Universities, Indigenous knowledges and sustainability

“Because lifelong learning is relevant to a wide range of societal issues, such as health, environment, work, justice, citizenship, culture, and social affairs, it is uniquely positioned to respond to issues in a manner that recognises how they interconnect.” – Making Lifelong Learning a Reality: A Handbook

President Sahle-Work Zewde of Ethiopia, opening the UNESCO Conference on Transformative Knowledge for the Future of Africa, stated: “Knowledge is a garden; if it is not cultivated, it cannot be harvested. Many different plants make the garden beautiful and useful to humanity.”

While much of the literature and practice in the field of Education for Sustainable Development has had a focus on the critically important roles schooling, students and teachers play in addressing the issues of sustainability, lifelong and life-wide learning have been increasingly called upon as a critical element in addressing the complex issues included in what we refer to as sustainability. This has implications for the roles of universities.

Supporting the world of learning of those women and men who are already of an age where they are making decisions about their own lives and the lives of their children deserves priority attention.

To go back to the words of the late president of Tanzania, Julius K Nyerere: “We cannot wait 25 years for our children to reach adulthood; we must educate the adults now.”



The meaning of sustainability

But what is the content of learning that needs attention? To answer that, we need to take a deeper look at the meaning of sustainability. Sustainability often refers to the avoidance of the depletion of natural resources to maintain an ecological balance. In Western or Eurocentric discourses, it calls for interdisciplinarity, for understanding interrelationships of humans and the rest of nature.

Ecological and environmental science is at the heart of what is often called for in lifelong learning for adults and sustainability.

A missing element in the discourses of lifelong learning and sustainable development has been the absence of Indigenous language and knowledge systems.

As Dr Ed Connors, a psychologist of the Kahnawake First Nation said: “I find it a great mystery that so much of the world’s population has come to believe in a myth that our valued knowledge as humans has only evolved since the emergence of what has been called civilisation.

“Contrary to these beliefs, I recognise that the accumulated knowledge we have formed throughout human time is not only significant and of value but necessary for the continued existence of humans on Earth.”

And from the Decolonising Science and Higher Education report: “Despite long traditions of Indigenous science that are now being appreciated and reimplemented, the practice of Western science has systemically excluded Indigenous thought, Indigenous ways of knowing and Indigenous Peoples. This needs to stop”.

Lorna Wanosts’a7 Williams, from the same report, summarises: “Indigenous knowledge systems and languages have been around since time immemorial and contain important concepts that are not only valuable but necessary for the continued existence of humankind and planet earth.

“However, these bodies of knowledge are generally not given the same consideration as Western knowledge. This means there’s a lack of meaningful educational opportunities that respond to urgent issues facing Indigenous communities, like declining Indigenous languages”.

The Indigenous Educator’s panel at the UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education noted that: “A better structure for higher education would focus on accessibility, inclusiveness and respect for Indigenous ways of knowing. This should be validated and incorporated into curricula.

“Higher education should also evolve to include Indigenous methods of knowledge acquisition, such as land-based education. By improving equity, decolonising knowledge, opening science, reducing or eliminating racism, and offering robust and culturally attuned supports to students to ensure they complete their studies, Indigenous higher education models can support the achievement of SDGs”.

Transforming roles for universities

A global policy consensus on higher education futures began with the UNESCO report on Reimagining our Futures Together in 2021. The call has been on moving inclusive, engaged and transformative learning towards achieving the United Nations Agenda 2030.

The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science further challenges universities to broaden their understanding of science. This recommendation calls for recognition of three domains of science: academic science, science created by societal actors and the science of Indigenous and other excluded peoples.

The Third UNESCO World Higher Education Conference (WHEC) in May 2022 continued to build a transformative vision of universities with the report of Independent Expert Group on the Universities and the 2030 Agenda, titled Knowledge-driven Actions: Transforming higher education for global sustainability. Its key recommendations:

1. The need to move towards inter- and transdisciplinary modes of producing and circulating knowledge.

2. The imperative of becoming open institutions, fostering epistemic dialogue and integrating diverse ways of knowing.

3. The demand for a stronger presence in society through proactive engagement and partnering with other societal actors.

Challenges remain

Citizens around the world, especially youth, are continuing their own actions towards sustainable lifestyles daily. Institutions of education, especially universities, need to play more assertive knowledge-driven roles to counter growing tendencies of misinformation and disinformation, especially through social media.

Every citizen has the capacity to learn, reflect and act in support of sustainable development, provided that educational opportunities are systematically and flexibly designed.

While the perspective of lifelong and life-wide learning has been professed for some years, provisions of educational opportunities remain disconnected and rigidly structured. Universities continue to be discipline-bound, and transdisciplinary teaching and research remain largely a mirage. This is largely due to discipline-bound curriculum fragmenting learning in silos.

The inclusion of practitioners as teachers remains restricted. Diversity of knowledge systems and cultures are yet to find meaningful integration with ‘modern’ science.

The movement towards knowledge democracy has been gaining momentum, and several local universities are moving in that direction by valuing community and indigenous knowledge, decolonising the co-construction of context-specific actionable knowledge, building respectful partnerships with local societal actors and promoting innovative, culturally and linguistically rooted research methods.

Two sets of challenges are faced by universities and their leaders when they try to move in this holistic and inclusive manner to integrate perspectives of lifelong learning and knowledge democracy.

First, much research funding and thereby design of curriculum discourages co-construction of knowledge in culturally appropriate and context-specific manners.

Second, the present system of ranking universities takes them away from local societal relevance, as comparison is based on publishing in artificially competitive journal articles written in European (predominantly English) languages.

Our opportunity

We are living in the UN Indigenous Languages Decade. Our universities have an important role to play in support of this Decade. Given that Indigenous land-based knowledge is most powerfully found within Indigenous languages, we need a much broader commitment to the revitalisation and preservation of Indigenous languages worldwide.

Let us dramatically increase our support of Indigenous language champions to turn the clock back on loss of languages. Secondly, let us fund Indigenous and other independent community knowledge workers to continue to draw out the lessons from the global treasury of Indigenous peoples.

Third, let us find ways to bridge the knowledge cultures of academic and Indigenous peoples and other communities. Fourth, let us continue to open higher education institutions to the full diversity of global epistemologies.

Can universities create new structures for a truly inclusive global knowledge commons? We welcome your own reflections.

Rajesh Tandon and Budd Hall are co-chairs, the UNESCO Chair in Community-Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education, at the University of Victoria in Canada and PRIA in India.