Reviving Knowledges through Play and Resistance: The Case of Navajo Conceptions of Space

Authors

Daniel Ness, St. John's UniversityFollow
Richard D. Sawyer, Washington State University, VancouverFollow

Keywords

curriculum epistemicide, cognition, human development, spatial thinking, play, resistance, space and environment

Abstract

The authors explore a possible cause of epistemicidal predispositions of the dominant Eurocentric curricula. They posit that one way to determine a plausible contributing factor of this increasing devastation is to consider epistemicide through the lens of intellectual development. To do this, the authors examine parallel patterns of behavior in the domains of developmental and cognitive psychology. The authors then discuss an alternative framework to the Western conception of space within formal K-12 education by presenting the Navajo conception of space and play. Throughout the paper, the authors argue that all students—and especially those living in poverty in commercially constructed, large urban areas—deserve, and need, an educational framework that expands rather than constricts their schema of space and facilitates their agency to renew and regenerate their environment.

DOI

10.15760/nwjte.2022.17.3.14

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/38816

Recommended Citation

Ness, Daniel and Sawyer, Richard D. (2022) "Reviving Knowledges through Play and Resistance: The Case of Navajo Conceptions of Space," Northwest Journal of Teacher Education: Vol. 17 : Iss. 3 , Article 14.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15760/nwjte.2022.17.3.14