The Creolisation of Recognition

Simone Ravaioli, Sr Director Global Learning Ecosystem, Instructure

It was Tyson Yunkaporta who recently introduced me to the uniquely generative idea of creolisation, in a panel discussion on, well, inclusive recognition systems: how do we build recognition that actually includes all learners, and all learning? He describes borders as “places of increase of relations” rather than walls, dynamic zones where systems meet, make kin, and transform one another, not sites where one side quietly absorbs the other.

I strongly believe that Recognition of Learning is one of the eight impactful forces reshaping the next decade of education, and that panel is where I found out how much of that reshaping is still undone.

When two (knowledge) systems collide, one absorbs the other, or both come out changed. creolisation refers to the second path, the one recognition policy almost never builds for.

• As Serge Ravet frames it: Decolonisation contests the power that imposes identities and hierarchies; creolisation describes what becomes possible when different identities enter into Relation without one absorbing the others.

For years, the standard policy answer to the panel’s question has been Recognition of Prior Learning: elaborate frameworks built to assess informal, experiential, or Indigenous knowledge. Sitting in that room, reflecting on years of work with the Open Recognition Alliance on decolonizing recognition, a more uncomfortable truth surfaced. Traditional RPL often functions as a polite tool of assimilation. We rarely validate experiential or different ways of knowing on its own terms; we run it through a translation process, carving up communal, land-based, holistic expertise into standardized competencies sized for frameworks that were never built to hold them. The recognition praxis stays conditional: we will recognize you, once you learn to speak in our terms first.

We have been advocating for Recognition Sovereignty to break colonial frameworks: the inherent right of communities to validate their own members, protected inside circles of trust shielded from extraction and standardization. Yunkaporta is the one who complicated that instinct for me in that panel. Decolonial and First Nations discourses, he warns, can fall into the trap of “bad border work of Westphalian weirdness”: building rigid, protective walls around identity, territory, and knowledge that only mimic the colonizer’s own logic of enclosure. Recognition Sovereignty by itself does not transform anything. I found creolisation an interesting, generative, and nuanced layer to the discourse.

This poses a design challenge for Open Recognition’s future: whether we build technology that helps communities construct sovereign fortresses of defensive isolation, or relational interfaces where different systems can meet, collide, and reshape one another.

Western qualifications frameworks demand cognitive standardization, what Yunkaporta calls the pursuit of “one mind.” Real inclusion of lifewide learning asks our architectures to pivot toward “one belly”: a relational, visceral capacity to feel together while individual and community autonomy stays intact. In practice, that means we stop trying to integrate Indigenous Knowledge Systems into National Qualifications Frameworks, an integration that risks appropriating them and stripping them of the cultural, land-based nuances that made them worth recognizing in the first place. The alternative is epistemic interfacing: formal qualifications and community-validated credentials meeting through Recognition Reciprocity, interfaces built on the premise that contact changes both sides.

Making that practical means rethinking how this work gets governed, since the credentialing world still reaches instinctively for top-down, static regulatory instruments. What if we spent that energy instead on Protocols for Epistemic Interoperability, learned from the traditional protocols Indigenous communities have used for millennia to govern relationships with outsiders and protect different ways of knowing? A protocol in that lineage functions as a relational interface: a respectful way of crossing a boundary, seeking consent, establishing reciprocity, honoring a community’s right to be understood without being fully exposed, categorized, or colonized. South Africa’s IKS Act of 2019 already writes a version of this into statute, housing it in a National Indigenous Knowledge Systems Office (NIKSO) built to sit under community-led authority rather than an accreditation board: interfacing as dialogue, not assimilation. Traditional designations issued directly by elders and community councils sit as legally valid in their own right under that model, not pending review by an external accreditor.

Culturally, protocols like these hold strict rules of engagement that prevent predatory extraction and protect what’s sacred. Technically, they could leverage open, decentralized standards, Open Badges and Verifiable Credentials among them, governed by principles like CARE for Indigenous Data Governance, that let different validation systems communicate inside chosen circles of trust: a shift from privacy as distrust by design to intimacy as trust by design (cit. Serge Ravet).

We’ve already built the decolonial shield of sovereignty. What’s still unbuilt is the relational protocol: the border work that lets us actually meet, not just the wall that lets us hide.

The real question left standing after that panel:
Are we designing systems that help communities build sovereign fortresses of isolation, or are we willing to leverage the Relational Intelligence (RI) necessary so different systems can meet as equals and transform one another through a genuine dialogue of Transknowledging (cit. Tyson Junkaporta) ?