Learning Sciences Lunch and Learn with Dr. Nicole Barry “Living our Stories: Indigenous Storywork and Youth Resilience in the Face of Uncertain Climate Futures”
Connect with colleagues during this in-person presentation at the GSE (Room 124). Pizza will be provided! Can’t attend in person? Join us remotely via Zoom!
In this talk, I explore the power of Indigenous Storywork. This article follows a particular Indigenous story and examines the way that this story helped cultivate youth wellbeing and kinship relations between three Indigenous youth and a plant relative, Stinging Nettle, through nine years of participation in an Indigenous STEAM program. In this exploration, I foreground Indigenous Storywork (see, e.g., Archibald, 2008) and Construal Level Theory (see, e.g., Trope & Liberman, 2010), with special attention paid to Indigenous Axiologies (what we value morally or aesthetically), Ontologies (what we believe to be real and how we enact those beliefs), and Epistemologies (what and how we know) or Indigenous AOEs. Doing so, analysis reveals how stories give us a framework for understanding how to “walk in the world,” in the words of one participant that supports holistic wellbeing and kinship relations between human and more-than-human communities. This study shows how stories are consequential in our current era which is wrought with human-made environmental problems.
Suggested Reading:
- McDaid Barry, N., Bang, M., Bruce, F., & Barajas-López, F. (2023). “Then the Nettle People Won’t Be Lonely”: Recognizing the Personhood of Plants in an Indigenous STEAM Summer Program. Cognition and Instruction, 41(4), 381–404. https://doi.org/10.1080/07370008.2023.2220852
Dr. Nikki Barry is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Justice Education in the Department of Education at UCLA. She is a citizen of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes of Fort Hall, Idaho and is also of Paiute and Irish descent. Her work utilizes community-based design research to co-design learning environments that support Indigenous sovereignty and address issues of environmental justice. She also conducts psychological research about the cognition of human reasoning and decision-making regarding environmental issues. Nikki earned her PhD in Learning Sciences from Northwestern University, her MA in Teaching from Pacific University, and her BS in Sociology from Northeastern University. She is also a parent of three young children and a former middle and high school teacher.