GAA Presents: Mindfulness with Mahfida Event Series – Flower Bouquet Making Workshop

Title: Collective Mental Models for Good Human-Earth Relations: The Case of Tribal Nation and Indigenous Scientists in STEM Graduate Education

Date/Time: Wednesday, February 26, 10-11AM, Pacific Time

RSVP to receive the Zoom link: https://ubc.zoom.us/meeting/register/r0XSNABcR7KlnGAOKKKKeA

Abstract: Indigenous students remain vastly underrepresented in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) graduate programs. Simultaneously, Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities throughout the Americas and elsewhere work to protect their rights and relationships with land and their more-than-human kin. From pragmatic constructions of natural resources to rethinking good human and earth relations, community members who hold Indigenous Knowledges are place-rooted learners and teachers of their Tribal environments as well as vital would-be scientists who debate and balance multiple epistemologies and methodologies towards protection and care of their places. In this presentation, an Ojibwe biologist and a land-based educational researcher discuss our work to prepare university partners to develop new mental models of good human and earth relations. In doing so, we position Tribal Nations and Indigenous peoples as central rights-holders and actors in this work and its immediate and long-range impacts.

Speakers:

Stephen J. Smith (Steve) earned his dual undergraduate degrees in Biology and Chemistry from Concordia University, M.S. in Biology from Bemidji State University, and a second M.S. in Chemistry from the College of St. Scholastica. His Ph.D. dissertation research in Conservation Sciences in the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resources (CFANS) at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, focuses on climate change and adaptation, invasive species, and aquatic plants, specifically the impacts of the invasive species starry stonewort on natural stands of wild rice. Prior to his doctoral studies, he was a STEM faculty member at Leech Lake Tribal College for nearly a decade, and he also served as the Director of the environmental lab for MCT (Minnesota Chippewa Tribe) comprised of six Ojibwe reservations in Minnesota. He is an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation and was raised and lived on Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe his entire life before attending his Ph.D. program.

Dr. Elizabeth Sumida Huaman is Wanka/Quechua from Peru with strong genealogical family and direct community ties across the Tawantinsuyo (four quarters of Inka lands), and specifically the regions of Junín, Huancavelica, and Cusco. She is Professor in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and studies the relationship between Indigenous lands, cultural practices, and in and out-of-school learning with Indigenous communities and Tribal institutions in the Americas. Centering Indigenous knowledge systems, her work is situated in three areas—the interfaces between modernity, development, and Indigenous places; Indigenous community-based educational design and generative environmental pedagogies; and Indigenous and comparative frameworks and enactments of decolonial rights. As an Andean Indigenous scholar, her goal is to advance Quechua research methodologies, and she writes about these processes in fellowship with other Indigenous methodologists worldwide.

Please join us in congratulating Itamar Manoff who successfully defended his PhD Dissertation on January 17 of 2025.

Title:
The Experience of Error in Adult Language Learning

Abstract:
We often think of language learning as a continuous process of learning from our mistakes: producing incorrect, inappropriate, ill-formed utterances, to which experienced and proficient speakers offer We often think of language learning as a continuous process of learning from our mistakes: producing incorrect, inappropriate, ill-formed utterances, to which experienced and proficient speakers offer correction or feedback. However, what mistakes and errors are, how they relate to the knowledge of language, what causes them, and how language learners deal with the mistakes and errors they make are very much points of contention in language education research. This dissertation aims to contribute to the scholarly debates and discussions on the topic by approaching the question of error in language learning from a distinctly educational angle, which highlights the existential and ethical dimensions of committing, and learning from, one’s errors in the context of coming into a new language. Drawing on scholarly discussions in second language acquisition research, educational ethics, pragmatism and phenomenology, I argue that the experience of error is more than the mere realization of epistemic or linguistic failure. Rather, it is a complex process in which the student’s very subjectivity is transformed as she interacts with experienced speakers and knowers in the new linguistic community. Such an experience is twofold, including an intersubjective, discursive and normative dimension, corresponding to the Hegelian notion of Erfahrung, as well as a first-person, subjective and existentially significant aspect for the individual (Erlebnis).

Finally, my dissertation examines possibilities of attending educationally to the ethically and existentially charged experience of error in language learning. First, drawing on Husserl’s notions of epoché and the phenomenological reduction, I suggest an approach that focuses not on the normative conventions of the target language or the sources of error, but rather on redescribing and narrating the first-person experience of error in an educationally productive way, shifting the emphasis from the sense of linguistic ‘failure’ to a view of error as a necessary step in the development of knowledge and learning. Secondly, in discussing the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty on expression in language and Levinas’s notion of welcoming, respectively, I claim that educators can attend to students’ experience of error as creative forays into the new language that disclose the poetic and aesthetic achievement of the language learner, as well as the ethical backdrop against which such expression occurs. Finally, I engage in a discussion of Claudia Ruitenberg’s reading of Derrida’s ethic of hospitality of education, claiming that error can appear in classroom discourse as a type of unexpected, uninvited “guest”, which can unsettle and disturb, but also expand and enrich, the language and culture of the host.

Chair of Examination Committee:

Dr. Molly Babel (Linguistics)

University Examiners:

Dr. Ryuko Kubota (Language and Literacy Education)

Dr. Barbara Weber (Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education)

External Examiner:

Dr. Clarence Joldersma (Calvin University)

Supervisory Committee:

Dr. Claudia Ruitenberg (Supervisor)

Dr. Sam Rocha (Member)

Dr. Sharon Todd (Maynooth University, Member)