Embracing Epistemological Collisions as Sites of Critical Indigenous Pedagogy

ARTICLE, are three educators united by a shared commitment to supporting the self-determined educational goals of the Navajo Nation.In particular, we are committed to the education of Din (Navajo) youth.As one way of living out these shared commitments, we have been collaborating for three years.The principal aim of our current work is to build, implement, and assess a curriculum for which the overarching purpose is to promote positive character and identity development-as understood within a traditional Din perspective-among youth who attend the Navajo Nation's tribally controlled Pre-K-12 schools.Throughout this article, we refer to this effort as the "Din curriculum-building project," even as we understand that promoting Din character and identity development is much broader, more complex, and inextricably intertwined with other aspects of Din language and cultural knowledge than the phrase "character education" might initially imply.A complementary aim of our work is to enhance our own and other educators' professional learning through shared inquiry into our collaborative processes.The overarching question that guides our current inquiry is, "How can universities partner with Indigenous nations in support of their sovereignty and self-determination?"At present, we are responding to our shared question by collaborating on the Din curriculum-building project and by documenting our evolving processes for collaboration on this and other projects.By combining the Din curriculum-building project with shared inquiry, we seek simultaneously to (1) advance the Navajo Nation's educational goals, (2) learn how we can collaborate with increasing effectiveness in support of those goals, and, along the way, (3) generate in-depth understandings of how universities can W Todd K. L., & Robert V. ( 2018).Reviving the spirit by making the case for decolonial curricula.