Aydin Bal & Linda Orie
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Education Futures in a Settler Colonial Context
Settler colonial histories haunt education in the United States, facing uncertain futures yet to be built. Indigenous youth continue to bear the weight of racialized inequities in discipline and special education, facing exclusion and systemic disregard for their epistemologies. From the missionary zeal of nineteenth-century boarding schools to contemporary accountability regimes, public education has long functioned as an instrument of assimilation and erasure. Yet within these contradictions lie possibilities for collective transformation.
Between 2019 and 2024, the Indigenous Learning Lab (ILL) took shape at a rural high school in northern Wisconsin as a coalition of families, educators, and tribal leaders—a praxis for futures of education rooted in justice and sovereignty. Grounded in the Learning Lab methodology (Bal, 2018), ILL sought not to repair a broken system but to co-create new systems of learning from Indigenous epistemologies outward.
Theoretical Anchors: Expansive Learning and Decolonizing Agency
ILL builds on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), which conceives learning as mediated, collective, and historically situated rather than as individual cognitive acquisition (Engeström, 1987, 2016). In this framework, contradictions within systems are not failures but motives and resources for expansive learning—openings through which participants can re-imagine the object of their shared activity.
Learning Labs operate as formative interventions that surface these contradictions through dialogue, double stimulation, and collaborative modeling. Building on this tradition, Bal and Bird Bear (2023) proposed decolonizing agency—the capacity of communities to expose the colonial roots of inequity and reclaim authorship over the design of their educational futures (Mawene et al., 2025). In this sense, ILL was not a neutral collaboration but a counter-hegemonic intervention into histories of epistemic injustice—a living site where Indigenous students, families, and educators reasserted sovereignty through collective design.
Local Context: Waves of Transformation in Indian Country
ILL took place in “Newhope,” a town shaped by both interdependence and conflict between Indigenous and settler communities. During the 1980s, Newhope was at the center of anti-Indian treaty rights protests, where white residents sought to deny Anishinaabe sovereignty. This history lingers in the experiences of families whose children now attend the high school, where Indigenous students are overrepresented in suspensions and referrals. At the time of the Lab’s formation, Indigenous students made up about 20% of the population but accounted for more than half of disciplinary actions.
Against this backdrop, the ILL was co-initiated by the high school principal and tribal education leaders. Monthly gatherings brought together teachers, administrators, students, families, and elders. Meals, childcare, and stipends ensured equitable participation. ILL was not simply about fixing a broken system but also reckoning with the deep contradictions of a settler colonial town by imagining more equitable outcomes.
Building Decolonizing Agency Through Collective Learning
Early sessions of ILL surfaced epistemic dissonance. Administrators focused on test scores and graduation rates, while Indigenous participants framed school inequities as part of a continuum of cultural erasure. This friction exemplified what CHAT theorists describe as primary contradictions—the clash between espoused equity and enacted exclusion.
Through cycles of expansive learning, participants used data, stories, and cultural knowledge as tools of double stimulation. Educators began to recognize how “misbehavior” could reflect alienation from a system misaligned with Indigenous values. Parents situated current conflicts in the intergenerational trauma of boarding schools and anti-Indian violence. Students articulated how disciplinary practices reinforced feelings of unbelonging. As participants engaged these contradictions, they enacted decolonizing agency: exposing colonial logics, shifting epistemologies, and reclaiming authorship over new designs.
ILL produced innovations such as “Tuesday Check-ins” for Indigenous students, the infusion of Anishinaabe culture into the existing curriculum, and the development of restorative alternatives to suspension. These practices were not external solutions, but emergent designs rooted in community knowledge. In addition to “Tuesday Check-ins” and restorative alternatives to suspension, one of the most powerful innovations emerging from the Indigenous Learning Lab was the Explorer Program, a culturally grounded alternative education pathway.
Seeds of this program were planted during ILL sessions, particularly through contributions of the Native American Mentor at Northwoods High. Drawing on his experience as a former student, he emphasized that many Indigenous students learn best through hands-on, land-based education. He envisioned alternatives to the “brick and mortar” style of mainstream schooling, describing Indigenous youth as learners whose cultural strengths required recognition.
The Explorer Program, formally launched in the wake of COVID-19 disruptions, was designed to re-engage students at risk of dropping out, particularly those who were credit-deficient. It became a self-contained, often outdoor classroom, blending academic instruction with cultural and survival practices such as wild ricing, maple sugaring, hunting, snowshoeing, and community service projects like shoveling for Elders and wreath-making. In this way, the program aligned academic standards with Anishinaabe lifeways and treaty rights, embodying CHAT’s principle of expansive learning through contradictions (Engeström, 2016).
Students reported transformative experiences: For the first time, they wanted to come to school, felt a sense of belonging, and began to imagine futures previously closed to them. Attendance soared—exceeding prior years combined for some students—and graduation rates for the first two cohorts reached nearly 100%. Administrators also reported dramatic reductions in absenteeism (from 27% to 8% overall) and discipline referrals among Explorer participants. Notably, the program gained support from both the tribal community and the school board, despite the region’s conservative political climate. Students’ presentations on wild ricing and maple sugaring in local elementary schools, as well as collaborations with university researchers, further built bridges between Indigenous knowledge and broader educational systems.
Through the Explorer Program, ILL demonstrated that decolonizing agency is not only about critique but also about creating new, durable infrastructures for learning—ones that embed Indigenous epistemologies, strengthen community ties, and reframe what constitutes educational success.
Toward Decolonizing Systems
ILL positioned Indigenous communities are not recipients of reform but designers of new systems. The ILL achieved both measurable outcomes and more profound systemic shifts. Disciplinary referrals and suspensions of Indigenous students declined. Relationships between the school and tribal communities strengthened. More importantly, participants developed new ways of seeing and acting; teachers reframed their assumptions; administrators recognized historical trauma; and families asserted their sovereignty in decision-making.
Decolonizing agency extended beyond critique into systemic redesign. School leadership and decision-making processes were restructured to center family voices, and disciplinary logics were reframed. ILL offered a living example of how communities can co-design decolonizing systems that break from compliance-oriented reform.
Futuring Education
The Indigenous Learning Lab is more than a project; it is a methodology and a praxis of decolonizing agency. It demonstrates that contradictions are not pathologies to be managed but resources for systemic learning. It affirms that Indigenous epistemologies are not peripheral but central to educational futures. It models how equity work must move beyond inclusion into transformation.
The work of ILL insists that systemic transformation is not about fixing individual deficits but about nurturing generations through systems rooted in care, sovereignty, and justice. ILL thus speaks directly to the global dialogue on futures of education. It shows that futures must be co-designed with communities, grounded in epistemic justice, and guided by the transformative and decolonizing agency of those most impacted by inequities. Rather than importing solutions, researchers and educators must create infrastructures where communities can learn expansively, imagine collectively, and design inclusive and transformative futuring.
In an era of converging political and ecological crises, the Indigenous Learning Lab offers more than a glimpse of possibility—it offers a praxis for reimagining education through sovereignty, memory, and collective imagination. It reminds us that transformation does not emerge from policy or technical reform, but from the slow, relational labor of designing new systems together. When communities gather at the same table—bringing ancestral wisdom, lived struggle, and shared hope—they craft not only programs but futures. Education, in this sense, becomes a practice of co-authorship and kin-making, a collective act of learning how to live and flourish together across generations.
References
Bal, A. & Bird Bear, A. (2023). Decolonizing agency: Future-making with indigenous communities. In A. Sannino and N. Hopwood (Eds), Agency and transformation: Motives, mediation, and motion (pp. 183-208). Cambridge University Press.
Engeström, Y. (1987). Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretical approach to developmental research. Helsinki: Orienta-Konsultit.
Engeström, Y. (2016). Studies in expansive learning: Learning what is not yet there. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mawene, D., Bal, A.,Ko, D., Orie, L., Schrader, E., & Yoo, J. (2025). Decolonizing agency for an inclusive co-design of behavioral support systems in indigenous land. Exceptional Children. https://doi.org/10.1177/00144029251350059
Sannino, A. (2010). Teachers’ talk of experiencing: Conflict, resistance, and agency. Teaching and Teacher Education, 26(4), 838–844.