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6Rs for Indigenous Open Pedagogy

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Abstract

Open education centers around collaborative practices, but these practices do not account for ways of knowing outside of the Western-centric perspective of sharing knowledge openly. Centuries of colonial research practices have left Western researchers with prestige and funding–and Indigenous communities understandably wary (Smith, 1999). Researchers have made careers out of stealing Indigenous knowledge they lacked the cultural context to understand, while Indigenous languages and cultures suffered under epistemicide and cognitive imperialism–a colonization of the mind that saw millennia of Indigenous scientific practices, spiritualities, and languages made illegal (Battiste, 1998). How can open education learn to rematriate knowledge that has been both exploited and suppressed? Drawing on the work of Rajiv Jhangiani’s 5Rs for Open Pedagogy (2019), as well as Tuck et al. (2022) visiting framework, among others, this article proposes 6Rs for Indigenous open pedagogy as a means to begin addressing cognitive imperialism in the work of open education. These 6Rs will reside in a framework of the literature and through conversation and discussion of the nuances around asking Indigenous communities to participate in a currently colonized structure.  

Keywords: Open Pedagogy, Respect, Relationships, Refusal, Responsibility, Risk, Reflexivity, Visiting

How to Cite:

Harris, M. L. & Smith, S. M., (2026) “6Rs for Indigenous Open Pedagogy”, Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education 4(1), 53–72. doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/joerhe.24657