Pedagogy and Culture

Abstract

Abstract Since the founding of the American Educational Research Association in 1916, the field of education—schooling, curricula, teaching, and learning—has been supported by a well-funded and scientifically based effort to document and analyze practice and theory. These ideas were exported around the globe via the replication of Western-style schools using pedagogy from the same source (institutionalized public basic schooling). The success or failure of that effort to transform Indigenous communities is not our prime concern. Rather, it is to argue for the belated study and analysis of the Indigenous pedagogy practiced in communities before the Western model became the norm. This study is buttressed by the very catholic nature of the data corpus ranging from classic fiction (Dickens in this case) to highly focused quantitative studies of the physical skills required of a successful bow hunter. The work draws primarily on work in anthropology, archaeology, history, and cultural psychology, and thereby relies on open lines of communication among subdisciplines that are not as integrated as they might be. This multidisciplinary approach yields insights not accessible to more narrowly focused scholars or interested laypersons. The book’s primary aim is to weave these strands of evidence into a model or models of pedagogy that are distinctly different than the model or models found today in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) society.