1. Paljaljim Rusagasag (Che-Wei Lee), MA
Program Coordinator, Institute for International Studies in Education,
University of Pittsburgh, USA
Kuan-Ting Tang, PhD
Professor, Department of Education, National Taiwan Normal University,
Taiwan (ROC)
Potentials and Challenges on Indigenous
Community-based Education:
A Critical Ethnography of Indigenous
Community-based School
11 March 2013. Paper presented at the 57th Annual Conference of The Comparative and International Education
Society, Hilton Riverside in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

2. Aims of Critical Inquiry
1. Examine if indigenous community-based education
can effectively achieve the ideal of self-
determination among Taiwan Aboriginal-based
schools;
2. Analyze the relationships, dynamics, and issues
between the community and its neighborhood
school; and
3. Form the pattern of indigenous community-based
education with its corresponding challenges for
Taiwan Aborigines as a reference.
COPYRIGHT © 2013 BY CHE-WEI LEE
AND KUAN-TING TANG

3. Research Concerns
1. To what extend could indigenous community
members exercise their power/rights/influence of
self-determination in an indigenous community-
based secondary school (from grades 7 to 12)?
2. What is the relationship between the community and
the school?
3. What are the challenges of indigenous community-
based education in our case study?
COPYRIGHT © 2013 BY CHE-WEI LEE
AND KUAN-TING TANG

4. • Premise: All cultural life is constant tension between control and
resistance.
• Case school: located in an indigenous area in the southern Taiwan
• School members: principal, staff, teachers, & students
• Community representatives: village heads & president of the village
council
• Community family members: president of the parental association &
students’ parents
• Ethnicity Han Chinese, including Mainlanders, Fukien Taiwanese, and
Hakka Taiwanese; Taiwan Aborigines or the indigenous peoples of
Taiwan—Amis, Atayal, Bunun, Kavalan, Paiwan, Puyuma, Rukai, Saisiat,
Sakizaya, Seediq, Tao (or Yami), Thao, Truku, and Tsou
Why Critical Ethnography?
COPYRIGHT © 2013 BY CHE-WEI LEE
AND KUAN-TING TANG

5. Considerations from the school members
• Close to school, reduce the burden of family economy,
promote the retention rates, reduce the cultural difference,
raise the indigenous consciousness, & enhance the
cultural identity (school staff)
• Lack of competition (students)
• Accessibility in secondary education vs. persistence in
higher education, & top universities/colleges (students)
Attitudes from the community members
• Skeptical: wait and see or indifferent
• Affirmative: fully supportive whenever school needs
community’s assistance
1. Divergent thoughts on the transformation of
indigenous community-based school
COPYRIGHT © 2013 BY CHE-WEI LEE
AND KUAN-TING TANG

6. What has changed?
• Two systems in one track of administration and
management
• Multiple budgets
• New facilities
• Close to indigenous environment
• Teaching staff were overloaded with extra administrative
affairs at the same time and failed to well prepare lessons
that negatively affected the accountability of administration
as well.
What stays intact?
• The contents of the whole curricula are based on the
national standards and principals.
COPYRIGHT © 2013 BY CHE-WEI LEE
AND KUAN-TING TANG

7. • General or mixed senior high school?
• Indigenous community-based school has a
richly cultural environment but has not a
cultural soul (practicing courage and having
positively internalized recognition).
• Stigmatized identity
• Homeless identity
2. Ambiguous, dilemmatic, and contradictory praxis of
indigenous community-based education
COPYRIGHT © 2013 BY CHE-WEI LEE
AND KUAN-TING TANG

8. Dilemmas of Tribal Language
Education
1. Parental contradictory expectations between
dominant and tribal languages learning (family
attitude)
2. Students cannot continue speaking tribal language
at home, school, and normal life because of its
practicability (real life).
3. Chinese has been the medium of instruction since
preschool education, besides dialect taught as a
subject until primary education (language shift).
COPYRIGHT © 2013 BY CHE-WEI LEE
AND KUAN-TING TANG

9. Uncertain Leadership
• The power of school members is
bigger than the one of community
members (realistic).
• Professionalism vs. Tribalism
• Do we have any alternative option
for eclecticism?
COPYRIGHT © 2013 BY CHE-WEI LEE
AND KUAN-TING TANG

10. Should we leave or stay at the indigenous
community-based school?
For
• We can protect them well (school faculty
members)
• Education advancement rate (students)
• Fear to situate the strange/unfamiliar
surrounding (students)
Against
• I want to see outside world . . . (tribal schooled
students)
• Individual educational pursuit . . . (high
achievement students)
COPYRIGHT © 2013 BY CHE-WEI LEE
AND KUAN-TING TANG

11. • Community members do not know to engage in
school administrative operation.
• School members do not know how to evaluate the
effectiveness of community members’ voices in
decision-making.
• The use of indigenous language in school
administration is inefficient.
• Both can hold the traditional activities together.
3. Community and school become mutually exclusive
in the structure of the mainstream(dominant) values.
COPYRIGHT © 2013 BY CHE-WEI LEE
AND KUAN-TING TANG

12. Signs of high awareness
• Community members have sysmatically prepared the cultural
materials.
• Some non/indigenous teachers are trying to integrating
indigenous knowledge into their instruction.
Factors of low agency
• Lack of powerful legal support and multiple resources
• National standardized test
• Challenges for tribal language use in a formal
education/pedagogy, e.g., time-consuming in bilingual
translation, and rare compatible terminologies can be used
interchangeably between Chinese languages and dialects
4. High consciousness of indigenous self-
determination vs. Low agency of decolonizing practice
COPYRIGHT © 2013 BY CHE-WEI LEE
AND KUAN-TING TANG

13. Conclusion
• The subjectivity of community is weak in
various school engagement.
• The framework of mainstream education still
affects the indigenous community-based
school system.
• Both school and community did not prepare
well to practice indigenous community-based
education.
COPYRIGHT © 2013 BY CHE-WEI LEE
AND KUAN-TING TANG

14. • School should allow community’s voices in a democratic
way to communicate, negotiate, and collaborate with
each other.
• When a school becomes organic to its local indigenous
community, its community would be possible to integrate
its own values into the school’s organization,
management, pedagogy, curriculum, and modes of
evaluation.
• Emancipatory leadership should be constructed
dialectically between professionalism and tribalism.
• School and community should conduct a complete
longitudinal study or archives to follow up the
development of their graduated students.
Implications
COPYRIGHT © 2013 BY CHE-WEI LEE
AND KUAN-TING TANG

15. Critical Reflections for Insiders,
Outsiders, and In-Betweens
1. Who is the real subject in the indigenous
community-based education?
2. Who has changed and unchanged?
3. What role should I play in this study?
4. To cultivate more indigenous transformative
intellectuals becomes an indispensable pathway for
indigenous community-based education.
COPYRIGHT © 2013 BY CHE-WEI LEE
AND KUAN-TING TANG

16. Thank you for your attention!
COPYRIGHT © 2013 BY CHE-WEI LEE
AND KUAN-TING TANG