Lessons of Indigeneity: Intergenerational Learning between Native American Parents and Their Children

Timothy San Pedro

This research project titled “Lessons of Indigeneity: Intergenerational Learning between Native American Mothers’ and Their Children” seeks to discover the ways Indigeneity is shared within and beyond the home and how such lessons may provide insight into the resiliency, survival, and academic achievement in schools. It actively challenges scholarship focusing on parental involvement since much of the work misses the multiple ways Indigenous (and nondominant) parents “…participate in their children’s education because they do not correspond to normative understandings of parental involvement in schools” (Bauedano-López, Alexander, Hernandez, 2013, p. 149). This work seeks to offer critical Indigenous frameworks to examine “parental involvement” in ways that forward cultural processes, which recenter mothers as educators, cultural brokers, and storytellers. In addition, it focuses upon what Indigenous Knowledges are shared, how they are taught and learned, and why children and their mothers feel it necessary to engage in such learning.

About Timothy San Pedro

Timothy San Pedro is an Assistant Professor of Multicultural and Equity Studies in Education at Ohio State University. His scholarship focuses on the intricate link between motivation, engagement, and identity construction to curricula and pedagogical practices that re-center content and conversations upon Indigenous histories, knowledges, and literacies. Recent companion article publications in Equity and Excellence in Education and Research in the Teaching of English focus on Native youth silences as agentive forms of survivance. His latest article, co-authored with Dean Valerie Kinloch, appeared in the American Educational Research Journal’s Centennial issue and argues for a move toward Projects in Humanization, which seek to center stories and the development of dialogic relationships within research. He serves as the chair of the Standing Committee on Research for the National Council of Teachers of English and is a member of the Literacy Research Association’s Ethic Committee. San Pedro is an inaugural Gates Millennium Scholar, Cultivating New Voices Among Scholars of Color Fellow, a Ford Fellow, a Concha Delgado Gaitan Council of Anthropology in Education Presidential Fellow, and, most recently, a Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow.