquiry, your intellectual weight and rigor could take this in so many directions. 

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I don’t want you to give me what I want. I want you to give me what you’re learning. 

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And that, to me, really spoke to how I was raised. 

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Right. I never knew exactly what outcome my dad wanted. 

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And so it was always like, you know, a different thing. That’s part of that wrestling and coming back process that happens. 

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And and so, yeah, I guess the takeaway is. 

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We all need to trust our students a little bit more. 

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We all need to trust that they’re coming to this space with their own capitals, with their own knowledge, 

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is with their own histories, their own stories, things that really could add value to our learning environment. 

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And when we’re constantly thinking that we have to have a certain looking product work product. 

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Right. Not outcome, but a work product that looks a certain way, 

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we dismiss all of those pieces that they bring with them that could be such rich components of how our learning environment shapes for all of us. 

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Right. We’re a community of learners in that space. And so that would be one of the pieces I would ask folks to think about. 

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And probably the other is this idea of checking your colonized self at the door. 

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Right. We talk a lot in equity work about the personal work that has to happen. 

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And particularly if you’re white and white coated, there’s so much personal work you need to be doing. 

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You need to be investigating your biases. 

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You need to be interrogating your own beliefs on a regular basis, like why you choose to do certain things you need to be reading. 

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You need to be looking at a lot of literature and stories that are out there. 

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You need to put yourself in spaces where you can learn about other cultures and other communities. 

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You need to be doing that work and that has to happen in our teaching. 

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Right. We have to continuously be in a space of reflecting and interrogating why we teach the way we teach. 

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And is that really the most beneficial way of getting our all of our students, 

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not just the students who excel in our structured way of thinking, but all of our students to the place where they need to go learning wise? 

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And so, yeah, those are probably my biggest two. 

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But you’ve got to be OK sitting in on the ambiguity, right? You’ve got to be OK meeting your students in that messy wrestling space. 

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You’ve got to give your students the opportunity to wrestle with some things and students are going to resist it. 

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Right. You’re indigenous students most likely won’t, because that’s a very comfortable space to them. 

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Right. That they they’re they’re comfortable oftentimes with the ambiguity of the learning process in a way that other students are not, 

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but constantly re engaging with them about this. 

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This is why we’re doing this. This is why we’re wrestling with it. This is really what I want you to know at the end. 

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Right. 

29:45 

There is an end, but we’re working towards it together and we’re doing it in these kind of really fluid ways that allow them to bring them home, 

29:46 

set their whole selves. Yeah, I love that example that you use because I’ve had conversations with my students about some assignments because I hear, 

29:54 

OK, I don’t really know what you’re asking about. Can you just, you know, can you give me the checklist? 

30:03 

And, you know, similar to what you were talking about with Kathy Jamison, my responses. 

30:08 

But the point is not for me to tell you how I think it should look. 

30:14 

The point is for you to kind of dive into that creative process to make it authentically your representation of it. 

30:19 

I’m not you know, I know I know what I think it should look like. 

30:29 

I’m interested in what you feel like it should look like from your perspective, because you’re going to see it differently than what I do. 

30:33 

And so, you know, I think that’s a great point, because even today, I think we’re still so attached to that. 

30:41 

Give me the guidelines. Give me the structure. 

30:49 

And living in that ambiguity is still an uncomfortable place for some people, especially some of our students. 

30:51 

When I talk to our native students, many of them are STEM majors. 

31:00 

And so they talk about like, you know, they understand there’s certain things that are finite that they have to memorize and learn. 

31:04 

Right. You got to know the bones of the body if you’re going to take anatomy and physiology. 

31:09 

Right. But at the same time. There’s this this tension of like the urgency of it, 

31:14 

like like how traditional classrooms often think about while I read the book 

31:22 

and now we’ve talked about the book and indigenous students will tell you. 

31:29 

But that’s not that’s not learning because I could have just read the book. 

31:33 

Right. I’ve come for the second half. Right. 

31:37 

I’ve come for that deeper space. I’ve come for that place of wrestling in the classroom because I. 

31:40 

I can read the book. Right. If you’re just going to talk about the book again, when I come to the classroom, then we’ve not done any of the wrestling. 

31:46 

Right. And the faculty member is essentially sitting in a role as a sort of an elder. 

31:55 

Right. They’re meant to be the guide. They’re meant to be the person to ask you challenging questions, to let you go deeper, 

31:59 

to tear things apart and really see where they settle for you because they’re going to settle differently for every student. 

32:05 

And that has to be OK. 

32:12 

And so that’s the piece of it that I think when I read all that, I’m by no means an expert in indigenous pedagogy. 

32:14 

I am not that I learn so many things every day. 

32:24 

I’m more curious. Indigenous person trying to figure out my place in indigeneity and what that means for how I teach right. 

32:27 

I’m a curious, reflective indigenous teacher, but everything I read about indigenous pedagogy, 

32:35 

it always comes back to those spaces where we have to trust our students. 

32:44 

We have to trust their learning spirit. We have to trust their curiosity. 

32:50 

And that’s going to lead us. And it’s OK if it leads us in different places and it’s OK if they walk out with new questions. 

32:55 

Right. It really gets back to the heart of how the real true love of learning that many of us got into education for. 

33:02 

The other piece is when you look at all of these parts of indigenous pedagogy, 

33:13 

it’s all of the best practices that we leave act like we’ve created in the last couple of years. 

33:18 

Collaborative learning, applied learning, integrated learning, culturally responsive learning. 

33:24 

Indigenous learning has always been all of those things at once. Right. 

33:29 

And we act like we got to siloed them out. I’m a collaborative learning, like that’s my area of expertise. 

33:33 

And they’re like those things shouldn’t be separate. A good learning environment, 

33:40 

houses all of these really amazing pieces that allow the learner to really develop a pathway that triggers that curiosity, 

33:44 

engages that curiosity, and then lets them see how the learning process is actually applicable to every part of who they are. 

33:53 

Right. And so those pieces are so essential to our indigenous students. 

34:01 

And so when I talk to our indigenous students, a lot of times those are the things that they really struggle with because they’re like, 

34:08 

I don’t only don’t see myself in the curriculum in those very physical ways. 

34:13 

Right. You’re not talking about me or you’re talking about me as if I don’t exist and I’m sitting here going, but I’m here and I exist. 

34:18 

But also they don’t see themselves in the structures we put forth. 

34:24 

And so, you know, I’ve talked with a number of students when we started to do this indigenous pedagogy project, 

34:30 

two of them in particular have been so essential to me, 

34:36 

figuring out who I am as an indigenous teacher, like there’s pieces that were constantly happening. 

34:39 

But I didn’t have the vocabulary or the understanding of why. I just knew that that was what I did and made me a good teacher. 

34:44 

And so we always talk about how I came at my indigeneity from one direction, 

34:51 

and they came at it from really feeling as though they had to leave their indigenous selves at the door. 

34:56 

If they didn’t, they couldn’t survive in these spaces. 

35:02 

And so they’re now at a space where they’re starting to reclaim their indigenous identity in their classroom 

35:06 

spaces in a way that they never thought they would be allowed to do because they’re able to articulate. 

35:12 

This is what’s happening, and this is why that doesn’t work for me, right, 

35:18 

when you only talk about things in these very clinical ways, here’s what I’m missing, right? 

35:23 

Here’s the relationship that I’m missing to the story, to the context, to the reason why I’m here learning it. 

35:30 

And they are indigenous students. 

35:37 

When I talk to them, they want to go so much deeper and they often can’t because of the way we’ve structured things. 

35:39 

They’re like, I’m all able to do this and this unit because that’s all you’re willing to let me do. 

35:46 

And I have all of these questions right. 

35:50 

So well. So thank you. Thank you for joining me today. 

35:54 

I know I personally have learned a lot. I even kind of discovered that I do a little bit of indigenous pedagogical practice in 

35:58 

the classroom that I before this talk would would not have even been classified as, 

36:07 

you know, indigenous pedagogy. 

36:12 

So I’m personally appreciative for that learning opportunity and experience that I’ve been able to share with you. 

36:14 

And thank you again for speaking with us on our indigenous populations here at UNCG. 

36:21 

Thanks. Thank you for having me. 

36:28 

Thank you for joining us today on small steps, big impact, 

36:37 

Our goal is to have continuous conversations about equity, diversity and inclusion in our classrooms. 

36:43 

To learn more about EDI, please go to our website at Go.UNCG.edu/Small Steps, Big impact. 

36:49 

Feel free to leave us suggestions for future topics and resources or join me on the episode for a conversation.