Emma Elliott-Groves
Assistant Professor of Education
Research Areas
Indigenous Education
Land-Based Pedagogy
Mental Health
Scholar Snapshot
Professor Elliott-Groves’ scholarship investigates Indigenous knowledge and concepts of place, belonging and relationality in relation to intellectual, physical and mental health (e.g., suicide). Her work engages Indigenous knowledge systems and ways of living to develop proposed solutions, approaches and interventions that can address complex health inequalities among Indigenous peoples.
Professor Elliott-Groves recently received a 2019 National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship supporting her work in collaboration with the Cowichan Tribes, a First Nations’ community on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Using land as pedagogy, her project engages Cowichan elders, cultural knowledge keepers and community members of all ages in walking their traditional homelands to identify local systems of relationality that ensure individual and collective livelihoods. She also is partnering with the Boys & Girls Clubs of King County to explore the role a trusted adult outside of the home can play in the lives of young people in order to support programming that is both socially transformative and culturally sustaining.
Her most recent publications include “A Culturally Grounded Biopsychosocial Assessment Utilizing Indigenous Ways of Knowing with the Cowichan Tribes” in the Journal of Ethnic & Cultural Diversity in Social Work and “Insights from Cowichan: A Hybrid Approach to Understanding Suicide in One First Nations’ Collective” in Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior. She received the Council on Racial, Ethnic, and Cultural Diversity’s 2019 Junior Faculty Award in recognition of her outstanding scholarship.For her work on suicide among Indigenous peoples, Professor Elliott-Groves received the American Educational Research Association Division E Outstanding Dissertation Award (2017) and the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States Distinguished Dissertation Award (2019).
In Depth
Read Professor Elliott-Groves’ recent paper on the development of an Indigenous biopsychosocial assessment in collaboration with Cowichan Tribes.