Principal Investigator: Rick Colbourne, Indigenous Leadership and Management
Project Title: Decolonizing Education: Disrupting and Transforming Racist and Colonial Practices in Post-secondary Graduate Business Programs
Funder: Spencer Foundation

This research is a collaboration between post-secondary institutions in the Indigenous territories of Turtle Island (Canada and the United States), Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Australia to investigate how graduate business schools are working with Indigenous peoples to promote Indigenous business student success. Historically, racism and colonization has marginalized Indigenous knowledge systems, ways of knowing and ways of being in educational institutions globally. This research aims to address these issues by using Indigenous epistemological models and culturally appropriate methods to: (i) conduct a joint visioning gathering (workshop) and environmental scan (survey) to understand the context of systemic racism, decolonization, and reconciliation in business schools; (ii) facilitate yarning/sharing circles (focus groups) and conversational story telling (interviews) with Indigenous and non-Indigenous students and faculty to better understand the role of systemic racism and various reconciliation approaches in constraining or facilitating students’ educational pathways; and (iii) identify examples of successful and unsuccessful business education interventions by reflecting on the researchers own practices (story writing, autoethnographic case studies) and by observing Indigenous and non-Indigenous faculty in classrooms (ethnography). This project will develop and document best practices to transform post-secondary educational systems by promoting Indigenous knowledge processes and innovations that disrupt normative racial/colonial practices.