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Abstract
This article reports on research examining the social purposes of Indigenous kindergarten children’s language and their construction of Indigenous cultural knowledge within and through interactions with peers during dramatic play and play with construction materials. The participants are three teachers and 29 children from two rural northern Canadian Indigenous communities that are accessible only by plane and winter roads. Data sources are video-recordings of the children’s play interactions taken over 4 months and their teachers’ perceptions of the Indigenous knowledge that the children construct in their play. Unlike results of many standardized oral language assessments indicating deficits in Indigenous children’s language, our results showed that children used language for a wide range of purposes; a range that corresponds with results of previous studies of nonindigenous children’s play interactions. Participating Indigenous children most often used language for learning and language for imagining in their play. Their teachers were heartened to see that their students, most frequently the girls, also used language for disagreeing and asserting themselves. Teachers felt that children were constructing powerful cultural identities that would contribute to positive change, if they could use language in these ways outside their Indigenous communities, as well. Participating children took up Indigenous cultural meanings in their play, such as relationships with the land and among family members. In some cases, they created hybrid narratives, bringing together elements of popular culture as well as traditional Indigenous land-based activities, such as fishing and hunting, into their play interactions.
The contributions of oral language to literacy and learning are recognized in research conducted across decades (Barnes, 1992/1975; Boyd & Galda, 2011; Cazden, 2001/1988; Mercer & Littleton, 2007). Many of these same studies, however, show that typical classroom interactions provide limited opportunities for children to talk for a wide range of purposes, as the teacher often positions children as receivers of information (Alexander, 2000; Barnes, 1992/1975; Cazden, 2001/1988). These kinds of interactions are part of “the silent curriculum of Eurocentric knowledge transmission and instructional pedagogy” that have led to Indigenous linguistic and cultural loss and the destruction of Indigenous peoples’ self-esteem and cultural pride (Battiste, 2008, p. 89).Not only do Indigenous children have little opportunity for self-expression in such environments, the content of the curriculum developed outside the children’s communities offers “a fragmented, negative and distorted picture of Indigenous peoples in history,…characteriz[ing] Indigenous Knowledge as primitive, backward, or superstitious,…causing Indigenous peoples to be viewed as deficient” (Battiste, 2008, p. 86).
Our research, taking place in fly-in northern Canadian Indigenous communities accessible only by plane or winter roads created when the lakes freeze over, aims to disrupt these “discourses of disadvantage and exclusion derived from the structural violence of systemic racism” (Darlaston-Jones et al., 2014, p. 89). We used collaborative action research methods that are underpinned by the four R’s of Indigenous research: respect, relevance, reciprocity, and responsibility (Kirkness & Bernhardt, 1991), to examine young Indigenous children’s language in play contexts. Together with two Indigenous teachers and one nonindigenous teacher, we take up questions about creating spaces for children to construct Indigenous cultural meanings in classrooms.
We propose that dramatic and construction play contexts align with the generative curriculum model (Ball & Pence, 2006) for developing early childhood curriculum in Indigenous communities. Children’s collaborative construction of knowledge and the flexibility and openness to change that is central to the generative curriculum model are characteristics of dramatic and construction play. When creating dramatic play contexts and when contributing to the ongoing play narrative, children draw from experiences and background knowledge, which may include mainstream elements such as popular culture characters and plots, together with cultural teachings from their extended family and community members. It is important for Indigenous children to draw from their individual lived experiences, as Indigenous ways of being and doing have been marginalized for centuries in assimilationist educational policies (Battiste, 2008). Our research was guided by two questions:
How do Indigenous girls and boys in kindergarten classes use language in their dramatic play and in their play with construction materials?
Drawing on participating teachers’ perspectives and stories and on Indigenous Knowledge writings of Canadian Indigenous scholars (Battiste, 2008; Styres & Zinga, 2013), what Indigenous cultural meanings are evident in participating children’s play interactions?
Our research contributes to conversations about classroom practices that provide space for children’s talk as well as ways to support Indigenous children’s construction of meanings that draw from Indigenous knowledge and cultural practices. We hope that the approaches developed from our research may inform future research and practice aiming to address persistent disparities that exist between Indigenous and nonindigenous children’s achievement on large-scale literacy tests and in their overall academic success (Ball, 2007; Gunn, Pomahac, Good Striker, & Tailfeathers, 2011; Statistics Canada, 2013; White, Maxim, & Spence, 2004). These disparities are also found in the United States, where Grade 4 children, identified as American Indian or Alaska Native, scored 19 points lower on average in reading than their nonindigenous counterparts in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (National Center for Education Statistics, 2012). We eschew these deficit-oriented perspectives of Indigenous children’s literacy and language and instead foreground the rich ways in which the children use language and their construction of Indigenous cultural meanings.
Theoretical Framework and Literature Review
Informed by sociolinguistic theory, we view language and literacy as symbolic representations of social systems: socially constructed and culturally bound (Halliday, 1975; Vygotsky, 1978). Children learn, in their interactions with others, how to use language to accomplish specific personal and social purposes (Halliday, 1969, 1975) and they select from the available discourses (e.g., culturally recognized social roles, ways of interacting, relationships, perspectives, and meanings that construct realities) to construct cultural identities (Gee, 1996; Ivanic, 1998). Using this theoretical lens, we focus on what children are able to do with language while participating in a wide range of social and cultural practices (Comber & Nichols, 2004; Yoon, 2015), rather than on evaluating characteristic features of Indigenous English dialect in terms of features of Standard English, a practice that has led to a deficit view of Indigenous children’s language (Ball & Lewis, 2006).
Indigenous Knowledge
We recognize that Indigenous communities across Canada and the United States vary widely in their cultural expressions and caution that our research synthesis and the findings of our study not be taken as universal descriptions across all Indigenous communities. Our research, carried out in Indigenous communities in collaboration with community members, takes into account the values and perspectives of each community as might be enacted in the children’s play. The following synthesis of Indigenous educators’ and researchers’ scholarship is intended to contextualize our description of Indigenous children’s enactment of Indigenous cultural meanings with the recognition that our findings should not be generalized to all Indigenous nations.
Battiste (2008) explained that Indigenous Knowledge “provides a positive approach to dealing with self-doubt and low self-esteem among Indigenous populations and a balanced perspective of the sociohistoric reality in which we all live” (p. 87). In many Indigenous communities, traditional approaches to teaching and learning center on the construction of meaning through relationships to holistic frameworks or contexts (Hilberg & Tharp, 2002; Rasmussen, Baydala, & Sherman, 2004). Understanding comes through reflection, ongoing observation, and collaboration (Toulouse, 2008), as community members learn how to carry out activities in traditional ways and symbolize ways of being and interacting with others, the land, and all creation (Styres & Zinga, 2013).
Consistent with Indigenous Knowledge and ways of teaching, in this literature review, we included teachings from our collaboration with Indigenous teachers, who tell stories of going out on the land with immediate and extended family members to hunt and pick berries and of listening to parents’ and grandparents’ stories of their childhoods. They also talk of respect for the fire as a teaching and of the centrality of the Seven Grandfather Teachings to Anishnaabe ways of teaching and learning (Benton-Banai, 1988). Laura Horton, an Anishnaabe teacher educator and collaborator with our project, summarized important themes from the Seven Grandfather Teachings: “It is however the journey that holds the wealth of knowledge. It is the journey in which we are opened to wisdom, love, respect, bravery, honesty, humility and truth” (Peterson, Horton, & Restoule, 2016, p. 24).
Previous Classifications of Children’s Play Interactions
The substantive body of research examining free-play and dramatic play interactions has been conducted across decades and international borders. This research has examined power relationships among peers (e.g., Corsaro, 1986; Löfdahl, 2014), types of talk that promote vocabulary and literacy development (e.g., Dickinson, 2009), use of argumentative and narrative discourse elements (e.g., Nicolopoulou, 1996; Zadunaisky Ehrlich & Blum-Kulka, 2014), and functions of language in young children’s play (e.g., Corsaro, 1986; Tough, 1976). Although carried out decades ago and in nonindigenous contexts, the analyses and classifications of children’s language purposes, conducted by Tough (1976) and Corsaro (1986), more closely align with our inductive analysis of the social purposes of children’s interactions than do the language analyses of more recent research. Recognizing these limitations, we used Tough’s (1976) and Corsaro’s (1986) categories to compare and contrast the results of our analysis of participating Indigenous children’s language use.
In Tough’s (1976) study, 4- to 7-year-old children used language for a wide range of purposes during dramatic and construction play: to direct others’ behavior; self-maintain; report on present and past experiences; logically reason with others; and predict, project, and imagine. Within each of these broad language use categories, Tough identified three to nine specific uses of language. Within the imagining category, for example, Tough found that children used specific language to do things such as comment on the imagined context, build an imaginary scene, and take on imagined roles. Within the predicting category, Tough included specific language uses such as forecasting events and possibilities, anticipating consequences of events, and surveying alternatives. Similarly, Corsaro (1986) identified several language use categories, some of which parallel Tough’s work. For example, Corsaro’s category of descriptions of actions mirrors the self-maintaining uses in Tough’s (1976) classifications. Both researchers observed that children use directives to guide or control their peers’ behavior. Corsaro (1986) found that children displayed what he referred to as semantic tying—an act where children contribute to what others have to say by adding new elements to the conversation. Corsaro also discovered that children call for attention and elicit peer response by using tags at the end of their speech.
Our research makes a contribution to these existing categorizations of language use during play by examining Indigenous children’s communicative functions in their play interactions, with special attention given to their constructions of Indigenous cultural meanings during their play. As identified in the following section, we created a classification scheme to describe children’s use of language through open coding of Indigenous children’s utterances in dramatic and construction play contexts in their kindergarten classrooms.
Research Methods
Participants and Educational Context
We acknowledge that this research has been carried out on Indigenous land in the Nishnawbe Aski Nation territory. We are grateful to participating Indigenous community members for welcoming us to work and learn within their ancestral lands.
Our research was conducted in Poplar Lake and Cougar Creek (all names are pseudonyms), two rural northern Indigenous communities with populations of less than 1,000 residents, in a central Canadian province. Both communities are over 700 km (450 miles) from a major urban area, which itself is another 1,600 km (1,000 miles) from our university. The two communities are accessible by plane or winter road when the lakes freeze over.
Three teachers from the two communities participated in our study. Shania and Tanna attended a workshop conducted by Shelley, one of the researchers, at the Kwayaciiwin Education Resource Center’s biannual conference for Indigenous teachers in Winnipeg, Manitoba. They accepted the invitation to meet with the researcher the next day for breakfast to talk about the project. Tanna subsequently recruited her colleague, Sadie, to take part in the research project. Details pertaining to each participating teacher, such as race/ethnicity, school/site, and the number of boys and girls in each classroom, can be found in Table 1.
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Table 1. Participating Teachers, Their Schools, and Number of Participating Students.
All of the participating children are Ojibwe, with their families predominantly speaking an Indigenous English Dialect at home. At school, the Ojibwe language is taught for half an hour each day, with English as the primary language of instruction during the rest of the day. In Sadie’s and Shania’s classroom, for example, the children chose where they played in the classroom and the type of play during the approximately 40 min of free-play time each day. Shania set up play centers on the classroom, whereas Sadie brought out play materials during the afternoon play time. Tanna organized the children into small groups and assigned each group to a play center. The groups rotated around the different play centers during the 40-min play time.
Data Sources
Our data sources were video-recordings of the children’s interactions while they engaged in classroom play. All three teachers were provided with iPod devices and tripods to video record any form of children’s play interactions at least once or twice a week. The video-recordings were gathered between the months of January and April, 2015. Although we (university researchers) collected video data during our visits every 6 weeks, the teachers gathered most of the data, as they were most familiar with the children and were able to observe the students more regularly and in a wider range of contexts. During our visits, we also collected data in the form of field notes of all our discussions with participating teachers and our classroom observations of participating children’s play.
Data Analysis
A total of 72 videos, ranging from 4 s to 6 min in length, were recorded by the participating teachers and researchers from this data collection period. From this data set, we selected 48 videos based on the following criteria. The videos (a) reflected a variety of play contexts involving dramatic play and play with construction materials, (b) captured play activities that are at least 20 s in length, (c) included at least two children talking, and (d) focused on children’s play interactions, rather than teacher/child(ren) play interactions.
The selected videos were then individually transcribed in their entirety using the Jeffersonian Transcription System (Jefferson, 1984). This method ensured that we would have both a description of children’s actions and the language that accompanied their actions to work with in our analysis process. The unit of analysis was an utterance, which we defined as a spoken word, statement, or vocal sound with a single purpose. We analyzed 857 utterances within the 48 videos: 482 by girls and 375 by boys.
We chose to engage in an inductive analysis process that was informed by previous research (Corsaro, 1986; Tough, 1976), but not guided by it. The process began with a description of the function of each utterance made by the children. For example, when a child said, “We should make a spaceship” to a peer, we described the purpose of that utterance as inviting collaborative action. During our classroom visits, we shared our initial findings with the three teachers and invited their input into the language-functions coding scheme that was emerging. Teacher input was especially important in helping us to understand how children took up and negotiated cultural meanings and practices in their play. Teachers viewed videos and discussed cultural meanings in children’s play during after-school meetings when we visited every 6 weeks. We used the teachers’ interpretations to identify Indigenous cultural understandings and the tenets within the community-first land-centered framework (Styres & Zinga, 2013) and Battiste’s (2008) description of Indigenous Knowledges to provide theoretical elaboration to participating teachers’ observations. This informal analysis process resulted in the identification of instances where children constructed Indigenous cultural meanings in their play.
Through this analysis process, we developed 29 language use codes that were grouped into categories. For example, the code inviting collaborative action was grouped with other codes into a category that we labeled as language for getting along. To refine these categories, we shared our findings with the teachers during our visits and also discussed their observations of the students’ oral language uses beyond our video data. We reworked our categories for greater clarity and accuracy. As a result, we developed seven broad language use categories for our 29 language use codes: learning, imagining, own needs, directing, expressing disagreement, getting along, and real life.
To ensure the consistency in our coding process, two researchers conducted an interrater reliability check on 10% of all transcripts, and this check confirmed an agreement rate of 84%. Patterns of language use were identified by calculating overall frequencies and making comparisons by gender and play context (e.g., dramatic vs. construction/materials play). Since we did not have an equal number of boys and girls in our participant sample, we conducted a log-linear analysis (Field, 2005) to determine whether data for the two gender groups could be combined for play context comparisons through χ2 goodness-of-fit tests. The log-linear analyses showed significant interactions between the two gender groups (p < .05), in several language use categories, so we were only able to run separate sets of χ2 goodness-of-fit tests for the two gender groups to determine the value of each gender significance.
Results
Children’s Use of Language
Participating Indigenous kindergarten children used language for a wide range of purposes, most frequently for purposes in the category of language for learning (26%). Within this category, children most often used language to give information, explain, or elaborate on something. The second most frequent use of language was language for imagining (24.3%). Within this category, the children most often played with sounds or words to accompany their actions and feelings. For example, children made gun sounds such as “Boom!” as they pretended to be hunters. Students used language for own needs with the third highest frequency (22.6%), with directing a peer’s behavior using an imperative coded most often in this category. For example, children said things like “Bring a sled” while using blocks as imaginary sleds. The students used language for real life least frequently (3.5%). As an example, one child told her friend excitedly that her “Daddy got growed up” on his most recent birthday.
There were statistically significant gender differences in the children’s use of language in their play interactions (see Table 2). The girls used language for expressing disagreement more often than boys, χ2(1, N = 40) = 8.100, p < .01. For example, we observed in some videos that the boys would engage in rough-and-tumble play, and this would elicit verbal disagreement from the girls expressed with statements such as, “I hate it” or “Stop, you’re pushing me.” The girls most frequently used language for learning (29.0%) and tended to use language for this purpose more so than the boys (23.7%). The girls also tended to use language to get along more often than the boys (10.7% and 5.2%, respectively) by saying things like “We should make a school.”
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Table 2. Gender Differences in Children’s Use of Language.
The boys used language for directing to a greater extent than the girls did, χ2(1, N = 97) = 4.546, p < .01. The boys’ directives to others, such as “You be this guy,” were often intertwined with the narratives they developed and discussion about real-life events. The boys also used language for imagining more often than the girls did, χ2(1, N = 208) = 29.250, p < .001.
Play Contexts
Although the teachers collected more video data of the children’s construction/material play than of their dramatic play activities, we found that both play settings provided contexts for children to use language for a full range of purposes. However, there were some notable differences in the categories of language use for each play context.
Dramatic play
In both play settings, the children used language for imagining, although more so in the dramatic play centers (30.9%) than in construction/material play (23.3%). Some of their dramatic play included fishing, hunting, pretending to be in a pow wow, role-playing in the house, buying groceries in a store, putting on puppet plays, hosting tea parties, playing with dolls, and dressing up. The children role-played at the different centers (e.g., hunter, cowboy, mom, dad, and shopper) and played with the props that the teachers provided (e.g., costumes, dolls, and cash register). The children sometimes associated their roles with the props (e.g., a cash register necessitated a cashier to ring up the groceries). The children also frequently created their own props and roles using the materials in the classroom for their dramatic play (e.g., making guns out of blocks to take on hunting roles). An example of the children’s imaginative use of language in a dramatic play context can be seen in the following excerpt where four boys pretended to be trapped inside a big box.
I’m going in first. (describing own actions—language for own needs)
We’re making a club house. (introducing new storyline—language for imagining)
Wanna make a first clubhouse? (affirming the storyline—language for imagining)
Aw I’m being squished! (expressing emotional condition—language for own needs)
Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! (expressing emotional condition—language for own needs)
Uh-oh! It’s a prison here. (moving the story along—language for imagining)
Oh, no! (expressing emotional condition—language for own needs)
We’re getting trapped. (moving the story along—language for imagining)
Trapped! Getting trapped! Oh no! (affirming the storyline—language for imagining)
The children also used language for getting along slightly more often in dramatic play (9.3%) than in construction/materials play (7.5%). Children invited collaborative action frequently as they developed narratives that were based on the theme or storyline established by the center (e.g., kitchen, fishing center, or doll center) and made efforts to share the materials based on the different narrative roles they had established. When working with the construction materials, the children tended to build objects or structures independently, even though they were playing and talking alongside their peers.
Construction/material play
When engaged in construction/material play, the children used language for learning most frequently (27.1%). They verbalized what they planned to do, provided explanation for their different actions, and sometimes offered suggestions for ways that others might play with the materials. An example of children’s use of language for learning in a construction/material play context can be seen in the following excerpt where two girls were building different homes with blocks.
You forgot to put a teepee door. (giving information—language for learning)
Eh Mandy, I’m building a house. (giving information—language for learning)
Why? (asking question to get an explanation—language for learning)
Because it’s so easy. (giving rationale for actions—language for learning)
We could make a big one, like a big castle with a big door. (planning what to do—language for learning)
We could fit in there ‘cause we have a lot of blocks. (giving rationale for suggestions—language for learning)
This will be our chair. (assigning meaning to objects—language for imagining)
The children also used language for imagining (23.3%) in construction/material play, often using objects to “symbolically to represent other objects and actions” (Bodrova & Leong, 2007, p. 143) by pretending that their blocks were items and animals such as sleds, guns, houses, arrows, hammers, snakes, and chickens. Another frequent use of language was for own needs (23.2%), where children asked each other for materials to share or use, tried to get a peer to attend to their construction, and talked out loud about what they were doing.
Constructing and Negotiating Cultural Meanings
Across the types of play with both girls and boys, we found that narratives about traditional Indigenous land-based activities such as fishing and moose hunting emerged in children’s conversations. For example, in one play scenario, the children pretended to go hunting in the forest with their big dog. While hunting, they imagined that they were being attacked by snakes, howling wolves, and soldiers with arrows. To protect themselves, they built a shelter, saying things like, “We’re making a cover ‘cause there’s a lot of arrows” and “We just need a roof man!” In another play scenario, boys and girls shared the responsibility of taking care of babies together. After making sound effects such as “Waa!” to indicate that the babies were crying, they carried the babies, played with them, and rocked the babies until they fell asleep. While the babies slept, they also pretended to prepare dinner saying things like “She’s cooking dinner.” As they role-played the caretaking of babies and cooking together, the children were constructing their understandings of child-rearing practices and how to share community responsibilities. Participating Indigenous teachers talked about the high value placed on these practices in their communities.
In addition to constructing Indigenous cultural meanings in their dramatic play, the children made references to popular culture characters and objects. They created hybrid roles and narratives, pretending that they were battling “Thunder Man” and the “Minecraft guy” with their arrows, guns, and hammers or used blocks to create alien spaceships that later evolved into an airplane to transport them out of their community. Dramatic and construction/material play provided spaces for children to bring together their lived experiences in remote Indigenous communities with vicarious experiences from popular culture texts.
Discussion and Implications
Children’s Use of Language
Our analysis of participating Indigenous children’s interactions while engaged in dramatic and construction play shows a richness in children’s language mirroring findings in previous research conducted in nonindigenous preschools and kindergartens (Corsaro, 1986; Tough, 1976). Participating Indigenous children used language to imagine—as they contributed to evolving narratives—more frequently in dramatic play but also in construction/material play. The children also used language to guide their own behavior, which aligns with Tough’s (1976) self-maintain category and Corsaro’s (1986) descriptions of actions category. They used language to direct others’ behavior, a social purpose found in all three of the previous studies. Also, consistent with previous research findings in nonindigenous contexts, participating Indigenous children made sound effects to accompany their actions, using language to provide information about what was going on in the play and about what happened in the past.
A departure from previous research was the participating Indigenous children’s use of language for disagreeing, especially by girls. Participating teachers wanted to encourage this social language purpose in the children, as it opens up possibilities for selfhood that resists dominant discourses (Gee, 1996; Ivanic, 1998). Teachers referenced the damage to the self-esteem of Indigenous peoples that has been wrought by “the racism inherent to colonization and subsequent institutional racism (examples include the residential school system [and] the current overrepresentation of Aboriginal youth in the criminal justice system)” (Pesco, 2014, p. 148). Teachers wanted children to create powerful Indigenous identities where they would stand up for themselves and hoped that the children would continue to use language in this way in future when interacting with nonindigenous people outside their community.
Our analysis of Indigenous children’s language in play contexts highlights what children are able to do with language; constructing the language abilities of children not in deficit terms, but in terms of their full potential when engaged in authentic and culturally relevant communicative contexts. This is an important implication not only for children in Indigenous contexts but also for children from other marginalized groups who are often not given the opportunity to use and demonstrate all their language talents (Cummins, 2001). In this respect, we recommend that teachers gather language samples in authentic social contexts, such as dramatic and construction play, to gain a more complex and rich picture of children’s language use than they would be able to gather in formal assessment settings (e.g., Dunn & Dunn, 2007; Zimmerman, Steiner, & Pond, 2002).
Children’s Construction of Indigenous Cultural Meanings
Participating Indigenous girls and boys drew on what they learned through observations of adults in their community, taking up discourses available within their Indigenous communities that valued relationships to family and community members, and to other living things in their environment. Within the community-first land-centered theoretical framework (Styres & Zinga, 2013), it is important not to privilege either the Indigenous or nonindigenous meanings in children’s play, but rather to recognize and value each of them in a process of “braiding together the knowledges” (Styres & Zinga, 2013, p. 290). The children’s play exemplified this braiding, as they took up roles and storylines of popular culture as well as meanings tied to their Indigenous culture. The strong influence of the land in children’s construction of Indigenous understandings was evident, even when children drew on popular culture in their play. The dramatic and construction/material play contexts opened up space within the classroom for the children to construct a range of Indigenous cultural meanings. The children demonstrated their sense of agency when trying out a range of roles, relationships, and constructing meanings that disrupted “the silent curriculum of Eurocentric knowledge transmission and instructional pedagogy” (Battiste, 2008, p. 89) inherent within the structure of Canadian schools.
Continuing our collaborative action research into a third year, the teachers are now introducing Indigenous cultural dramatic play center. Following the teachings of community elders in monthly cultural classes, these centers provide a way for teachers to support children’s construction of Indigenous understandings through foregrounding Indigenous Knowledge over Eurocentric knowledge. To an even greater degree than the dramatic play we analyzed in this article, these Indigenous cultural play contexts provide opportunities for the collaborative construction of Indigenous knowledge that is central to the generative curriculum model of curriculum development in Indigenous schools (Ball & Pence, 2006). These dramatic play contexts are also meant to create spaces for children to use Ojibwe, the language of their grandparents and the language of instruction in their Cultural classes, in recognition that “language is by far the most significant factor in the survival of Indigenous knowledge. Indigenous and their symbolic, verbal and unconscious orders structure Indigenous knowledge; therefore, educators cannot stand outside of Indigenous languages to understand Indigenous knowledges” (Battiste, 2002, p. 17).
Indigenous teachers collaborated on both creation of curriculum in our action research and the data analysis. We believe that our research methods, which draw on the knowledge of Indigenous teachers throughout the research process, provide useful ways for researchers involved in Indigenous and nonindigenous research collaborations to gather and interpret information about their students’ language and cultural ways of interacting. Interpretations of data are richer, and there is a greater sense of accountability to the teachers, children, their community, and their Indigenous culture.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank participating Indigenous children and their teacher, and members of the Indigenous communities in which they live. Please note that we would like to name our Indigenous collaborators because their conversations about the children’s play have in many ways made them coauthors of this article. To do so, however, would compromise the anonymity of their communities and the children in their classrooms that we have promised community leaders that we would honor. We are also grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for funding this research through a Partnership Grant.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research has been funded by a Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Partnership Grant.
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Author Biographies
Nazila Eisazadeh is a registered early childhood educator and current doctoral candidate in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning at OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education)/University of Toronto. Her research interests include narrative inquiry, early childhood education, language and literacies education, culturally responsive pedagogy, and discourse and identity.
Shakina Rajendram is a doctoral candidate in Language and Literacies Education at OISE/University of Toronto. Her research focuses on translanguaging, language policy, and collaborative learning.
Christine Portier is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning at OISE/University of Toronto. Her research interests center on early literacy development and the relationships between narrative, writing, and cognition.
Shelley Stagg Peterson is a professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning at OISE/University of Toronto and the principal investigator of the NOW Play project. Her research interests include early literacy and language development, rural and Indigenous education, and teacher learning through action research.
