The Design Ethics of Culturally Sustaining & Revitalizing (Re)Presentation

Abstract

Educational innovations with emerging technologies often disregard the potential historical and cultural damage of those technologies, which further disenfranchises Indigenous communities from a fruitful relationship with them. This is especially true for narrative-based digital technologies, because storytelling is held as a sacred practice of knowledge sharing among Indigenous communities. In response, we wondered how we could create technologies (digital and non-digital) that support Indigenous ways of knowing, especially through storytelling. This is a process we call (re)presentation. Specifically, our work is centered on building culturally sustaining and revitalizing models for (re) presenting stories. Our team engaged in an iterative and reflexive design process with Indigenous and non-Indigenous community members, educators, designers, and researchers. We present a single design case of (re)presenting an Indigenous story across interactions and share four ethical tensions that we encountered throughout our process. Our (re)presentation of each tension includes a critical reflection as well as our shared journey navigating the ethical tensions in practice and what that means for how we approach learning design