Honoring Place, Community & Culture in the Curriculum

1. Honoring Place, Community& Culture in the Curriculum Multicultural Education Conference August 20, 2017, Anaheim, California Jon Reyhner, Professor of Education Northern Arizona University

2. It is very important for students to be able to relate what they are learning in school to their lives outside of school. Constructivist learning theory posits that learners need to link new knowledge to what they already know.

3. There is much to learn from examining the history of America Indian education, both from the many things schools did wrong as well as from those things that worked.

4. For example, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 and its Reading First provisions were supposed to close the test score gap between ethnic minority and “white” students−THEY DIDN’T!

5. U. S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Francis Leupp wrote in 1910: The more intelligent teachers in the Indian Service are ignoring books as far as they can in the earlier stages of their work. They are teaching elementary mathematics with feathers, or pebbles, or grains of corn; then the relations of numbers to certain symbols on the blackboard are made clear, and thus the pupils are led along almost unconsciously from point to point. Had a system like this been in vogue twenty years ago, an Indian who became a bank teller would have been spared a confession he once made to me, that he had reached a full man’s estate before he understood why he multiplied four by five in order to find out how much four pounds of sugar would cost at five cents a pound! Throughout his school life he had been an expert mathematician, yet figures meant nothing to him but so many pure abstractions which could be put through sundry operations mechanically; they bore no relation in his mind to any concrete object in nature.

6. My son Tsosie's chemistry teacher, Mansel Nelson, at Tuba City in the Navajo Nation began to rethink the way he taught soon after arriving in Tuba City after his best chemistry student, a Navajo girl, asked him “Why are we learning chemistry?” He began thinking of ways to make chemistry relevant to the lives of his Navajo students. He started taking community issues and challenges and teaching chemistry around them—local issues related to water quality, diabetes, uranium mining, etc.

7. When students can’t connect what they are learning to their lives, they tend to see school as boring, which is the most common reason dropouts give for leaving school. My son’s teacher, sought to connect the “foreign” content of the mainstream textbook curriculum to actual concerns of his students and their community, including the threat of diabetes, uranium mining, and water quality. His students talked, read, and wrote about these concerns in Navajo and English, and by studying these issues they developed autonomy and prepared themselves for sovereignty—taking control over their own lives and the life of their community.

8. Place-, Community-, and Culture-based Education Students have trouble finding meaning in the one-size-fits-all decontextualized textbook- and standards-driven curriculum and instruction. The best way to contextualize education is to relate what students are learning to their local community and culture.

9. Should we not recognize that all cultures—African, Asian, European, Indigenous, etc.— have values and languages worth recognizing, appreciating and maintaining in schools as well as at home?

10. The Navajo Nation has taken a lead in promoting culturally sensitive teaching. Peterson Zah in his preface to the Navajo Nation Education policies (1984) wrote, “We believe that an excellent education can produce achievement in the basic academic skills and skills required by modern technology and still educate young Navajo citizens in their language, history, government and culture.”

11. These policies require schools serving Navajo students to have courses in Navajo history and culture and supported local control, parental involvement, Indian preference in hiring, and instruction in the Navajo language. They declare: “The Navajo language is an essential element of the life, culture and identity of the Navajo people. The Navajo Nation recognizes the importance of preserving and perpetuating that language to the survival of the Nation. Instruction in the Navajo language shall be made available for all grade levels in all schools serving the Navajo Nation. Navajo language instruction shall include to the greatest extent practicable: thinking, speaking, comprehension, reading and writing skills and study of the formal grammar of the language.”

12. The Navajo Nation’s “Diné Cultural Content Standards [for schools] is predicated on the belief that firm grounding of native students in their indigenous cultural heritage and language, is a fundamentallysound prerequisite to well developed and culturally healthy students.” Navajo values to be taught include being generous and kind, respecting kinship, values, and sacred knowledge.”

13. At Rough Rock Demonstration School, the first Indian-controlled school in modern times in the United States founded in 1966, an effort was made to educate Navajo students about their heritage.

14. Culture-based Education (CBE) can include students writing and publishing school newspapers and magazines as was done with the “Foxfire” publications in the southeastern United States. Content in the TSÁ’ ÁSZI’magazine was written by Ramah Navajo students.

15. Culture-based content can be combined with standards based academic content like writing five paragraph (or more) essays and various forms of process writing where students brainstorm ideas, write drafts, discuss drafts with fellow students (and their teacher), edit, and finally publish their writing.

18. The Applied Literacy Program at her school got students to develop their writing skills in Navajo and English by writing in a variety of ways, including for the school's low-power television station and award winning newspaper. Much of their writing was based on interviewing elders, tribal officials, and other community members.

19. Place-, community-, and culture-based education is not new. Newbery Award winner and teacher Ann Nolan Clark practiced it with her Pueblo students in the 1930s.

20. Clark’s 1941 Caldecott Medal book In My Mother’s House illustrated by Velino Herrera was written for her third grade Tesuque Pueblo students in New Mexico.

21. However, There Are Forces Working Against Culture-based Education

23. Is Assimilation a Good Idea? University of Utah Professor Donna Deyhle from 20 years of research found that Navajo and Ute students with a strong sense of cultural identity could overcome the structural inequalities in American society and the discrimination they faced as American Indians. In a study of students on three reservations in the upper mid-west, Whitbeck, Hoyt, Stubben and LaFromboise reported in the Journal of American Indian Education in 2001 that the traditional cultural values defined “a good way of life” typified by pro-social attitudes and expectations and that learning the Native culture is a resiliency factor.

24. Sheilah Nicholas (2011) notes that her Hopi Elders link Hopi language loss to “un-Hopi” behavior by youth that includes “substance abuse, gang membership, and domestic violence” and how the “fundamental principles of the Hopi way of life are those of reciprocity and humility,” which need to be transmitted to each successive generation to live a good life.”

25. Oscar Kawagley noted that the work of Alaskan Natives in Alaska Native Education, represents “a slow healing process for the villages. Our educational mission is to produce human beings at home in their place, their environment, their world. This is slowly being brought to fruition through the efforts of the Native people themselves, with support from others of like thinking.”

27. Results of Assimilation on Immigrants The National Research Council (1998) found that immigrant youth tend to be healthier than their counterparts from nonimmigrant families. It found that the longer immigrant youth are in the U.S., the poorer their overall physical and psychological health. Furthermore, the more Americanized they became the more likely they were to engage in risky behaviors such as substance abuse, unprotected sex, and delinquency.

28. If you want to see a patriotic display in the United States, compare the playing of the national anthem at a athletic event to the grand entry at an Indian Pow Wow with its Flag Song and the honoring of veterans.

29. In a September 2000 press release, Navajo Nation President Kelsey Begaye declared that the “preservation of Navajo culture, tradition, and language” is the number one guiding principle of the Navajo Nation.”

30. Statement of Navajo President Joe Shirley in 2005 after a high school shooting incident We are all terribly saddened by the news about our relatives on their land in Red Lake in Minnesota. Unfortunately, the sad truth is, I believe, these kinds of incidents are evidence of natives losing their cultural and traditional ways that have sustained us as a people for centuries. Respect for our elders is a teaching shared by all native people. In the olden days we lived by that. When there was a problem, we would ask, “What does Grandpa say? What does Grandma say?” On many native nations, that teaching is still intact, although we see it beginning to fade with incidents like this.

31. Even on the big Navajo Nation, we, as a people, are not immune to losing sight of our values and ways. Each day we see evidence of the chipping away of Navajo culture, language and traditions by so many outside forces. Because we are losing our values as a people, it behooves native nations and governments that still have their ceremonies, their traditions and their medicine people, to do all they can to hang onto those precious pieces of culture. That is what will allow us to be true sovereign native nations. This is what will allow our people to stand on our own. The way to deal with problems like this one is contained in our teachings.

32. Students who are not embedded in their traditional values are only too likely in modern America to pick up a hedonistic culture of consumerism, consumption, competition, comparison, and conformity. As Vine Deloria, Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux) wrote, “A society that cannot remember and honor its past is in peril of losing its soul.”

33. Hallett, Chandler and LaLonde (2007) examined data from 150 First Nations communities in British Columbia and found that communities with less conversational knowledge of their Native language had suicide rates six times greater than those with more knowledge.

35. Alaska is especially to be commended for its work done on culture-based education.

36. Northern Arizona University for over two decades has helped support Culture-based education and Indigenous language revitalization through conferences, books, and the web site. http://nau.edu/AIE

37. The Kamehameha Schools Research & Evaluation Division surveyed 600 teachers, 2,969 students, and 2,264 parents in 62 schools and found that: Culture-Based Education (CBE): 1. positively impacts student socio-emotional well-being (e.g., identity, self-efficacy, social relationships). 2. enhanced socio-emotional well-being, in turn, positively affects math and reading test scores. 3. is positively related to math and reading test scores for all students, and particularly for those with low socio-emotional development, most notably when supported by overall CBE use within the school.

38. Other Positive Effects of • CBE Education • Promotes healthier life styles, including eating traditional foods rather than less healthy processed and fast foods. • Promotes traditional values of respect, humility, hard work, generosity, etc. that lead to safer, stronger nations and communities. • Develops a strong positive sense of identity that leads to perseverance and resiliency .

39. Terry Huffman (2010), among others, has marshaled considerable evidence that “rejects the notion that American Indian students must undergo some form of assimilation to succeed academically.” He found through his research how a “strong sense of cultural identity serves as an emotional and cultural anchor. Individuals gain self-assuredness, self-worth, even a sense of purpose from their ethnicity. By forging a strong cultural identity, individuals develop the confidence to explore a new culture and not be intimidated. They do not have to fear cultural loss through assimilation. They know who they are and why they are engaged in mainstream education.”

40. For Further Reading • Bowen, J.J. (2004). The Ojibwe language program: Teaching Mille Lacs band youth the Ojibwe language to foster a stronger sense of cultural identity and sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. • Deloria, Jr., V., & Wildcat, D.R. (2001). Power and place: Indian education in America. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Resources. • Hallett, D., Chandler, M.J., & Lalonde, C.E. 2007. Aboriginal language knowledge and youth suicide. Cognitive Development, 22, 392-399. • Hinton, L. (2013). Bringing our languages homes: Language revitalization for families. Berkeley, CA: Heyday. • Huffman, T. (2010). Theoretical perspectives on American Indian education: Taking a new look at academic success and the achievement gap. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. • McCarty, T.L. (2013). Language planning & policy in Native America: History, theory, praxis. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. • Nicholas, S. E. (2011). “How are you Hopi if you can’t speak it?”: An ethnographic study of language as cultural practice among contemporary Hopi youth. In T. L. McCarty (ed.), Ethnography & language policy (pp. 53–75). New York: Routledge.

41. Reyhner, J. (2017). Affirming identity: The role of language and culture in American Indian education. Cogent Education, 4(1). http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2331186X.2017.1340081 Reyhner, J. (Ed.). (2015). Teaching Indigenous students: Honoring place, community and culture. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Reyhner, Jon. (2006). Education and language restoration (Contemporary Native American issues series). Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House. Reyhner, J., Martin, J., Lockard, L., & Gilbert, W.S. (eds.) (2013). Honoring our children. Culturally appropriate approaches for teaching Indigenous students. Flagstaff, AZ: Northern Arizona University. http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jar/HOC/ Reyhner, J., Gilbert, W.S., & Lockard, L. (eds.). (2011).Honoring our heritage. Culturally appropriate approaches for teaching Indigenous students. Flagstaff, AZ: Northern Arizona University. http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jar/HOH/ Reyhner, J., & Lockard, L. (eds.). (2009). Indigenous language revitalization: Encouragement, guidance & lessons learned. Flagstaff, AZ: Northern Arizona University. http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jar/ILR/

42. Romero-Little, M.E., S. Ortiz & T.L. McCarty (eds.). (2011). Indigenous language across the generations: Strengthening families and communities. Tempe, AZ: Center for Indian Education, Arizona State University. Romero-Little, M.E., & T.L. McCarty. (2006). Language planning challenges and prospects in Native American communities and schools. Tempe, AZ: Education Policy Studies Laboratory, Division of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, College of Education, Arizona State University. Whitbeck, L.B., Hoyt, D.R., Stubben, D.R., LaFromboise, T. (2001). Traditional culture and academic success among American Indian children in the upper midwest. Journal of American Indian Education40(2), 48-60. Wyman, L.T., McCarty, T.L., & Nicholas, S.E. (2014). Indigenous youth and multilingualism: Language identity, ideology & practice in dynamic cultural worlds. New York: Routledge.