10/15/2026
On my walk today, I found myself reflecting on a question that continues to shape my thinking as an educator:
How can we hope to transform education if we continue to rely on the very frameworks that have contributed to students’ disengagement?
We speak often about innovation, student agency, belonging, and meaningful learning. Yet, how often do we question the underlying assumptions about what education is for, what counts as knowledge, and how we define success?
This reflection brought me back to the work of Indigenous scholars Marie Battiste and James Youngblood Henderson in Naturalizing Indigenous Knowledge in Eurocentric Education.
Their work invites us to reconsider the foundations of education itself. Indigenous ways of knowing remind us that learning is not simply an individual pursuit of knowledge, achievement, or credentials. It is deeply relational, connected to land, language, community, identity, and the responsibilities we carry toward one another.
Learning is not only about who we become, but also about how our becoming contributes to the well-being of others.
Perhaps this is where meaningful educational transformation must begin.
Not simply by introducing new strategies into old systems, but by questioning the assumptions upon which those systems were built.
What if we understood education not as a race toward individual achievement, but as a lifelong process of developing our capacities to contribute to society?
What if relationships were not something we built before learning could happen, but something we recognized as being at the very heart of learning itself?
And what if we measured the success of education not only by what students know or accomplish, but also by how they come to understand their responsibilities to others and the world around them?
The question is not simply how we can improve education, but what kind of education is worth transforming toward.
