Our work brings together three educators – a doctoral student and sessional instructor, a middle years teacher and master’s student, and a university professor – who come to this project from divergent positionalities, ancestries and educational geographies. Across the span of one summer, we engaged in critically reflexive dialogue, sharing field texts including teaching artefacts (syllabi, assignments, lesson plans) and personal writings that map our entangled pedagogical transformations. These stories are not linear narratives of improvement, but rather messy, layered accounts of yearning, grief, contradiction and co-becoming in entangled relational worlds. As we story our experiences, we ask: What does it mean to teach science in ways that resist colonial erasures? How might we reimagine science education as a site of ethical response-ability, rooted in Land, story and ancestral relation? Our inquiry is situated in the Canadian education system, but it resists nationalistic framing by foregrounding Indigenous sovereignties, spiritual geographies and the deep affective currents of learning in stolen land. With the reminder that locating ourselves – through ancestry, land, language and community – is an act of relational accountability; we delve into situated, plural stories that trouble the singularity of “Science” itself.

Collaborative autoethnography can function as a means of reclaiming certain African realities that have been co-opted by colonial epistemes and language. This can be significant in very concrete ways: northern Uganda is suffering a catastrophic loss of tree cover, much of which is taking place on the collective family landholdings that academia and the development sector have categorized as “customary land.” A collaboration by ten members of such landholding families, known as the Acholi Land Lab, explores what “customary ownership” means to them and their relatives, with a view to understanding what may be involved in promoting sustainable domestic use of natural resources, including trees.