OISE Leithwood Award winner shares humbling journey to understanding Indigenous language, literacy skills and practices

Dr. Lois Maplethorpe has been named the 2024 winner of the Leithwood Award for OISE Outstanding Thesis of the Year.

The Leithwood Award is presented to one recipient annually in recognition of exceptional, cutting-edge research conducted by an OISE student in the last phase of their doctoral work.

Established in 2003, this award is named in honour of Dr. Kenneth Leithwood, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Leadership, Higher & Adult Education and former Associate Dean, Research. His research on educational leadership and educational change contributed to shaping theory, policy and practice in most jurisdictions in Canada, England, the United States, and Australia.

In recent years, Dr. Mona El Samaty won the Leithwood Award in 2022 for her research on the linguistic and cultural realities of Montreal. Dr. Rebecca Beaulne-Stuebing received the 2023 award for her research on Indigenous grief medicines.

To explore this award in more detail, we share the award citation, and spoke with Dr. Maplethorpe about her journey.

The citation

The Leithwood Award for OISE Outstanding Thesis of the Year for 2023 is awarded to Dr. Lois Maplethorpe from the Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development. Dr. Maplethorpe’s thesis, entitled “Growing Our Roots: Exploring the Home Language and Literacy Environment within the Context of Indigenous Ways of Knowing and Being,” was recognized for its research excellence, including positional sensitivity and ethical relationality in the conception, design and execution of the study; significance; and impact, including knowledge mobilization with Indigenous communities and as an example of community-led, collaborative partnership research. Dr. Maplethorpe was nominated by her faculty supervisor, Professor Eunice Jang.

“I’d like to congratulate Dr. Maplethorpe on her doctoral thesis. I had the pleasure of serving on Dr. Maplethorpe’s committee so I am very familiar with her thoughtful and in-depth research,” says Professor Michal Perlman, OISE’s Acting Associate Dean, Research, International & Innovation. “Her thesis is a stellar example of community-led, collaborative partnership research.”

The award committee would also like to acknowledge the runner-up:

Dr. Ariana Simone from the Department of Applied Psychology and Human Developed receives an honourable mention for her thesis “Understanding the facilitators and experience of disclosing nonsuicidal self-injury to informal and formal sources” which was commended for its significance, research excellence, broad scope and impact across multiple audiences. Dr. Simone was nominated by her Faculty Supervisor Professor Chloe Hamza.

Arriving at her doctoral thesis

Dr. Lois Maplethorpe has always been a cultural outsider to the four First Nation communities that she and her family live close to in southern Alberta, but she was always invested in learning and understanding more about the People, culture and history of this area.

When a teacher education program opened at the cultural college on the four-band site in the 2000s, she opted to receive her education there rather than at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, an hour’s drive away.  “I spent two and a half years there learning alongside Indigenous preservice teachers, and I really was the outsider,” she said, “I was the minority.”

She worked for years to understand the importance of Indigenous culture and education’s role in that—especially within early learning. When it came time to do her doctoral dissertation, she wanted to explore this further, connecting herself with an Indigenous pre-school that set her on her academic path.

“I see many, many Indigenous children in programs that do not represent Indigenous cultural beliefs,” observed Maplethorpe, now an instructor at Red Deer Polytechnic in central Alberta. “So, they go there and they have to pretend that their culture doesn't matter. The children don't get to live their culture—they have to put it aside when they go to school. That should never be the case.”

Taking a community-embedded, collaborative approach to her thesis, she sought to explore disconnects between western mainstream perspectives of early language and literacy compared to Indigenous ones. The research followed an Indigenous methodological approach grounded in what she describes as relational accountability, reflexivity, and reciprocity.

Building trust, feeling humility

Before any research activities began, Maplethorpe says she had to carefully develop trusting relationships in order to create ethical space to hear other voices and bridge cultural differences. In turn, Indigenous stakeholders and right-holders were full and equal partners in the research project, having a final say in how the data was collected and how the results were analyzed, interpreted, and shared to ensure they remained true to the participant voices and that cultural values, beliefs, ways of knowing and sacred knowledge remained protected.

It was this that was the most humbling for Maplethorpe. “The idea of being humble, the idea of how important relationship is, and honouring Indigenous ways, I learned so much about that during the study,” she says upon reflection. “This study allowed me to live the experience alongside my Indigenous co-researchers, to be a humble listener and learner.

Maplethorpe’s methodological approach involved mapping Indigenous perspectives onto Western theoretical approaches, practices, perspectives, and assessments of language and literacy to explore culturally dissonant aspects that may contribute to misinterpretations and mismeasurement of Indigenous children’s knowledge and abilities. She says that Non-Indigenous educators may not recognize and honour unique Indigenous ways of knowing and being, traditional languages and cultural practices.

These perceptions and biased measurement tools often follow a negative, deficit approach and can become the basis for pedagogies, programming and interventions which may be culturally inconsistent, less meaningful, and even harmful to young Indigenous children and their families.

Hopes for translation

Maplethorpe, humbled and grateful to receive the Leithwood Award, hopes that the recognition from this award will help to further disseminate the study’s findings and result in smoother transitions for Indigenous children and families in early learning environments and more culturally representative educational experiences going forward.

“I feel like it's something that is already starting here, and it’s reverberating out,” she says, noting promising changes she has seen at the local level. “I am hoping that our collaborative work reaches the frontlines of education where  educators are working, evaluating and assessing children and working with families.”

“Cross-cultural allyship is so important as we co-create ethical spaces to better understand and appreciate each other,” she adds.

For additional context, Dr. Maplethorpe spoke with OISE’s department of Applied Psychology & Human Development. You can access that conversation here.