Re-Defining Academic Integrity: Embracing Indigenous Truths

Abstract

AbstractDespite historical and ongoing challenges, Canada has been making promising strides towards reconciliation prompted in large part by the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015). We honour our Indigenous Elders and Ancestors who have led social and educational movements that named and resisted the negative outcomes created and continued by a Canadian colonial history. The authors point to current institutional projects of decolonizing and Indigenizing the academy as holding the potential to re-define what academic integrity means. As a hopeful point of entry into how teaching and learning scholars might reconsider current conceptions of integrity, we see Indigenizing efforts across a number of Canadian universities as the basis from which to speak to a more inclusive and wholistic definition of academic integrity. The authors seek to problematize the current neoliberal and commercialized approaches to education where different forms of academic misconduct arise as inevitable outcomes. If education is viewed as the pursuit of truth, or more appropriately truths, then it is essential to nuance the scope of academic integrity to include Indigenous perspectives such as wholism and interconnectedness. In this chapter, we discuss these truths, challenging current conceptions, to propose a more inclusive definition of academic integrity by drawing upon Indigenous scholarship as well as dynamic forms of ancestral language to situate our work. In sum, sharing truths through the inclusion of Indigenous perspectives grounds the scholarly discussion in an equitable understanding of truth-telling as foundational to academic integrity.