COMMUNITY-BASED INQUIRY from within INDIGENOUS EARLY LEARNING COMMUNITIES of PRACTICE: A Special Issue of the American Indian Culture & Research Journal

Community-Based Inquiry is really Indigenous inquiry. It is a practice that we engage in regularly as part of who we are.
— Jewell Arcoren & Fawn YoungBear-Tibbetts

DENVER and BOSTON, May 14, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- The Indigenous Early Learning Collaborative (IELC) Institute, led by First Light Education Project (Denver, CO) and Brazelton Touchpoints Project (BTP) (Boston, MA), announces the historic publication of a special issue of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal (AICRJ), focused on Community-Based Inquiry (CBI).

The IELC, founded in 2021, is a national ECE initiative designed for Indigenous communities to strengthen early childhood education and systems of care and learning by developing their own critical questions, conducting their own inquiry, and constructing local, relevant, sustainable solutions.

In the first section of this special issue, community scholars from the four original IELC partner sites — Wiikwedong Early Childhood Development Collaborative (L'Anse, MI), Wicoie Nandagikendan Immersion Program (Minneapolis, MN), Daybreak Star Preschool (Seattle, WA), and Keiki Steps (INPEACE, Hawai'i) — author and share their stories of Community-Based Inquiry. In the second section, Indigenous scholars working (currently or recently) in universities join the community conversation with powerful insights from their work using CBI.

Collectively, this journal issue describes and documents the possibilities and potential for Native ECE when Indigenous communities have the space, resources, and support to ask their own questions of practice and pursue answers to these questions from within their communities.

Dr. Tarajean Yazzie-Mintz, Director of the IELC Institute: "This collection of inspirational articles tells the story not only of strengthening early learning in communities, but of empowering community members and ECE practitioners, who now think of themselves as researchers, and university scholars, who discover new pathways to merging their academic selves and their community selves in the process of generating insightful and effective inquiry."     

Dr. Joshua Sparrow, Executive Director of BTP: "This is the next step in the work of the IELC Institute — sharing these innovative stories of inquiry from within communities, so that more communities and scholars can access CBI and its enormous possibilities."

This special issue is available as an open-source publication at: https://escholarship.org/uc/aicrj

To learn more about the IELC Institute, or to schedule an interview with Drs. Yazzie-Mintz or Sparrow, or any of the participating authors, contact Dr. Ethan Yazzie-Mintz, Executive Director, First Light Education Project (phone: 617-548-0908; e-mail: [email protected]).

SOURCE Brazelton Touchpoints Center