In the USA, Indigenous youth are punished more frequently and severely as compared to their White settler peers. Hyperpunishment of Indigenous youth should be understood in the cultural history of a settler-colonial nation. In this chapter, we present a formative intervention, Indigenous Learning Lab, implemented at an urban high school in Wisconsin through a coalition of an Anishinaabe Nation in Great Lakes, the state’s education agency, the Wisconsin Indian Education Association, and a university-based research team. Indigenous Learning Lab including Anishinaabe youth, families, educators, and tribal government representatives and non-Indigenous school staff examined their existing system and designed a culturally responsive behavioral support system. In the following year, the team worked on the implementation of the new system. We utilized transformative agency by double stimulation with a decolonizing approach to facilitate the process. Our decolonizing approach was based on sovereignty and futurity and utilized funds of knowledge in Indigenous communities.

In the immediate post-1989 period, the symbol of the cross remained a focal point both for the power-holding conservatives and for the anticlerical post-Communists and continued to define new frontlines of conflict. After the fall of Communism, as the Catholic Church in Poland regained its hegemonic position, the cross became a visual marker of the new political order and a metonymy for the legislative changes that sanctioned the Christian worldview in Polish public life. Examining the contexts in which the symbol intersected with politics, including the abortion debate, the anti-pornography campaign, and Poland’s lustration process, I argue that, during the ideological shift that deeply transformed the country, the cross came to function as a shibboleth for the national community, which now coalesced around a new set of values and rituals, and designated new Others. While the figure of the Communist continued to haunt the cultural mainstream and inspire bizarre purification rituals such as the public crucifixion of a regime journalist, Roman Samsel, in 1990, the symbol of the cross was also subverted to mock the Catholic Church and the political elites in satire.

Chapter 10 brings the different chapters together and responds to the question: ‘How might a public education system become more ethical?’ In other words, it asks how an education system itself can be conducive to and embody ethical living in relationships, and assumes that such ethical living will require concern for the well-being of persons and will constitute a vital aspect of one’s own well-being. It clarifies that educational system isn’t a collection of schools, but instead, it is the way in which various institutions are interrelated according to the principles that define the way they work together. These institutions include schools, examination boards, teacher training colleges, local authorities, the national curriculum authority, the ministry, national school inspection offices, various institutional employers, a framework of laws, and from there, the wider global economy. To propose ethically oriented systemic transformation, the chapter outlines the nature of an educational system that is centred around the well-being of persons in the four principles, including non-instrumentalisation, whole-person development, well-being and learning as human becoming. It then explores how these principles can be applied to the design of the system, and to key aspects of schooling, such as curriculum, pedagogy, evaluation and learning communities.