With increasing international recognition of Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty and rights, many settler-colonial countries over past decades have not only enacted laws and policies to safeguard the rights of Indigenous communities, but also sought to transform schools in substantive ways, aiming to dismantle enduring oppression, discrimination and microaggression. In line with these global development trends, Taiwan government has undertaken key legislative initiatives, including the enactment of the Education Act for Indigenous Peoples in 1998 and the Indigenous Languages Development Act in 2017. Furthermore, more than one hundred Indigenous schools have been established (IEIW, 2025), alongside recent efforts to the recognition and construction of Indigenous knowledge systems (Council of Indigenous Peoples, 2020).

While these developments signal movements towards Indigenous educational sovereignty, the actual implementation of Indigenous education remain contested. Scholars have sharply criticized the instrumentalization of Indigeneity (Rowen, 2019) and the symbolic policies implementation by non-Indigenous groups (i.e., the Han Chinese) (Nesterova, 2023) in Taiwan. Others have argued that Indigenous education within the public education system prioritizes enhancing national competitiveness over advancing Indigenous educational justice (Chen, 2012; Nesterova, 2019). This symbolic enactment of Indigenous policies without substantive change suggests that non-Indigenous and Indigenous peoples continue to be shaped by coloniality, with scholars further pointing to the ongoing processes of internal colonization (Lien, 2013; Yeh, 2019). Transforming the current schooling system therefore requires Indigenous teachers to recognize the realities shaped by the coloniality of knowledge, power, and being (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013) and to engage in praxis to dismantle the oppressive structures (Somby & Olsen, 2022; Shirley, 2017). 

A review of research on Indigenous teachers in Taiwan indicates that much of the existing literature has focused either on Indigenous teachers’ life histories or on their educational practices. Due to the separation between what Indigenous teachers experience and how they enact their practices, critical questions central to teachers’ transformative praxis remain insufficiently addressed, e.g., what motivates certain teachers to engage in actions that challenge structural constraints on Indigenous education for the benefit of Indigenous communities, and what hinders others from doing so? How can more Indigenous teachers be empowered to participate in transformative praxis? Many studies have attempted to explain teachers’ engagement in Indigenous education by emphasizing strong ethnic identity, often assuming that identity naturally triggers transformative action (e.g., Chou, 2020; Yang, 2018). However, identity alone is insufficient to sustain transformative practices (Chang, 2015).

For understanding Indigenous teachers’ engagement in transformative praxis, Freire’s theory of conscientization may shed light on how teachers’ understandings of their lived realities inform their educational practices. According to Freire (1970/2000), when individuals critically perceive reality and expose the structural, institutional, and cultural logics that sustain systems of oppression, they move beyond mythical explanations toward causal reasoning. Through this process, individuals acquire the capacity to intervene in reality as it is unveiled. However, Freire appears to assume a relatively smooth transition from reflexive understanding to transformative actions whereas in practice this process is often messy, contradictory, and uneven.

In order to clarify how teachers’ transformative actions relate to their reflexive understandings of realities, this study aims to:

1. Explore Indigenous teachers’ reflexive understanding of their situated realities,
2. Understand how Indigenous teachers seek to transform their perceived realities, and
3. Analyze how do Indigenous teachers’ reflexive understandings translate into actions that transform educational landscape.

By examining Indigenous teachers’ conscientization in Taiwan, this study contributes to global dialogues on decolonizing education by illuminating how critical consciousness is negotiated in East Asian settler-colonial educational contexts.

This study employs a qualitative multiple-case study design to explore Indigenous teachers’ reflexive understanding of reality and their transformative actions. Given that Indigenous teachers’ understandings and practices are largely shaped by their lived experiences, which are influenced by factors such as place of origin, age, class, teaching experiences, and workplace contexts, a multiple-case study approach enables a more comprehensive and nuanced exploration across diverse participants (Yin, 2003). To identify suitable research participants, we conducted ten group interviews with a total of 19 teachers to understand their experiences in promoting Indigenous education. We further invited five teachers who demonstrate critical reflection on their identities, histories, and positionalities within systems of oppression and who actively challenge unjust social structures through their educational work to participate in this study. Of the five participants, three were female and two were male. The participants spanned three generational cohorts, with one born in the 1970s, two in the 1980s, and two in the 1990s. All participants were born into Indigenous families. Two of them grew up in Indigenous communities and acquired cultural knowledge through everyday community life. The other three, however, described their families as weakly identifying as Indigenous and strongly oriented toward Han Chinese mainstream values, with efforts to assimilate into dominant society. For these three participants, Indigenous culture became an object of intentional learning in adulthood rather than an inherited everyday practice. In-depth interviews served as the primary method of data collection, supplemented by document analysis. Drawing on conversational methods (Kovach, 2010), we sought to foster relationships grounded in trust, openness, and relational accountability. Open-ended questions were employed during interviews to encourage participants’ narrative reflections. Each participant took part in two to three interviews, with each interview lasting approximately two to four hours. All participants provided informed consent and consented to audio recording. After transcribing the interviews verbatim, a summary of each interview were provided to the participants for member checking.

Based on the stories shared by the participants, the preliminary analysis identified two interrelated dimensions of reflexive understanding: (1) the relationship between the self and collective imaginations, and (2) relationships between Indigenous groups. These dimensions shaped teachers’ expectations of schooling, their pedagogical goals, and their educational practices. First, teachers who grew up in contexts where Indigenous cultural practices were weakly sustained described how stereotypes, social labelling, assimilationist expectations, and collective imagination shaped their ways of learning, living and being. For example, one of the participants described how she had been shaped by assimilative education to fit mainstream societal expectations, yet later, when Taiwan began to embrace multiculturalism and promote Indigenous revitalization, she was expected to “be Indigenous.” The externally imposed collective imaginations about who Indigenous people should be and how they should perform exerted powerful pressures on individuals, leading the participants to envision schools as spaces that foster students’ confidence to becoming themselves and provide opportunities to practice critical thinking and exercise autonomy. Second, teachers working in multi-ethnic contexts observed emerging hierarchies among Indigenous groups based on notions of ancestry and cultural authenticity. One participant described feeling that she is “not a ‘real’ Indigenous” but a “half and half”, and experienced a sense of inferiority when she met with the “‘real’ Indigenous”. She critically questioned how have Indigenous people had become entangled in judgments about being “pure-blooded Indigenous.” Such reflections illustrate how teachers grappled with internalized standards shaped by external judgments, while struggling to affirm the legitimacy of the “in-between” Indigenous positionalities and beginning to interrogate what makes an Indigenous person Indigenous. Together, these findings highlight that Indigenous teachers’ reflexive understandings emerge through relational encounters and reveal layered intra-Indigenous tensions that move beyond the colonizer/colonized binaries, thereby extending European and international debates on teacher reflexivity and decolonizing education.

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