Valerie Shirley and Jeremy Garcia to lead new AERA section for Indigenous teaching and teacher education

Earlier this month ITEP Directors Valerie Shirley and Jeremy Garcia were awarded the college’s Outstanding Faculty Service/Outreach Award for their dedication to Indigenous education. Part of their commitment has included advocating for a stronger research focus on Indigenous education within the American Educational Research Association Division K: Teaching and Teacher Education.

After three years of meeting with AERA Division K leadership and support from Indigenous scholars, Division K will add a new section that will be dedicated to Indigenous teaching and teacher education. The new section was formally introduced during the AERA 2021 Division K Paper and Symposium Session, "Indigenous Education: Teaching and Teacher Education as Decolonial Praxis."

The new section, which will launch in 2022, will engage not only a refusal and critique of the historical, social and political settler colonial structures, but also revitalize and sustain Indigeneity through Indigenous epistemologies, ontologies, relationality, responsibility, reverence and reciprocity. It will also advance the global context of Indigenous human and legal rights through the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, treaties and the sovereignty and self-determination movements of Indigenous Peoples.

Shirley and Garcia will lead the new section, which they say emerged with the support of several Indigenous scholars engaged in Indigenous teacher education. Special recognition includes Vice President of Division K Dr. Dorothea Anagnostopoulos and Indigenous scholars Dr. Jo-ann Archibald, Dr. Jan Hare, Dr. Michelle Jacob, Dr. Leilani Sabzalian, Dr. Danielle Lansing, and Dr. Filiberto Barajas-López.