Towards a Healing Curriculum: Addressing Cultural Inclusion for the Indigenous Sadri Community in Bangladesh

Abstract

Bangladesh is a Southeast Asian country where the indigenous people of the northern and southeastern region speak a variety of native languages. But none of their languages is included in the main curriculum for teaching or learning. As a result, these people are often not motivated to send their children to school. The language policy of the country does not include these indigenous languages in the core curriculum. Though the government of Bangladesh has started an initial plan to introduce education in mother tongues of five major indigenous languages in the country, they are not yet implemented. A large number of studies have emphasized the need of curriculum inclusion through using the indigenous/minority languages to improve literacy for the deprived people, but no step has been officially taken to include any of these languages as a mode of classroom instruction in Bangladesh. Thus my paper investigates the impact of a mother-tongue based intervention adopted in a research study to expand possibilities of the cultural inclusion approach for the indigenous Sadri community in Bangladesh. While working with the research participants I felt the need of a healing curriculum that will help the indigenous people to cope with learning struggles. My paper proposes a healing curriculum to reduce cultural differences and maintain a cultural ecology (Cajete, 2000; Cardoso & Jimenez, 2015) within communities through cultural inclusion. I also advocate for a healing curriculum concept to foster cultural inclusion (Richardson, 2011) to counter identify dysfunction of curriculum design in a settler-colony context.

Keywords

• indigenous people of Bangladesh
• learning struggles
• language policy
• cultural inclusion
• healing curriculum.