School of Education doctoral candidate Ionah M. Elaine Scully, Michel First Nation (Cree-Métis and Irish) from Alberta, Canada, has been awarded a prestigious National Academy of Education NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship for the 2023-2024 academic year. They are one of 35 awardees from a pool of more than 350 applicants.
Ionah M. Elaine Scully
Holding a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and certificates of advanced study in conflict resolution from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and in women’s and gender studies from the College of Arts and Sciences, Scully’s research involves storytelling, Indigenous methodologies, land pedagogy and Two Spirit critiques.
Scully adds this fellowship to their New York Public Humanities Grant (2021), University of California Davis’ Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) fellowship (2019) and ϲ’s LGBT Resource Center Social Justice Award (2016), as well as awards for excellence in teaching, activism, writing, scholarship and land-based education initiatives. Scully also is a professional dancer and dance instructor who has been one of the most sought-after teachers and performers in Upstate New York.
A member of the University’s (IGD), a theory and practice-based initiative of social justice education, Scully has created an Indigenized IGD course—offered in community, school and higher-education settings—that employs land, Two Spirit and other Indigenous pedagogies to create generative dialogue and communities of care and learning across difference.
Scully teaches foundations of education, gender studies, and Native studies, describing their teaching philosophy as publicly engaged, activist, and holistic. In their courses, they encourage multi-sensory learning, the mitigation of classroom hierarchies, and addressing equity issues to move learning toward antiracist ends.
Scully’s dissertation—”Nehiyaw Two Spirit Creation Stories: Re-mapping Home, Desire, and Indigenous Education Through the Body”—brings together Two Spirit (Native 2SLGBTQIA+) people of Michel First Nation (MFN) to dialogue about Nehiyaw (Cree) creation stories and subsequently recreate—or re-map—their own creation stories as Two Spirit (2S) people to understand how these stories can support Indigenous and decolonizing educational practices.
For more on Scully’s dissertation, visit the .
