Lessons from canoe school: reimagining space and curriculum for a sustainable future in the Marshall Islands

Placed in the context of debates on decolonizing schools, particularly the role of Indigenous culture in the curriculum, this article discusses key insights arising from the study of a grassroots educational programme focused on teaching the traditional skill of canoe building to out of school youth in the Marshall Islands. A ‘patchwork ethnography’ which draws on eight years of engagement and four periods of fieldwork, it argues that the programme skilfully navigates a reimagined educational ‘third space’ (Soja 1996) by drawing on aspects of formal Western schooling, as well as capitalist work practice combining these with Marshallese approaches to knowledge and learning. By drawing on Klafki’s work on ‘educational substance’ (2000), it outlines how the canoe itself constitutes the curriculum that is taught. It concludes with some reflections on what we can learn from the approach more broadly for both Indigenous models of education and formal schooling.