Linguistics and Education | 2019
Disjuncture, modality, and institutional repertoire: (De)colonizing discourses at a tribal school.
Abstract
Abstract The complicated ideological terrain of a tribal school 1 wrestles with aims of self-determination, academic success, and the legacy of settler colonial violence and theft through institutionalized schooling. One effect of these challenges is the ‘two-worlds’ approach to education for Indigenous students that categorizes linguistic and social practices as either ‘Indigenous’ or ‘modern’ ( Lee, 2007 , Wilson and Kamanā, 2009 ). Though this approach has long been recognized as problematic, it persists in Indigenous schooling contexts. This study employs a critical multimodal social semiotic ( Kress, 2011a , Kress, 2011b ) approach to language and sign to examine how school and community members invoke, reject, and reimagine ideologies from disparate cultural sources within a single event: one Ojibwe tribal school s kindergarten graduation ceremony. Contextualized with data from a larger ethnographic project, I extend Meek s (2011) work with disjunctures to call attention to the ‘institutional repertoires’ that shape the teaching and learning therein across multiple modes.