Indigenous education research has been profoundly shaped by Western imperialism, with dominant research paradigms historically embedded in colonial power relations and Western epistemologies (Smith, 2012). Much of the existing international scholarship has emerged from settler-colonial contexts such as Canada, Australia, the United States, and New Zealand, where distinct settler populations displaced Indigenous peoples in the pursuit of territorial sovereignty. Within these contexts, extensive theoretical and empirical work has examined Indigenous education and cross-cultural teacher collaboration. However, the applicability of these frameworks to societies operating through different colonial mechanisms remains underexamined. Contexts characterized by multiple and layered colonial histories—without a single, coherent settler population—raise distinct questions regarding power, knowledge, and educational authority that cannot be fully addressed through dominant settler-colonial literature alone.

Taiwan represents such an undertheorized context. Taiwan is home to sixteen officially recognized Indigenous nations, comprising approximately 2.3% of the national population, alongside Plains Indigenous groups whose official recognition remains contested. These communities have experienced successive colonial regimes, including Dutch, Spanish, Qing, Japanese, and Chinese Nationalist rule. Rather than a single regime replacing another, these historical layers have produced a complex colonial formation in which Indigenous knowledge, identity, and sovereignty have been continually reshaped within processes of nation-building, cultural governance, and education.

In Taiwan's urban schools, Indigenous students often constitute less than two percent of the student population. Indigenous knowledge remains institutionally marginalized and is frequently positioned as supplementary cultural content rather than as a foundational epistemological framework (Nesterova, 2019). Recent Indigenous education policies mandate the inclusion of Indigenous languages, histories, and cultures across school curricula; however, these mandates have been implemented without corresponding professional development infrastructure (Nesterova, 2019). Prior research has shown that non-Indigenous teachers in Taiwan often lack sufficient understanding of Indigenous peoples and cultures, leading to stereotypical interpretations and deficit-oriented expectations toward Indigenous students (Yen, 2009).

These conditions exemplify broader theoretical challenges in multiply colonized contexts where settler-colonial frameworks, premised on binary Indigenous-settler relations, inadequately capture the complexity of teacher positionality and epistemic authority. In urban contexts where Indigenous students represent an extreme numerical minority, non-Indigenous teachers encounter fundamental epistemic asymmetries when curriculum content requires engagement with Indigenous epistemological frameworks outside their professional training. This study argues that professional anxiety emerging under such conditions should not be understood simply as implementation failure, but signals teachers' growing awareness of the limits of their professional authority and epistemic positioning. Rather than treating professional anxiety as a deficit, this research conceptualizes it as a potentially generative condition for professional learning.

Drawing on a two-year collaborative action research project (2023–2024) involving two Han Taiwanese teachers and two Indigenous educators (Kavalan and Paiwan) in an urban elementary school in northern Taiwan, the study examines how sustained cross-cultural teacher co-planning enables teachers to traverse professional anxiety. Building on Donald's (2012) concept of ethical relationality, the collaborative process challenged teachers' conventional positioning as curriculum experts. Through sustained relational engagement, Indigenous knowledge came to be positioned as authoritative in curriculum decisions. This repositioning emerged through teachers' ongoing confrontation with the limits of their Han-centric pedagogical expertise. The study addresses three research questions: (1) How do Han Taiwanese and Indigenous teachers experience and navigate professional anxiety during collaborative Indigenous curriculum development? (2) What pedagogical and relational practices emerge when teachers work across epistemic differences? (3) How does sustained collaboration reshape teachers' understanding of their professional knowledge and its limitations? This study contributes empirical insights to international Indigenous education scholarship by examining teacher collaboration in multiply colonized urban contexts.

This study adopts a participatory action research design to examine teachers' professional learning within cross-cultural co-planning practices. Teachers were positioned as co-learners engaged in iterative inquiry under uncertainty and asymmetrical epistemic authority. The research was conducted across two academic years (2023-2024) during early implementation of Taiwan's 2019 Indigenous education policy mandate. Four teachers participated: two Han Taiwanese teachers (including the researcher) and two Indigenous educators (one Kavalan, one Paiwan), all teaching in an urban public school where Indigenous students comprised less than 2% of the population. Eight intensive co-planning workshops (3-5 hours each) were conducted quarterly, generating approximately 32 hours of audio-recorded dialogue. This pacing allowed teachers to pilot curriculum modules and return with implementation reflections. Data sources included: audio-recorded co-planning sessions capturing collective negotiation; semi-structured interviews with each teacher; researcher field notes and reflexive journal systematically documenting experiences of anxiety, epistemic uncertainty, and shifting positionality; and curriculum artifacts. This triangulation enabled examination of professional learning from collective, individual, and auto-ethnographic perspectives. Data analysis followed a reflexive thematic approach, attending to how all four teachers—including the researcher—articulated anxiety, negotiated epistemic boundaries, and repositioned themselves across the two-year trajectory. Workshop recordings, interviews, and field notes were analyzed iteratively, with emerging themes triangulated across sources. Analysis prioritized moments of hesitation, disagreement, and uncertainty as sites where professional learning became visible. Consistent with Indigenous research ethics and OCAP principles (Schnarch, 2004), Indigenous educators retained authority over cultural knowledge and veto authority over interpretation and dissemination. All analytical themes were reviewed collaboratively. The researcher's positionality as Han teacher-participant-researcher was further complicated by Pingpu Plains Indigenous ancestry without corresponding cultural identity or community belonging. This ambiguous positioning—neither fully 'Han' genealogically nor Indigenous in lived experience—embodied the complexities of positionality in multiply colonized contexts that this study theorizes, requiring continuous reflexivity regarding power dynamics and epistemic authority.

Findings reveal that professional anxiety in cross-cultural Indigenous curriculum collaboration operates asymmetrically. Han teachers' anxiety manifested as silence and withdrawal—a privileged retreat from epistemic responsibility. Conversely, Indigenous educators experienced dual agency anxiety: pressure to simultaneously fulfill professional teaching roles while bearing cultural representation labor, intensified by Han colleagues' silence. Cross-cultural collaboration progressed through four transformative stages. Anxiety: Han teachers' silence stemmed from fear of harm, yet paradoxically imposed greater labor on Indigenous colleagues. Conflict: Indigenous educators challenged Han-centric assumptions—confronting deficit framings that positioned urban Indigenous students as "lacking cultural nourishment" or Indigenous practices as "traditional" while Han knowledge remained unmarked. These challenges made visible how seemingly benevolent concern structured epistemic violence. Negotiation: Transformative shift occurred when Han teachers reframed uncertainty from professional failure to relational accountability, articulating "I don't have authority to determine this—how should we approach it?" as epistemic humility that redistributed interpretive authority. Co-construction: Sustained dialogue repositioned Han teachers from seeking cultural mastery to creating conditions where Indigenous knowledge systems held authority. Specific practices emerged: Han teachers developed accountable questioning that explicitly named epistemic limitations; Indigenous educators modeled relational knowledge approaches; collaboratively, teachers created epistemic holding spaces where multiple knowledge systems coexist without Han synthesis, positioning Indigenous educators as knowledge authorities and Han teachers as dialogue facilitators. Sustained collaboration enabled teachers to articulate shifts in understanding professional knowledge. Han teachers identified specific limitations of their pedagogical approaches. Both groups reframed professional competence from mastery toward sustaining dialogue across epistemic difference. Teachers' ongoing engagement beyond mandated sessions indicated emerging sustainability through relational commitment. These findings contribute empirical evidence of Donald's (2012) ethical relationality in multiply colonized urban contexts, revealing how extreme numerical minoritization produces asymmetrical anxiety requiring attention to dual agency burdens and relational sustainability mechanisms.

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