The Swan Valley Cluster of schools for the Make It Count project identified the professional learning of teachers and teaching assistants as a key factor in improving numeracy outcomes for urban Indigenous children. Initial training for assistants began in late 2010 and took the form of workshops based on a modified First Steps in Mathematics…

Misrepresentation, appropriation, and denigrating Indigenous knowledge is still common practice in educational institutions despite efforts of critical educators to challenge these practices. One such challenge was to papier mache totem poles in an education institution's library in a faculty of education that houses teacher education programs. A…

Creativity, content, and policy have multiple relationships. Creativity and disciplinary content are inextricably linked. In dealing with creativity, the first education policy choice is whether to recognize and act on that fact. Care is needed in using the term "creativity" in advocacy contexts, lest the relationship between creativity and…

Background: Interest in and use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in the United States is increasing. However, CAM remains an area of nascency for researchers and western practitioners. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine U.S. health educators' attitudes toward CAM and their use of common CAM therapies. Methods: A…

With deeply rooted assumptions established as authoritative in both negative and positive views of California's first nations, it is unsurprising that what students are taught about them today focuses on how the peoples of different regions made use of the naturally-occurring resources available to them. The "History-Social Science Content…

The author has over the past several years been involved with Hawai'i's Kamehameha Schools on a project called the Hawaiian Cultural Influences in Education (HCIE) study. Kamehameha Schools was established to provide educational opportunities to improve the capability and well being of people of Hawaiian ancestry. In this paper the author…

The goal of implementing a culture-based curriculum that draws upon indigenous knowledge, traditions, and language is currently in competition with demands placed on schools by high stakes educational reform to implement a standards-based curriculum in schools. Though often left out of the policy conversation, Native teachers in particular have…

African Americans underuse counseling services because of factors such as cultural mistrust, stigma, and culturally incongruent treatment interventions. As a result, this population relies on informal healing networks. The foundations of these networks have been outlined within the professional literature. However, limited attention has been given…

The number of people in need of care, support and assistance from afflictions (natural and artificial) keeps expanding by the day. From a simple traditional based dislocation to a sophisticated "man induced" social problems of wars, refugees, drug addiction, homosexuality, HIV/AIDS pandemics etc, the society today (either developed or…

This essay--a combination of authorial narrative and scholarly critique--examines a grassroots organization's (Friends of Historic Northport) campaign to preserve a site in west Alabama where a pivotal Choctaw-Upper Creek battle took place in 1785. The organization has faced opposition from city planners and business leaders intent on developing…

Over-reliance on prescriptive pedagogies, such as explicit instruction, could hamper students with learning difficulties from sense-making and thus limit their acquisition of conceptual understanding. To help them in constructing mathematical knowledge, manipulative and drawing could be used to solve problems in a meaningful context. Using a case…

Scientific ecological knowledge (SEK) is a powerful discipline for diagnosing and analyzing environmental degradation, but has been far less successful in devising sustainable solutions which lie at the intersection of nature and culture. Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) of indigenous and local peoples is rich in prescriptions for the…

This article explores a project at the Koori Centre, University of Sydney, funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) in 2011, titled "Indigenous On-Line Cultural Teaching and Sharing". One of the team members (Kutay) was also a project team member on the ALTC-funded project "Exploring PBL in Indigenous Australian…

Indigenous scholars have debated the impact that researchers and the act of researching have on Native and Indigenous people and communities. Although literature on this subject has grown, little has been written explicitly laying out "the doing" of research with these communities. The authors seek to articulate their "doing"…

"Koladeras" are women who use call and response in impromptu songs that may contain proverbs, stories about the community, their life experiences, and who and what they see in their world from their own perspective. Via qualitative methods of (auto)ethnography, personal and life story narratives, and interviews, I look at how…