Indigenizing Environmental Education: Conceptualizing Curriculum that Fosters Educational Leadership

In this article, we review recent environmental reforms in Canadian systems of public education as examples of curriculum that continue to perpetuate a gap between environmental education and Indigenous Knowledges (IK) in a conceptualization of environmental educational learning. Indigenous environmental education can bring together two worldviews through an infusion of shared intergenerational knowledge through a merger of storytelling, curricular inquiry, and numerous other focal practices including creative writing. We consider how ecologically centered identities can become developed through a desire to foster healthy relationships with the places that we live as a necessary and critical means of enabling and restoring ecological function and integrity. We consider how students can deepen their understandings about intact-ecosystems over a course of time and in particular, how poetic writing can help them to develop a deeper understanding of place.