Global Education from an ‘Indigenist’ Anti-colonial Perspective

This paper troubles the dominant ways of pursuing of “global education” pointing to the possibilities of such education through an Indigenist anti-colonial lens. The intellectual objective is to ensure that global education helps destabilize existing power relations, colonial hierarchies, and re-centers key questions of equity, power and social justice in education. An important question is: How do we frame an inclusive anti-racist future and what is the nature of the work required to collectively arrive at that future? It is argued that one of the many hallmarks of the contemporary neo-liberal corporate agenda in education is the intensification of private and corporate commercial interests in schooling and education. Education is being tailored to suit the needs of the current labour market with funding being preferentially diverted to economically viable disciplines, the streaming of students to ensure a blue-collar workforce and with complete disavowal of education as a social and public good. The paper introduces an „Indigenist anti-colonial‟ lens highlighting Indigenous democratic principles for effective educational delivery. Indigenous communities see education both as a process and as something that happens at a place or site where learners openly utilize the body, mind and spirit/soul interface in critical dialogues about themselves and their communities. There is a shared understanding in these communities that people come to know through the simultaneous, dialogical and trialectic engagement of body, mind and spirit/soul, reinforcing the power of Land and Earth teachings; a need to understand the learner and the learning space; the nexus of society, nature, and culture; bringing an embodied connection to education; the importance of ethics, consciousness and responsibility; and engaging the coloniality of power. It is concluded that for the Global South, a rethinking of schooling and education has to take us back to our roots to examine our histories and cultural traditions of knowledge production, dissemination and use. We


Introduction
First, as I begin this paper I want to recognize and give thanks to our Ancestors (past and present), Elders and the Land on which we gather for your spiritual guidance, nurture and ways of knowing. I also want to share some African proverbs to contextualize my message. Among the Akan of Ghana there is a saying that "although the lizard and the gecko are from the same reptile family, they differ in behaviour and appearance" [Oketepa ne Oketew se din mpo a wonse honam]. The Kiembu of Kenya also caution that "you must end badly if you do not start well" [Igatura na kinatha twa ria murago]. Similarly, the Igbo and Ukwani of Nigeria point out that "to open eyes very widely does not mean seeing very well" [Igba anya hara hara abụghị ihụ ụzọ]. Taken together, what these proverbs teach us is that appearances can be deceiving. Therefore, we must be clear about what it is we are speaking to so as to not mislead our readers. I come to this discussion as a sociologist/social anthropologist located in both the critical and visionary traditions of our disciplines. "Critical education" as I have argued elsewhere (Dei, 1996) should be seen as a critique and interrogation aimed at understanding and transforming existing ways of knowing and educational practice. In this sense a critical take on "global education" is to move beyond merely intellectualizing projects of educational change to concrete action and specific practices aimed at subverting colonial, racist and imperial relations of schooling and education. Informed by Du Bois" (1903) assertion that the problem of the twentieth century would be the colour line, I propose that the problem of the twenty-first century is the deceit/conceit of the "global"/globalization (Dei, 2008).
In this paper I want to trouble the dominant ways of pursuing of "global education" while at the same time pointing to the possibilities of such education through an Indigenist anti-colonial lens. An important objective and intervention is to present 'education as a right', in terms of the right to education beyond all borders, as a component of 'global education' and as a spiritual understanding of education. I focus more on the consequences of our educational actions rather than the "good intentions" and "humanism" of pursuing global education. My intellectual and political objective is to ensure that the pursuit of global education helps destabilize existing power relations, colonial hierarchies, and re-centers key questions of equity, power and social justice in education. An important question for me is: How do we frame an inclusive anti-racist future and what is the nature of the work required to collectively arrive at that future? My discussion aims to be provocative as I exhort us all to move away from our comfort zones and a sense of complacency, to steadfast action with our intellectual backbone.
One of the many hallmarks of the contemporary neo-liberal corporate agenda in education is the intensification of private and corporate commercial interests in schooling and education. As McDetrmott (2014) opines since 1980s a neoliberal framework is shaping educational institutions and social relationships (see in particular Giroux, 2008;McMahon & Portelli, 2012;Harvey, 2005;Davies & Bansel, 2007;Gallagher & Lortie, 2005;Gallagher & Fusco, 2006;Ball, 2003;Goodson, 2001;Lasky, 2004;Hargreaves, 2005;Lingard & Mills, 2000;Day, 2002;Day & Smethem, 2009). Educational reforms in the 1980s are written with business/capital lenses with rewards for those who adhere to strictly business principles of educational delivery. Those who deviate are punished. Specifically, many teachers and schools have been asked to become "enterprising subjects" (see Ball, 2003;Gallagher & Fusco, 2006;Giroux, 2008;Bragg, 2007;Essed & Goldberg, 2002;Harvey, 2005). And, in fact, a disembodied neoliberal logics have framed educational reforms treating all students as universal learners without identities of race, class, gender, sexuality, [dis]ability, etc.
Today, education is sold to the highest bidder within the setting of corporate [Western] capital modernity. Wherever one turns we see large corporations and businesses with increasing and unfettered roles in the schooling and education of youth, not limited to private control of curriculum, faculty appointments, quality of research, and governing structures which support corporate agendas. It is very clear education is being tailored to suit the needs of the current labour market with funding being preferentially diverted to economically viable disciplines, the streaming of students to ensure a blue-collar workforce and with complete disavowal of education as a social and public good. The interest of corporate capital reigns supreme with intensified and glaring socio-economic inequities. Marginalized communities are made to bear the burden of privatization, with rising student and household debt. This has generated a disturbing discursive orientation, one that tends to solely highlight class and corporate capital dimensions in schooling, even from critical scholars who seek a genuine transformation of the educational system (see also Porfilio and Malott, 2008). It is not just that equity issues are being left to the sidelines. There is also a shameful appropriation of the equity discourse that traditionally highlighted issues of social responsibility, power, accountability, quality and access, and ensuring educational excellence through an emphasis on social justice considerations. The liberalization of education has resulted in discussions about "standards and standardization", "merit and meritocracy", "educational quality and students" achievement", and a push for "the basics" (i.e., English, math, and science literacy) in what we offer young learners as the requisite educational capital to access and succeed in a competitive job market.
Without any shred of doubt the political economy of contemporary schooling and education is shaped by global forces, considerations and fortunes. Labor market factors influence what goes on in our schools (e.g., course programming, curriculum development, staff development, and the general direction of educational strategic planning). Often times questions of academic viability of programs are evaluated in economic terms and/or are either pitted against economic imperatives. Private and corporate fundraising initiatives are strenuously pursued to woo big donors, in particular, business and corporate capital to be on-side in educational initiatives in schools. Academic programs that fail to become self-sustaining financially come under threat from educational administrators. Meanwhile global economic imperatives are scripting the lives of students, teachers and school administrators. Rising tuition fees are the order of the day and it is an uphill task to convince educators, administrators, families and governments how such developments are restricting educational access for a rising number of young learners.
There are specific international dimensions to the discussion. Smith-Aaron (2012) draws an interesting parallel in a conversation on the importance of the pedagogy of anti-colonial theorist, Franz Fanon, today. He argues that we have a contemporary era of neo-liberal globalization where the Global South is fully integrated into a global political economy detached from their previous specific colonial-metropolitan centre, but enmeshed in continued relationships of imperial subordination in a more extensive set of globalized imperial relations led by the West. The Global South continues to be defined by a political economy of peasants, semi-proletariats, proletariats, local and global capital, agricultural and raw material production and a comprador petty bourgeoisie. Communities of the Global South are still caught in a damaging and unsustainable globalized political economy which affords technological, cultural and economic integration into an ideology that fosters a worldly consciousness premised upon free-market neoliberal principles and a sort of "money consciousness" (Simon-Aaron, 2012). In effect, we need to think of how the pedagogy of global education is/can be relevant in the age of neo-liberal globalization and the global hegemony of the West. With globalization has come an intensification of information technology with arguably serious implications for inequities in knowledge production, validation and dissemination both locally and globally. How do we speak of global education in an age of smartphones, internet communications, market literacy, Facebook, Twitter, landlessness, immigration, "illegal" economies, wars on "terror", human trafficking, etc?
The encroachment of the "global" in education must be understood in the hegemonic sway of free markets, competitive individualism and corporate capital modernity. There is a restricted definition of education to serve individualized, private, corporate market interests. But education cannot just be about individual achievements, self-improvement or the actualization of corporate/private needs and interests. Education cannot work with a narrow definition of success. To the contrary, I believe an important objective of education should be improving our shared and collective lives and creating healthy and sustainable communities in which "communities of learners" become responsible for each of us as members. Such communities are defined by the collective good; a shared common [even with tensions and contestations] interest. Education needs not to be thought of as a zero-sum commodity. Consequently, if we are to approach global education as a collective good then it requires a serious interrogation of what has often masqueraded as "global" which, in fact, speaks of a particularity.

The Conventional Pursuit of 'Global Education'
Global education [GE] has taken on many forms. It is difficult to pin down one concise meaning. In fact, the term itself is highly contested. Dominant readings of GE easily tout the virtues of a) the global mutual interdependence of our worlds; b) a commitment to fundamental freedoms and rights of all peoples; c) acknowledgement of cultural diversity, tolerance of intercultural differences; and, d) the belief in the efficacy and power of individual action and learner (see Mundy and Manion 2008;Wright, 2011, p. 7; see also Abdi, 2006;Peters, Britton, & Blee 2008;Golmohamad, 2008). The idea of education for "Global Citizenship" is central to dominant discourses of GE, particularly, in the calls for democratic education and civic engagement. There is a conception of "[Euro] modernity" and a post-modern phase which is prescriptive in its adherents to politics and practice of the "cosmopolitan" and "cosmopolitanism". GE is also pursued from a particular moral and ethics stance with whiteness and the White body [re]fabricated as the archetype of humanity, or prototypic [Western] global citizen (Dei, 2012a,c; see also Spina, 2012). The "postmodern subject" is the global citizen of today. Apart from such problematic constructions with GE theoretical and philosophical desire to collapse [local/regional/national/international] borders and boundaries, and to imagine and re-configure new futures, one has to ask critical questions: Where is the recognition of the necessity to deal concretely with power, privilege and our relative complicities in sustaining colonial and oppressive relations and the persistent global structural inequities that we see around us? In effect, the question being asked of GE is about the coloniality of the global and the problematics of "global coloniality" (Grosfuguel, 2007). In its current form(s), GE does not address the historical and prevailing power relationships that come to organize the world in its seeking of harmony and peace, and thereby in this moment GE notwithstanding any good intentions, acts as a civilizing, colonial, imperial imposition on anyone who does not hold power. The current mantra of global education is anchored in and dictates the global corporate agenda of commercial interests, with its own language of choice, individual action, and market ideologies (see also Charania, 2011).
The era of neo-liberalism and global capitalist modernity has not only implicated us in terms of how we think of our identities and subjectivities, but fundamentally, what collective meanings we produce and bring to the sense and purpose of education. It is important for us to have a critical gaze that allows us to trouble the conceptual and dominant meanings of GE, one that allows us to focus on resistance to GE and, perhaps, abandon GE all together (if at all possible). We must re-imagine GE and consider its roots in a neo-liberal agenda (e.g., the scripting by forces of globalization) (see Portelli & Solomon, 2001;Portelli & Vibert, 2001;Peters, Britton, & Blee 2008;Kaye, 1992). We need to ask: does the concept of globalization have any redemptive qualities, a transformative potential, or it is simply a form of evil? Global relations are exploitative making some of us (particularly racialized, colonized and Indigenous bodies) see the "terror" of GE. Given the ills of contemporary society that can be traced to the forces of globalization, what make us, as educators, so sure that transformative qualities lay in the pursuit of GE? By virtue of asking of such questions, we can claim and redeem the transformative potentials or possibilities of GE. From where I sit as an educator in the academy of higher learning, I see that institutionalization of "higher education" has become a race to lucrative international markets. In the process, we seem to be losing our souls and what education and the search for knowledge is all about.
Additional critiques of neo-liberal discourse in global education must be made around how how 'success' is mobilised globally for the markers of industrial consumption and also to serve a corporate and business agenda. The high premium placed on some academic programs (e,g., MBAs and other marketable professional degrees as opposed to arts, humanities and social sciences) show the extent to which educational success in schooling is being defined. Of course, the neo-liberal educational agenda"s preoccupation with well-trained, professional teachers, school administrators able to deliver "measureable success" working with well-defined learning aims and goals to ensure that all learners have equal opportunities in education may be wellintentioned. But it is problematic when the discourse ignores the fact that the learning process occurs both within and outside the classroom and the school setting. We also need to contest the notion of transnationalism/global as "new". Many of us, especially those who have been forcefully displaced/bodies of colour have been transnational for over a hundred years. What does it mean then for us to think we are all of a sudden in an era of transnationalism/globalisation? While recognizing some of the nuances, especially, given the technological advances that allow us to be "global" in seconds, the notion of "progress" must be challenged given the disrupted development resulting from colonialism and on-going colonizations of the Global South. Furthermore, there are inherent dangers associated with the pluralism/democracy discourse whenever eschewed in the desires of the global. For example, while we may call for spaces for multiple histories/perspectives to co-exist in our educational institutions, many times the notion of "plurality" is co-opted -especially in "all sides of an issue", "freedom of speech" and "no one is off the hook" scenarios. Such developments which may be about collective responsibilities can be strategically evoked to absolve particular bodies [e.g., the dominant and the most powerful] from primarily being held accountable for their [in]actions.
However, the intellectual objective should not simply be to critique GE. I also want to focus on the "small acts" and "major acts" of rethinking education, borrowing from the teachings of an Indigenous anti-colonial perspective. I believe it is with such new rethinking that we can subvert the conventional understandings and approaches to global education. The global is about relations of power and/or asymmetrical power relations among different bodies, given that historically questions of access, power, authority, prestige within the global sphere/space are granted unequally to bodies and nations. In her excellent article, Charania (2011, p.364) writes of the need for a "pedagogy of suspicion" as we engage "global" from our situatedness and contradictory positions of history, power, domination, and subordination. Furthermore, the global cannot be rendered "disembodied, ahistorical and denaturalized" (Charania, 2011, p. 354; see also Taylor, 1994 writing in another context). Rethinking global education calls for both a "situated analysis" and a "political engagement" (Charania, 2011, p. 355). There are differential complicities of bodies in the North-South/East-West relations that formulate the global encounter. The global has become a site of re-colonial relations in the remaking of the Empire and Nation. There are recurring relations of domination, colonialism, and imperialism in accounts and practices of the "global", consistent with Grosfuguel"s (2007) notion of "global coloniality". Perhaps much more insidious, there is also the denial and evasion of race and power, and the problem of representing Whiteness as the standard bearer and acceptable normal in discourses of global education. How are we to understand and subvert the global with histories of privilege for dominant [White] bodies as welcome transnationals, border crossers and makers of the "home"? There is a need for the interrogation and dislocation of Whiteness and white identity from its power, privilege, authority, and entitlement in conventional practices of GE and in fact, Global Citizenship Education (GCE) [Dei, 2012c].

Asking New Questions
Anti-colonialism begins by necessarily asking new questions. In fact, Charania"s (2011) paper frames much of these questions for me: How does GE come to deal with power, privilege, tensions, conflicts and contradictions? Who and what defines the parameters of such global education? Where are the boundaries drawn, who is in and who is out, and simultaneously, who is policing the boundaries? Who is punished when they trespass defined borders and boundaries? Why is the idea of the global so paradoxical and yet so seductively "appealing to our [basic] humanistic instincts"? How is the "global mobilized and global engagements framed" in prevailing discourses of global education (Charania, 2011, p. 354)? How do we come to understand the specific historical and material relations, networks, and contexts for our global engagements? How does global education teach about the ongoing violence of colonialism, imperialism, racism and genocide? What are our relative complicities in the hegemonic sway of the global and our matching responsibilities to uncover and subvert the power hierarchies of the global through an Indigenist anti-colonial perspective? How do we subvert the ways global education has denied heterogeneity in local populations in the project of "sameness"? How does global education allow today"s learners to develop a strong sense of identity, self and collective respect, agency and empowerment to community building? What is the role of local knowledge in subverting the internalized colonial hierarchies of conventional schooling by promoting Indigenous teachings that focus specifically on social values, community and character education as part of critical global education? How do we revision schooling and education to espouse at its centre such values as fighting for social justice, equity, fairness, resistance, and collective responsibilities?
This paper does not attempt to answer all these questions. But it is important that such questions are asked. GE is about educating in the contexts of global and imperial modernity. GE implicates how we come to understand the challenges of internationalization and localization of [higher] education. The forces of globalization have presented us with particular forms of economic and political imaginaries. These imaginaries make it difficult to step outside the scripting for the broad economic and political forces of society to offer counter-visions of global education that not only speak to affirmation of difference, diversity and the complexities of identities and subjectivities, but also, foster a project pluralizing knowledges. Simply engaging in so-called "civic missions" towards local, national and international communities based on notions of "global citizenship", "diversity" and "social responsibility" is limiting if it fails to account for the way power mediates education, politics, culture and political economy. For us to re-imagine radical education for global citizenship, diversity and social responsibility the question of the coloniality of power must be confronted. "Pluralizing knowledge" is about power and power sharing given how we come to locate the geo-and body-politics of knowledge production (see also Andreotti, 2012). Similarly, the affirmation of difference, identity and history is a question of power. A so-called "hybrid epistemological space" (Andreotti, 2012) is a space of location and politics. We cannot have critical, intercultural and global citizenship and/or cosmopolitan education that are innocent of power and asymmetrical power relations that undergird our learning communities and societies. Global education indicts us all when we begin to ask questions about our roles and responsibilities as educators, learners or students in pursuit of the ideals of global citizenship. If we accept that by being involved in the academy we are all implicated in the dictates of academic capitalism, then we must accept the accompanying responsibilities to think through creative resistance that allow us to subvert hegemonic education.

The 'Indigenist Anti-colonial' Lens
I borrow from Wilson"s (2007) use of "Indigenist" to speak of an "Indigenist anti-colonial" perspective (see also Sium, 2011). Elsewhere (Dei, 1999) building on the pioneering works of Fanon (1963Fanon ( , 1967, Memmi (1965), Cesaire (1972), wa Thiong"o (1986, and many others, I have defined the anti-colonial discursive framework as a theorization of colonial and re-colonial relations, and the aftermath and implications of power and imperial structures on three issues/concerns: a) the processes of knowledge production, interrogation, validation, and dissemination; b) claims of Indigeneity and Indigenous ways of knowing; and, c) the recourse to agency, subjective politics and resistance. Among the theoretical suppositions of the anticolonial framework is the insistence that the transformation of social realities must start with asking new questions about what, how, and why of education: What sort of education should be taking place in our schools today? How do we come to learn and know using multiple lenses of critical inquiry of knowledge? How do we read and understand our worlds differently and share such multiple knowledges as a "community of learners"? (see also Dei and Asgharzadeh, 2001;Dei and Kempf, 2006;Dei 2012c). "Colonial" is defined as more than simply anything "foreign" or "alien". Rather "colonial" must implicate anything that is "imposed" and dominating". The concern also is with "re-organized colonial" relations rather than a supposedly "new colonial", and particularly, the ways re-organized colonial relations and mindsets structure and dominate social relations of knowledge production, ruling and social practice.
Such complex analysis allows for the interrogation of the power relations structured along lines of patriarchy, racist colonialisms, capitalism, as well as other sites of difference, namely, gender, class, ethnicity, religion, language, disability and sexuality. The anti-colonial lens is also about seeing decolonization as both a process and set of practices aligned with body, mind, soul/spirit interface, and a politics of healing ourselves from the psychological scars, cultural dislocation, and wounds of colonial mimicry. The anti-colonial lens is also about reclaiming the place of Indigeneity through the engagement of/with communities, sense of place, history, past, cultural memory and recovery. For the anti-colonial, the act of resistance to colonial relations is for our collective survival and our sense of a shared humanity.
There is a central place for local cultural ways of knowing, as well as the centering of local voices in the dialogue on education and social development. Teasing out points of contention, resistance, and opposition in these voices to dominant educational and development practices offers possibilities for transforming current social systems. Anti-colonial approach to critical study would examine how such local voices shift beyond mere critiques of the current order to transformative options that genuinely educate all learners. There is a shared understanding of what it means for contemporary education to be increasingly globalized. The local and global connections are being continually renegotiated as people cross borders and boundaries are drawn, re-drawn and erased. The key question asked is "what features will and should define the educational landscape of new frontiers?" This is where learning and teaching from a set of Indigenous principles and democratic ideals comes in.

Learning from Indigenous Democratic Principles
Collectively, we must embark upon a beginning journey of healing and redemption. In bringing the anti-colonial lens to GE we will have to use GE against itself. We must deconstruct and/or reject the "citizen" who is bound by dominant demarcations of nation and state, and re-think ourselves as humans. Using GE against itself is to educate critically about "global" poverty, racism, health, and environmental sustainability. It also means raising consciousness and key questions of ethics and responsibility (see also Dei, 2012b). I identify ten (10) Indigenous democratic principles as foundational to building towards global education.
1. "Communal/Community Living" as based on mutual trust and respect pursued through non-confrontational and non-competitive relations. The classroom as a social space must be shared with communities of learners. This space is built on mutual trust and interdependence; where building communities is preferred to destructive individualistic competition.
2. Respect for the sanctity of human action and social life as significant for sustaining communities. Every learner is valued and treasured as a whole person with something to contribute to discussions. There is sanctity to every duty or action and bringing sanctity to our work as teachers, students and administrators ensures respect and reciprocity.
3. Indigenous teachings of "life after death" and "the continuation of the world of the living and the dead" help regulate social/moral conduct, while enforcing accountability and transparency. Understanding that we are only temporary residents in a given space and that we would at some point be called to account for our actions in an afterlife is a fundamental teaching that stresses integrity and accountability. In other words teachers, school administrators and students cannot devalue, negate or disrespect other members of their communities (and their experiences, knowledges, histories and subjectivities) without being called upon to account for their actions at some point.

4.
Redistributive justice is about our human-hood. To be human is to embody the values and ideals of social justice, equity and fairness. While this principle values and ensures a resistance to oppression and social injustice, it also calls on education to equip all learners with critical equity thinking around the broad issues and questions of power and domination.
5. Connecting [individual and collective] rights and social responsibility. Advancing one"s rights [entitlements] to a place, location, or context comes with matching responsibilities. Having the right and the privilege to go to school and to receive education comes with a corresponding responsibility to put our learning to the benefit of ourselves, peers, our local and global communities. This is about education as a social responsibility.
6. The place of the individual is affirmed within the community in which they are a part of. The significance of the learner is that they are a part of a community, a community of learners. No learner exists on an island. We do not know just by ourselves. We learn about ourselves and our communities as mutually interdependent.
7. Understanding Earth/Land-based teachings (e.g., the interface of society, culture and nature; the nexus of body, mind, soul and spirit) as key to how we do education [broadly defined]. Such Land teachings emphasize the power of a Divine Creator, Mother Earth, connections of Inner self to Outer built on mutual respect, humility, co-existence with Nature and communities.
8. There is an interdependency of life and social existence. Life is about actualizing hopes, dreams and aspirations through work and action. Such dreams and aspirations can be collectively shared and requires collective action to be achieved. Sometimes the collective task comes through a shared resistance for survival. It is through such struggles that our histories and identities have been intertwined and connected.
9. There is no ownership of knowledge, but rather shared, collective, and collaborative dimensions of knowledge [in producing a global public sphere]. No one individual, community or group has a monopoly on what constitutes knowledge. Knowledge is coproduced with others. Knowledge cannot be owned, only shared. To be entrusted with knowledge is to guide against its sale and appropriation. The current marketplace of ideas where knowledge is bought and sold presents tremendous challenges for our communities.
10. The idea of communal knowledge as something for "global good" (e.g., schooling and education as common resource intended for the good of all). Histories and cultures as sites for the production of knowledges constitute community custodianship. This does not imply the Western sense of "owning" such knowledge. It speaks more about a responsibility to proliferate and maintain the education commons, by acting as caretakers of communal knowledge. Such knowledge must be for the schooling and education as a public good for all. When knowledge loses this sense of community custodianship we run the risk of appropriation for narrow, selfish and commercial interest. We see this in the use of knowledge as power to exploit, oppress and dominate. Equally learners in this context are not equipped to address questions of injustice, oppression and domination since those who hold onto and benefit from such misuse of knowledge do not want certain truths to be told.

Rethinking Global Education from an Indigenist Anti-Colonial Lens
How then do educators actualize a more effective approach to global education? Perhaps we can begin with the "small acts" of education. These are educational approaches, practices, strategies and philosophical orientations that can be pursued at the level of classroom teaching. The starting point for Indigenist anti-colonial GE is for educators and students to ask about the sort of education that should be taking place in our schools today and what we expect learners to get out of this education. Also, to ask what learners are going to do with their education? These questions call on the classroom teacher to see each learner as a complete/whole person. In other words, there is an appreciation of the inter-connections of body, mind, soul and spirit within the learner. Educators should therefore not only center the learner in their learning, but also, bring a particular understanding to how learners come to know and act responsibly in communities (see Dei, 2012b). Indigenous communities see education both as a process and as something that happens at a place or site where learners openly utilize the body, mind and spirit/soul interface in critical dialogues about themselves and their communities. There is a shared understanding in these communities that people come to know through the simultaneous, dialogical and trialectic engagement of body, mind and spirit/soul. Schooling and education is perceived as happening in spaces which nurture conversations that stress the importance and implications of working with a knowledge base about the society, culture, and nature nexus. It is important for our conventional schools to be such places. Such spaces can only be created within our current school settings when we all open our minds broadly to revision education (and for that matter, global education) in a different light and begin to see schooling as an opportunity to challenge dominant paradigms and academic reasoning.
As educators, we must see learners as whole beings whose educational journeys touch on the nexus and interface of the body-mind-soul and spirit, as well as the interface of society, culture and nature. This is new way of thinking and approaching education shuns any compartmentalization of the educational process for the learner. It is education that cultivates the complex dimensions of learners as full beings working with faculties of body, mind, soul and spirit. This orientation calls upon educators to move away from a Cartesian split or dualism of body/mind and spirit, and begin to appreciate young learners as capable of coming to know through the prism of the interrelationships between themselves, their communities and surrounding environments. Where this orientation is missing it becomes educators" responsibility to nurture it among their learners. Clearly, such educational approach or orientation has consequences for the way schools traditionally hierarchize knowledge, and privilege some learners as smart and bright, while others are deemed underachieving and unsuccessful or "failures". This approach also implicates how we assign "academic" to certain bodies while seeing other bodies as "applied" and practically/mechanically inclined. It will also mean accepting learners as spiritual beings who come into the school setting with their racial, class, gender, sexual, ethnic, cultural and spiritual identities, as well as their differential abilities.
Arguably, acknowledging the place of spirituality in schooling means a new and perhaps radical way of thinking about relations among learners, teachers and their social and physical environments. In the envisaged Indigenist anti-colonial educational practice, spirituality is rightly acknowledged as having a place in the schooling of young learners. Such spirituality grounds learners in an appreciation of their relations to a Divine/Creator, Mother Earth and Land teachings, understandings of Inner self and Outer collective and their interdependencies, as well as developing a higher purpose of life and social existence. This appreciation of Inner self, Life and the Outer environments helps situate learners in a consciousness of their surroundings; the importance of mutual co-existence and peaceful communion with others, including nature (i.e., an appreciation of Life and what the Earth and the Land have to offer). Schooling is viewed as a sacred activity and process, involving a community of learners. This approach also brings into focus the importance of humility in the claims to know about our complex worlds. While spiritual and Earth teachings are about the learner developing a strong self and personhood, and sense of worth and collective social purpose, it also speaks to what it means to be in communion with Nature and our environments. It helps learners start to develop an understanding of their humanness. The learner can only be enriched when school teaching and classroom learning are viewed as sacred activities demanding diligence, respect, an ethicality of care, and social responsibility for a community of learners that includes students, parents, educators and administrators.
The argument then is that unless education starts laying such foundations for the contemporary learner, calls to develop global responsibility, appreciation of global difference and diversity, mutual respect for all learners, educators, Elders, parents, guardians; discipline and respect for authority and reciprocity cannot be fully grasped. Teaching to be globally responsible learners has to begin with these basics. A key objective of GE must be to inculcate in young learners the ideals, expectations and responsibilities of the learner today, irrespective of their location and context. These include educators helping young learners think through ways to frame an inclusive anti-racist/anti-imperialist/anti-colonial global future fully aware of the nature of the work required to collectively arrive at that future. This educational orientation also helps learners develop deeper insights into ways of "re-fashioning" their roles as students to create a deeper and more relevant understanding of what it means to be human. Engaging learning from a multicentric and holistic location or space allows students to begin to seek ways to understand and engage global challenges facing humanity. It helps learners bring multiple lenses of critical inquiry and encourages the search for ways to tell multiple stories so as to get the whole story.
Global education at the local level must be about students reclaiming knowledges about themselves as learners, developing the courage to challenge and resist how history is taught to us, asking critical questions about the omissions, negations, devaluations, and absences in school curriculum, classroom instruction and teacher pedagogies. It brings questions of social justice to the fore of classroom teachings (i.e., classroom teachings that broach questions about power, race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, and social oppression). It is about working to re-create schooling as "learning communities" with a "community of learners". An Indigenist anti-colonial GE asks: what does it mean for learners of today to acknowledge and speak about their racialized, classed, gendered, sexualized embodiments? How do learners decolonize their learning, beginning with the self to implicate broader questions of power, history, ethics and responsibility?
We can begin to understand what is required in terms of the "big acts" of global education by raising key challenges about the internationalization and globalization of education in the contemporary sphere. Let me situate such discussion in the context of North-South relations, particularly, when it comes to aspects of the political economy of education (i.e., the commodification, commercialization and privatization in higher education). As Teferra and Altbach (2004) have noted in the context of Africa, internationalization has become consequential for the recognition, articulation, validation and dessimination of particular "overseas/international" study programs, graduate research and teaching/training partnerships and scholarly networks, and the development of particular policies, structures and strategies for managing, advancing and enhancing internationalization at institutional, regional, national systemic and organizational levels. Singh (2004) points out that there are fundamental differences on how internationalization, for example, is framed between countries from the Global North and Global South. African countries are primarily "sending countries" of mobile students, researchers and other professional staff, while the Global North constitutes "receiving countries" in relation to current cross-border provisions. One only needs to read immigration policies, practices and priorities of the Global North. The North-South partnership tends to be one-sided and exploitative. The history of the current internationalization has largely not been "self-initiated" and "self-directed" by the Global South. International cooperation in higher education includes modes of internationalization that continue to perpetuate colonial projects and post-independence legacies and their associated power imbalances (see Teferra and Altbach, 2004;Singh, 2004).
Consequently, the question for us to be asking is: how do we pursue internationalization of education that is mutually beneficial to countries of the Global North and Global South while being mindful of the unequal power relations? Apart from the current one-sided trend which has resulted in huge "brain gain" for the North, Singh (2004) and many others have also noted the potential for increasing the hegemony of Western knowledge, cultural values and languages at the expense of Indigenous knowledges (see also Assize-Lumumba, 2006;Dei, 2011), the dangers of cultural homogenization (Knight, 2008), curriculum homogenization and loss of cultural identity (Jowi, 2009); all of which are further exacerbating the continuing unequal [power] relationships between universities in the Global North and South. On a related caution, the whole idea of the internationalisation of education can be generally perceived as mutually beneficial. We may be right in explicitly aiming for this. One would see this as consistent with Paolo Freire's articulation of an inclusive, emancipatory community education in the "Pedagogy of the Oppressed". We need education to be beneficial to all in that we can decolonise and liberate ourselves. Yet, it is also suggested that we (as marginalised bodies and communities) may not be explicitly looking for this mutual desire of internationalization of education. We must simply see the benefits of education for all as a by-product of critical pedagogies of liberation as these require decolonisation.
In effect, there are competing politics and consequences for pursuing GE in different contexts. For the Global South, a rethinking of schooling and education in the global sense and global public sphere has to take us back to our roots to examine our histories and cultural traditions of knowledge production, dissemination and use. We need to look at education from this source in terms of its connections with family life, community and social relevance. This means drawing from the lessons of how knowledge is impacted through early socialization practices, childrearing practices, teaching and learning responsibilities of community membership, and the application of knowledge to solve everyday practical problems within one"s backyard and beyond. We need a re-envisioned education that creates spaces in schools for parents, Elders, families and cultural custodians to come in as teachers to work on a daily basis to complement the work of professionally trained educators. Students must also be firmly grounded in their local communities and engaged as a practical component of every classroom. Teaching must see students located in their communities, implement their classroom ideas and also engage community knowledge(s). We have to go back to the days when the separation of school and community was non-existent and was nourished and cultivated in every sense of the link.
But such bodies of knowledges and ways of knowing are also beneficial to countries outside of the Global South. In my most recent work on Indigenous African philosophies (Dei, 2014a,b), I have been impressed with the ways some local African scholars are using local proverbs, folktales and songs as powerful instructional, pedagogic and communicative instruments for teaching young learners (see some of the extensive literature on African proverbs in such works as Yankah, 1989;1995;Opoku 1975;1997). I strongly believe the teachings of such African cultural and Indigenous systems of knowing have pedagogic and instructional lessons and relevance for youth in Euro-American contexts as educators confront the challenges of youth [in]discipline, respect, reciprocity, social ethics, character and moral development, responsibility and accountability.
The internationalization processes and the colonizing and imperializing projects of higher education bring to the fore the urgency of pursuing an Indigenist anti-colonial education in schools. In paraphrasing Willinsky (1998), I would reiterate that GE must help learners develop a critical awareness of how the effects of colonial education continue to live on in the "unconscious aspect of our education" today (p.3). GE must ask: what kinds of anti-colonial educational discursive practices with "the potential to resist and disrupt hegemonic patterns of knowledge production" have historically subverted or restricted any possibilities for truly transformative work, including "ethical relationalities and solidarities in local, national and transnational academic spaces"? (Andreotti, 2012, p. 3). There are particular areas in which GE must place a more critical gaze. One such area is the coloniality of science, history and knowledge production. Contemporary education must challenge what has passed as "knowledge" in the prism of Western science/scientism and account for an interface between Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge systems or forms. Schooling must be about teaching the multiple sciences of the global contexts, which includes Western science and Indigenous sciences. Anticolonial educators must embrace the struggle for anti-hegemonic education to undo/subvert the whiteness of the educational curriculum. Learners must be educated to appreciate the ways our complex, entangled colonial histories have and continue to play out.
GE must work against the coloniality of space and identities as taken up in schooling and education. Spaces have the tendency to reproduce hegemony, dominance and privilege. Spaces also come with particular histories and readings. However the coming into any space as part of a critical, anti-colonial educational process must engage the fact that spaces themselves come with varied and contested meanings and politics. Critical, anti-colonial education can help learners subvert/interrupt spaces with their politicised identities. Going to school cannot become simply learners asserting their sense of entitlement to such spaces. It must also require that learners ask what politics are required for coming into such spaces to create open access, inclusion of other bodies, knowledges, histories, experiences and identities. For example, what does it mean to require that all learners note the trans-historicity of our identities and make the required "identifications" necessary to promote structural changes? In today"s world, as learners we cannot speak about the trans-historicity of our identities and subjectivities without coming into dialogue with colonialism and globalization.
GE must bring a more nuanced understanding to colonialism and the linkages of globalization.
Colonizing relations are very much tied to social and economic formations and learners must be equipped to see these connections (e.g., the entanglements of racisms, capitalism and colonialisms, patriarchy). It will also require an understanding that while we may want to collectivize the colonial experience, it is equally important for us to note that colonialism was not the same everywhere. In effect, understanding both the colonial experience and the colonial encounter we must note that there are important historical continuities, discontinuities and disjunctures. The violence of colonial relations and encounters are not always easily discerned. Pierre Orelus (2007) makes the excellent point that "colonization is not as profound as the psychological scars it has caused "postcolonial" subjects" (p. xi). How do we identify those who have benefitted, and continue to directly and indirectly benefit from colonial processes and colonizing experiences? This calls for critical, dialogic encounters and exchanges. Loomba (1998) has charged that colonial discourse studies seek to investigate the intersections of ideas and institutions, knowledge and power that justify and maintain the dominance/hegemony of specific epistemologies and institutions. The experiences of the "Euro-colonial" moment and "Euro-modernity" in general present specific and related challenges in the lived moments and experiences of racialised bodies.
In pursuing an Indigenist anti-colonial Global Education as a project of "decolonization" it must be acknowledged that the project is itself filled with risks and uncertainties. There are no guarantees -particularly as to where this education leads us. Decolonization entails claims of Indigeneity and the reclaiming of spirit, culture and identity. Fanon (1967) long ago reminded us that the issues of decolonization have not yet been addressed because colonization is itself ongoing. The violence of the (ongoing) colonial encounter makes (continued) decolonization necessary. As decolonization emerges from colonization it must be rooted in a critical archeology and dialecticism of the past, culture, history identity and the question of the Land. It is the understanding of this dialecticism that fosters resistancein this sense, resistance for survival of the colonized body. There are many paths to decolonization; it is not about mainstreaming practice. We can discuss its multifaceted forms given the varied tropes of colonialism, capitalism and imperialism. The decolonization project cannot seek for legitimation and validation from the oppressor/domain; it should be about developing a critical consciousness of oneself, place, history, identity, culture and politics.
In "decolonizing the school curriculum", we require a theory of change, that is a reconsideration of the history of our schools, colleges, and universities as well as an analysis of access and exclusion/inclusion over the years. For example, it requires an understanding for learners as to why the prevailing tension in our institutions is of "academic freedom" and "academic responsibility". We repeatedly hear arguments about how college/university curriculum is in the hands of professors and deans, and calls for curriculum change need to be balanced with the desires of keeping the college/university "marketable". There is an academic responsibility to make education more relevant to the diverse communities we serve. There is a responsibility of the public educational system in ensuring our graduates have been exposed to critical equity thinking. Educators must be bold to ask: What constitutes an academic text? Who is given authority to speak, to decide which courses are offered, and what is the purpose of curriculum (e.g., to meet market needs or to promote genuine learning)? Are we teaching students to memorize facts, or to be critical learners so that our knowledge is not restricted to a particular framework/understanding? What sorts of teaching and learning strategies are required in order to develop active and critical thinking?
There are also questions about language. What do we see as the role of the English language and first/second/their language acquisition in the education of youth today? I present the question as a political statement on English being a dominant language. Language actualizes a culture and a civilization. Language is critical to articulating one"s identities. Language is about resistance. There is thus an importance to engaging contemporary language and literature and what this means in the pursuit of critical education in a multilingual and multicultural setting. On the use of English language and new models of writing in the 21st century, there are questions of access: who is our audience when we write/speak? Who do we seek to dialogue with and how? What modes of communication produce multiple knowledges and who is left out or excluded? On which bodies have the power of various genres and styles of writing and the creative process (e.g., fiction, non-fiction, journalism, poetry, blogging, digital and electronic technology, hiphop, etc.) been conferred? It would be hard to convince me that Global Education should be immune to or inoculated from these questions.

Conclusion
In framing this paper as a way to rethink "global education" starting with the "small acts", I have highlighted the following as key to an Indigenist anti-colonial approach: the power of Land and Earth teachings; a need to understand the learner and the learning space; the nexus of society, nature, and culture; bringing an embodied connection to education; the importance of ethics, consciousness and responsibility; and engaging the coloniality of power. Educators must reimagine both the space and practice of education. We need options in contemporary schooling and education. There is an urgent necessity to produce oppositional counter discourses of resistance, and work with counter/alternative visions of education, which includes the informed voices of a diverse community of learners and teachers.
The era of global neo-liberalism has not only implicated us in terms of how we think of our identities and subjectivities, but also what collective meanings we produce and bring to the sense and purpose of education. We must borrow from the teachings of Indigenous anti-colonial perspectives and begin to promote counter-visions of schooling and education because conventional schooling has not served all our communities. Critical education brings to the fore questions of power, colonial imposition and the imperial tendencies of knowledge. The politics of critical education require contestation as to what constitutes knowledge. Such contestations are also struggles over images, imaginaries, ideas that have constituted the "new normal". However, the struggle is more than simply contesting the normalized. It is also about understanding the question of "voice dislocation" and the necessity for affirming and reclaiming such displaced voices. Critical education is about a call for us to be "human again" in ways that also allow us to work with all our myriad identitiesrace, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and of course spiritual identities. Inclusion is about bodies, knowledges, and experiences. Inclusion is not bringing people into what already exists; it is making a new space, a better space for everyone. A space that values, acknowledges, and brings to the forefront those on the peripheries.
Inclusive education, as one of the main goals and objectives of GE, must involve three (3) core tenets: "multicentricity", "Indigeneity", and "reflexivity". Multicentricity must be approached as recognizing multiple civilizations in the human world as a challenge of any universalization and hegemonies of particular knowledge(s). Indigeneity must be viewed as a mode of thought and practice that sees inclusion as developing from "Indigenizing the Curriculum" or engaging Indigenous and non-Western concepts, philosophies of education, ethics, values, social norms in the education of the learner. It involves working with Indigenous cultural knowings, which may include students' immediate lived experiences and cultures, to problem-solve and to develop critical thinking skills. It is recognizing the languages in the classroom, rather than covertly telling students that their past language, history, and culture are not part of the everyday curriculum. Reflexivity, on the other hand, helps reconnect individual learners and the environment, self and society, identity and reality in social and scientific inquiry. It is an interrogation of the interconnectivity of Self and the external world, and the responsibilities we have to our social, physical, and ecological environments. Reflexivity helps to capture suppressed cultures, the hidden rules, norms, and assumptions of schooling. Through reflexivity, educators bring integrity to their curricular and pedagogical practices. Through inclusive education, we may subvert the hegemonic neo-liberal agenda and begin to reclaim global learning.