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Over recent decades, research institutions have prescribed discrete ethics guidelines for human research with Indigenous people in Australia. Such guidelines respond to concerns about unethical and harmful processes in research, including that they entrench colonial relations and structures. This chapter sets out some of the limitations of these well-intentioned guidelines for the decolonisation of research. Namely, their underlying assumption of Indigenous vulnerability and deficit and, consequently, their function to minimise risk. It argues for a strengths-based approach to researching with and by Indigenous communities that recognises community members’ capacity to know what ethical research looks like and their ability to control research. It suggests that this approach provides genuine outcomes for their communities in ways that meet their communities’ needs. This means that communities must be partners in research who can demand reciprocation for their participation and sharing of their knowledge, time and experiences. This argument is not purely normative but supported by examples of Indigenous research models within our fields of health and criminology that are premised on self-determination.

This chapter reviews and synthesizes three major strands of recent research, alongside discipline-specific research design, from scholars of Language Issues in Comparative and International Education. The first strand is mixed methods research on the policy and practice of L1-based multilingual education programs, and their contribution to raising educational quality and addressing equity and inclusiveness worldwide. The second strand is qualitative, community-based research of educational programs aimed toward revitalization of minoritized, indigenous, and/or endangered languages. The third strand is empirical and theoretical research that seeks to document, contest, and reconceptualize the dynamics among dominant and non-dominant languages within and between international contexts. The authors explore points of synergy between studies, examine publication in the field from a meta-perspective, and suggest encouraging directions of future research, while highlighting the value of non-dominant languages as resources for education and life.

This essay provides an overview of key contemporary issues researched by scholars of Language Issues in Comparative and International Education. The authors present this scholarship around three main themes: L1-based multilingual education; language revitalization and education; and the power dynamics between dominant and non-dominant languages in educational settings. Research in all three themes challenges the view of monolingualism as the norm and invites the view that all languages are resources. These perspectives are relevant to the goals of educational development, particularly to equitable access to quality schooling. Recent research examines some stakeholders’ resistance to supporting and sustaining local languages and cultural practices. While language-in-education policy change may be slow, there are promising directions in research on how educators and communities exercise agency in transforming educational institutions to support plurilingualism and intercultural understandings. Scholars highlight the ideological, pedagogical, and policy-level supports needed for sustainable development of multiple languages, literacies and learning across contexts.

Since 2008, the Global North universities and the rural district of Chilanga, Kasungu in Malawi, have endeavored to create a dialogic, inclusive, and reciprocal knowledge-transfer project. Numerous years of consultation with community members resulted in the creation of Transformative Praxis: Malawi, a project dedicated to bettering human conditions in one of the most impoverished areas of the world. Through participatory action research (PAR), the Malawian community strongly indicated the need to foster critical thinking, creativity, and social entrepreneurship in the areas of Education, Health, and Development. Although local women were prominent in all stakeholder meetings, a growing suspicion emerged that the inclusive intent of our research-based work was actually supporting existing male-oriented power structures, which exist despite ongoing assurances of the active participation of women in decision-making, and the purported matrilineal societal nature of Malawi. Through a progressive series of critical incidents connected to literature on PAR and women in impoverished communities, this chapter chronicles the manner in which local Chilanga women unexpectedly and unconventionally solidified their participation and authentic leadership in a Global North and South initiative based in Malawi.

The New Zealand Teaching Council recently published Tapasā, a touchstone document to support non-Pasifika teachers in considering how their practices might be more culturally sustaining for Pasifika students, signaling continued national recognition of the need for teachers to inquire into their teaching practices as culturally informed and situated. In this chapter, we see this call as an invitation to look critically at the content of our initial teacher education literacy classes, and also to look critically at the methods of instruction and assessment. In our framing and analysis, we draw on several aspects of Tierney's (2018) framework for global meaning making, including “interrupting existing frames.” Despite Aotearoa New Zealand's official foundation in biculturalism, Indigenous ways of knowing have been historically marginalized in official schooling spaces, so there is a continuing need for rigorous interrogation of curriculum and practices that continue to privilege settler colonial perspectives and values. Using diffractive text analysis and talanoa vā, we explore the processes and first wave of insights to arise through a collaborative effort to decolonize some aspects of literacy teacher education curriculum.

Many academics have, as of late, shown commitment to decolonising academic research and/or have (re-)educated themselves, at least to some extent, on Indigenous epistemologies, methodologies and methods. While these efforts seem commendable, they may lead to tenacious expectations by some senior academics that new and emerging Indigenous scholars must use Indigenous research tools when conducting decolonising research with their communities. However, such expectations can create ethical issues in instances where the use of Indigenous research tools may be inappropriate or even harmful due to the ongoing impact of deep colonisation in the community. Such counterproductive expectations also disempower emerging Indigenous researchers as they undermine the researcher’s knowledge of what is and is not appropriate in their communities. In this autoethnographic account, an Indigenous knowledgemaker and her non-Indigenous academic mentor jointly reflect on the tightrope walk between meeting academic expectations and contributing to the decolonisation of Indigenous communities in meaningful, non-harmful ways. Drawing on Edward Said (1979, 2004), we contemplate whether the increasing dissemination of Indigenous scholarship has generated a type of ‘academic neo-orientalism’ that is characterised by academic outsiders exoticising emerging Indigenous scholars in various research matters and thus re-colonise (perhaps contrary to their sincere intentions) Indigenous scholarship.

This chapter provides an overview of the postcolonial literatures and their critiques relevant to internationalising curriculum in the educational administration and leadership field. The aim is to both examine the problems culturally and institutionally with primarily Anglo-American globalised curriculum that still holds a hegemonic position internationally as well as identify proposals in diversifying the field to reflect context, policy requirements and practices, and cultural values and principles. Discussed also are a number of initiatives that have been taken that provide a foundation for furthering this kind of curricular development, and a set of principles for internationalising the field that indicate the various levels and factors involved.

In this chapter, we contribute to ongoing discussions surrounding decolonising research and teaching in higher education by considering the place of language and linguistic diversity within this decolonising turn. The question we explore is how academic researchers and lecturers can recognise and respect that a move to decolonise will involve engaging with epistemologies expressed in different languages and expressed from diverse worldviews. We take inspiration from the work of linguistic citizenship researchers who make explicit the links between knowledge systems, languages and issues of equality/inequality. In linguistic citizenship, research connections are made between the everyday practice of translanguaging, moving between different linguistic repertoires by multilingual speakers, and transknowledging or the fluid movement between differing systems of knowing. To explore the potential of using the concepts of translanguaging and transknowledging as tools in the task of decolonising higher education research and practice, we discuss in depth two published research studies for critical reflection.

In this chapter, we explore the ethics of developing and maintaining meaningful and equitable relationships between Māori and Pākehā scholars and researchers. We begin by asking if it is even desirable, viable, or sustainable to pursue decolonising research in disciplines and relationships that are so deeply entrenched in settler-colonialism. We consider the challenges involved in managing an equitable distribution of decolonising labour in settings with few Indigenous scholars, particularly around the constant work of educating and pointing out ignorance, as well as the emotional labour of dealing with Pākehā vulnerability, inaction, and resistance to change. Building on the Kaupapa Māori principles of whanaungatanga and manaakitanga, we suggest a tangible set of seven strategies or ‘collaborative ethics’ to address these challenges in working together and in actively dismantling while privilege and white supremacy within the Academy and wider world of research.

Decolonizing involves dismantling deeply entrenched colonial systems of knowledge and power by disrupting colonial patterns of thought, questioning how teaching and learning occurs, and critiquing the colonial practices that are merged into the fabric of higher and adult education. Within this process, scholars and practitioners engage in interrogating teaching and learning approaches and developing a critical consciousness regarding what knowledge is valued and how this value is acquired. Within higher and adult education, limited research has explicitly considered the ways in which conceptions of andragogy and its accompanying instructional approaches might be deconstructed within the context of decolonization. The purpose of this chapter is to deconstruct and decolonize foundational higher and adult learning conceptual and theoretical frameworks that are routinely embedded within courses and programs. The conceptual and theoretical frameworks selected and analyzed include self-directed learning, transformative learning, and action learning as conventional examples of individual and collective instructional approaches employed within higher and adult learning settings. Maōri scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith's (2012) nine characteristics of theory that contribute to colonizing discourses and 25 Indigenous projects/principles are employed as the lenses that frame this analysis. These lenses include social science and methodological approaches and strategies that decolonize populations and promote Indigenous epistemologies.