Here I will first review and read critically five of the required curriculums taking into account Barnhardt’s essay, Teaching/Learning Across Cultures. The second task, more difficult for me since I am not a teacher, is to select one of the curriculums and explore implementing it in classroom/school/community.
Alas, I am not responding well to the “The Athabaskans: People of the Boreal Forest.” I struggle with how book driven the content knowledge is. I recall Ongtooguk’s criticism: “But as I became acquainted with the literature, I was also surprised at what was not included: Alaska Native perspectives about the gold miner, the commercial fisheries, the sale of Alaska, and the critical aspects of Alaskan History.” I am also struck by the rates of Alaska Natives classified as “students with disabilities:” “Of all Alaska Natives enrolled during the 2005-2005 school year, 17.5 percent were classified as students with disabilities, whereas 12.4 percent of all non-Native students enrolled were classified as having disabilities.” Reading is not the only skill affected by learning disabilities but it is often. So, taken together literature frequently lacking Native perspectives and learners struggling with reading “The Athabaskans” seems to miss a couple key points of the problem from the get go.
Too, as I read through the curriculum I was struck by the heavy weight on “Teacher Objectives”: What about learners? Most of the assignments were worded with language like: “define,” “answer,” and “understand” only a few called upon learners to “do,” “make,” or “show.” This shows an implicit bias towards Western values and schooling and troubles me whether we are talking about Native, or non-Native learners. While I am suspicious and critical of this guide I do think there are bits worth noting. For example part A, section C, asks learners to read from various sources and to consciously switch between points of view. On one hand this stretches to the “cultural eclecticism” relevated in previous course work, but, it is dependent upon reading to teach the skills and values and hence is embedded in Western schooling. I do not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are some good resources and some interesting ideas here, but, to simply implement the guide without critical thought would be, I think, a recipe for classroom failure.
I suspect the critical framework Teaching/Learning Across Cultures raises at least two issues with this teacher’s guide: first, has to do with cultural immersion, second with context of learners. This curriculum seems content heavy and that I think would make a teachers move into the community more awkward both as a pseudo-expert and out of balance in answering the tough questions of “Why am I here?” and “Who am I?” For, a “white-guy-from-away” it would be easy to fall into the pattern of reading/studying the recommended resources rather than engaging in the process of tentative generalizations and personal discovery – the misplaced concreteness of knowledge derived from books and reading.
The sheer size of the Innuqatigitt curriculum is potentially off-putting. Too, at first glance it seems to be packaged for a Western audience. A deeper look quickly gets past that snap judgment. I was pleased to see an extensive list of Native advisors. I was also intrigued by the lengthy statements of values throughout this document. One exciting goal of the authors was to emphasize the shared values and life ways of the cultural sub-groups this document was created to serve, rather than belaboring the differences. Second, this is more a sourcebook than a curriculum and as such it is very interesting to read and valuable to use. I prefer this format over that of the teacher’s guide format of “The Athabaskans.” The burden of learning objectives and lesson plans is on the teacher. They have a valuable resource but not a set of recipes and so they have to actively engage with learners and community to actually create lesson plans and projects and this accomplishes the blurring of boundaries between town and gown.
While the authors are culturally inclusive, and while there are shared values between all Alaska Natives it is still important in the face of cultural extinction to not lose sight of the differences. Survival itself in particular bio-systems, arctic, boreal shield, temperate rainforest, to name a few, contributed to the uniqueness of cultural adaptations. So I would want to be cautious about mapping Innugatigitt onto Alaskan Inupiats for one example. Although that is probably a safer move than mapping it onto Athabaskans. Barnhardt is clear that a teacher entering a community needs to engage with that particular community and not generalizations about ethnicity. Barnhardt offers the advice:
By visiting elders in the community, you will be giving evidence of your respect for the bearers of the local culture, while at the same time you will be learning about the values, beliefs and rules of cultural behavior that will provide a baseline for your teaching. Showing enough interest in the local language or dialect to pick up even a few phrases and understanding some of its structural features will go a long way towards building your credibility….
Where I probably will not on my return to Alaska be entering a community as a teacher, but, perhaps still having a role in education, maybe higher education, I still see the value of this advice. My way of categorizing this is the political frame. One of the keys to my success in my current position is the personal connection I have with individuals in different departments all over campus. Also that I ask them what I can do to make their jobs and working with my staff easier. I suspect that librarians and teachers share, at least initially, the confusion about not understanding themselves as leaders in their respective communities.
The Dene Kede curriculum focuses on elementary education and yet is formidable in length all three sections combine to 275 pages, 100 and change more than the Innugtagitt document. It focuses and culturally related groups to the teacher’s guide “The Athabaskans” and is vastly superior in format and content. Similar to Innugatigitt this curriculum is an extensive statement of values and an extensive sourcebook of cultural knowledge.
Alas, as already noted, I dislike learning objectives that do not require learners to do, make, or show. Unfortunately many assignments and outcomes in the Dene Kede only require learners to “recognize”. I think this fails in creating the engagement, knowledge and skill that both Native and Western learners need. Another frustration along these lines arises from suggested teaching activities sections, for example: “Listen to tapes or see videos of dancing and drumming to discern differences in rhythm and to learn purpose.” Marshal McLuhan coined the phrase: “The message is the medium.” I fear that tapes and video speak louder than rhythm and performance. I think that drummers and dancers, real people from the community, have to interact with the learners for the values as well as the skills to be transferred. Barnhardt captures this concern but in a positive way: “Natural setting are more likely to foster mutually productive and culturally appropriate communication and interaction patterns between teacher and student, then highly structured and contrived situations created in the confines of the classroom.”
The Piniaqtavut Integrated Program is presented through a poorly formatted web page. I think this detracts from the usefulness of the resources and it seems less polished than some of the other resources. However, this presentation does serve as an archive and it makes the support publicly available so despite the shortcomings has merit.
I love the clear statement of goals for the curriculum:
- Bilingual communication skills.
- Pride in cultural identity.
- Responsibility and independence.
Here we see the role of education being preparation for life rather than just preparation for my schooling. I like as well the seven aspects of the “interactive/experiential model invoked by the authors:
- genuine dialogue between student and teacher in both oral and written modalities.
- guidance and facilitation rather than control of student learning by the teacher.
- encouragement of student-student talk in a collaborative learning context.
- encouragement of meaningful language use by students rather than correctness of surface form.
- conscious integration of language use and development with all curricular content rather than teaching language and other content as isolated subjects.
- a focus on developing higher level cognitive skills rather than on factual recall.
- task presentation that generates intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation.
This program is self-conscious of its thematic approach both in form and content. Two additional features of the classroom play out interestingly in this curriculum: multi-grade classrooms, and a curriculum that covers K-9th grade. Frequently middle school is broken apart from elementary or lumped together with high school. In my experience as a parent it seemed that a 14 year old had more in common with a 12 year-old then with a 15 year-old and yet we often lump them together with high school age learners. The multi-grade classes seem to give these 14 year-old some opportunity to be both learners and teachers keeping them engaged in a way missed in other configurations.
Like both the Inuugatigiit and the Dene Kede curriculums this one offers broad categories, and values, but, it is very thin on specifics, on learning outcomes and light on potential activities. It assumes a lot of cultural knowledge perhaps even a high level of language skill in the Native language. A teacher would have to do a lot of lesson planning and reach out to additional resources to actually create a program for a classroom.
The Effie Kokrine Charter School Thematic Curriculum website was not immediately transparent to me. It took several return trips for me to identify the links across the top of the page as links and as having supplemental material explaining the diagram. So, initially I thought the diagram was all I had to work with. Hence my first review consisted of an extensive list of questions. I would suggest that the menu bar with the links be relocated on the page beneath the title rather than above it.
That said, I really liked this curriculum. It is a thematic approach that melds spatial landmarks with temporal landmarks, embeds skills in their actual use, accomplishes the “both/and” that many of Villegas and Prieto’s interviewees value and call for in Native education, and ties values and relationships to any of these other components. I like that it spans from 7th- through early College just because one never sees that span. Too, those 17-19 year-old can serve as positive role models for the 11 and 12 year-old creating and re-enforcing community within the school circumstance.
I liked the Sample Module although I had both questions about them and intrigue with them. It seems they are written very much to address State and Federal assessments of school accomplishment and yet somehow still get learners and teachers into the equation. I was disappointed to see under the proficiency column too much emphasis upon “say” and “tell” and not enough emphasis on “show,” “do,” and “make” alas.
All said and done I think a good teacher would have to combine several of these resources and create their own guiding document. Certainly some of these are active and impressive in unique ways but also each had weaknesses as well. I wonder however, if young teachers have the skills and the self-confidence to do that kind of work. I expect that principals and school boards weigh in heavily on a young teacher’s thinking that combined with the assignment of traveling to a remote community and immersing in a different culture – where and when would a young teacher create space for themselves to do this work?
Before I turn to the work of selecting one of the curriculums and explore implementing it in classroom/school/community, I have to wonder why no examples of syllabi from Southwestern or Southeastern groups are included here. I raise this in part because my first choices in relocating to the State are these areas. As I mentioned earlier in this paper I probably will not radically reinvent myself and seek out high school teaching opportunities. Rather, I will probably look at opportunities in higher education administration. I would like to find opportunities beyond libraries – I have had enough of that work, but, higher education is a good fit. I am intrigued by the various branch campuses of the University system. So given that context I found myself resonating with two different curriculums for very various reasons: both the Inuuqatigitt and the SPIRAL Curriculum intrigued me. As I mentioned above Innugatigitt is a statement of values and a sourcebook/outline of cultural traditions and knowledge. As such it requires a lot of a teacher. Too, where I am not going to be a teacher it requires even more of me.
I think an implicit assumption that has to be made explicit is the leadership role a teacher has in the community not just the classroom. This without using these words is at the heart of Barnhardt’s Teaching/Learning Across Cultures. Though the kind of leadership described is a transformational type rather than the more familiar transactional type that we see in military or business cases. Married to this distinction is a difference in expected outcomes rather than growth for the sake of growth the goal of a community leader is balanced and optimized improvement of individual and community identity and functionality. Said differently a leader is looking for optimization of multiple variables rather than maximization of a single variable – profit in the case of most business models. I suspect that for me as an administrator on a campus like Kodiak College, UAF’s Bethel campus, or even UASoutheast in Sitka, I would be looking for points of contact with schools, Borough or City government, but, these are obvious. I would also be looking for connections with athletic programs and facilities, with public libraries, with local businesses. Probably, my approach would first be looking inward to the resources and opportunities at hand – the local talent. But, one lesson learned through my work with the Chilkoot Indian Association, “Alaska runs on grants” guides me to think about how to attract money to these points of synergy. Certainly most people are motivated by moments of altruism but they also have to put food on the table and shoes on the kids. Again, a lesson I remember learning during my short times in State is that folks do not think about a career or work in the same way as we do in the lower-48. Rather, a career gets cobbled together from a patchwork of part-time and seasonal work. So a leader needs to remember that and build some money into the partnerships as well. But money is not the only currency. In a small community reputation, authority and influence all are important as well. A program that centers and focuses upon traditional Elders adds to an individuals’ credibility in that role. Obviously this knife cuts both ways and I would need to be incredibly sensitive to how and why the local community selects people as Elders. This to reinforce cultural integrity and to avoid overstepping perhaps setting up a competing criteria or worse competing “Elders”. In larger communities like Kodiak or Sitka that would be difficult to do but in small villages it would be pretty easy to do although the consequences would be severe in either case.
Returning to the curriculum’s, the Effie Kokrine program intrigued me in part because it blurred distinctions between high school and college. The Effie Kokrine school is in Fairbanks and as such I wonder about this from the standpoint of duplicating services that UAF may either already provide or could be partnered with to provide. Rather, I am intrigued with this as a relevant strategy for villages and small schools. Distance education is in fact easy to set up. Most internet service providers offer Moodle as part of the bundle. Indeed in my work with Chilkoot Indian Association I showed them how they could save $10,000 dollars by not purchasing their course management system from a big company but rather setting up an instance of Moodle on their domain name host site. That $10,000 dollars could instead have been spent on creating content for presentation through the Moodle interface. Certainly this could have been focused on employees as was the intention of the original grant and plan. However, it could also have been a pivot point for the entire community both Alaska Native and Western. This resource can be developed to support Adult Education through the local schools and or partnered with the University system.
My own assessment of Haines, is an extremely fractured and conflicted community, all demographics suffering from issues with trust and respect – hippies to conservatives, Chilkoot to Chilkat. So as a community leader even temporarily as a consultant working with the tribal government I was seeking fulcrums to achieve leverage. That community shared pride and identity in their public library and they shared concern in the brain drain that sending kids to college had on the community – since few returned. The library was a neutral ground that young people, no matter ethnicity, shared. It was a hotspot for connectivity, for internet access that extended beyond the school. At that time MOOCs were just on the horizon. But, what I was struggling to articulate and imagine in that situation was SPOCS (small private online courses) a marriage of young people’s fascination with creating YouTube content with archiving and transmitting cultural knowledge through appropriate use of technology. Above I fret that replacing dancers and drummers with reproductions of those activities where the technology speaks louder than the message. I wonder though in instances where cultural extinction is accelerated and local knowledge is seriously threatened if archival activities supersede such compunctions — in truth, I wonder. Haines is at an ecologic transition between southeast temperate rain-forest, and interior boreal forest and cultural border between Tlingit, Eyak and Tuchone. Hence I would expect very precise local adaptations to climate and ecology and a creative site for cultural interaction and hybridization. So while I liked both Inuuqatigitt and the Effie Kokrine school programs I want to be cautious of their tendency to generalize about cultural knowledge and practices.
My stay in Haines was brief and intense, but, some of what I observed was that the Chilkat just up river seemed to have a closer knit community and a more stable connection to traditions and traditional practices. The Chilkoot seemed to be farther along the continuum of acculturation. And as I mentioned above Haines is a tense and politicized community and this seemed to include the Alaska Natives as well. One piece of evidence for this was the joint project between public library and Chilkoot Indian Association to commission a carved pole to be raised on library property. The project ran throughout the summer and local youth participated, but, the carver was from farther south, Ketchikan I believe. The tribe seemed most interested in the association generating jobs and money, particularly dividend money rather than preserving and transmitting cultural knowledge, values and practices. Another example, we explored a number of possible projects to optimize a number of variables, rather than maximize a single one. We suggested the tribal administrator purchases a couple of log splitters. These could be rented by tribe members. Or, instead if a tribe member, cut and split a certain amount of wood for an older community member, or Elder, they could in turn use the splitter for a set amount of time free. Of course there were all kinds of practicalities and liabilities to negotiate before this could be turned into a pilot however we never got that far as we asked the tribe members employed in the office what they thought about the idea. They all thought it was great in concept but felt it would never grow legs. I, interpreting based both on what was said and what was unsaid, heard them saying that lip service to values was easy but breaking wood was work and that would kill the initiative.
We actually brainstormed a variety of pilots that pulled together the technology I saw the young people working as interns using; the culture, the place, and the Elders to try to archive knowledge and engage young people. I was stuck be the disconnection between tradition and the young people. I was reminded of a saying I heard first from a career Marine, “200 hundred years of tradition unimpeded by progress.” What I take that to mean in this situation was that the “Elders” were not willing to extend a reciprocity to the young people that “both/and” that we heard among Villegas and Prieto’s interviewees. They seemed unwilling to explore the young people’s ways of knowing and learning and rather expected that to be set aside if the young people were serious about culture. To my mind a static and once-and-for-all understanding of culture. This by comparison to the Tribe of Sitka which has a very active program for youth teaching many aspects of Tlingit lifeway and values. Yet, the same community is open minded enough to spawn a Jazz/Tlingit fusion group. Or, Juneau where an English/Tlingit version of Macbeth was performed.
Returning to Barnhardt: “If you encounter situations of apparent social breakdown and dysfunctionality, be especially careful to exercise discretion and obtain the views of others before you take any precipitous action.” Perhaps I have come across more certain than I really am in this review of Haines, and the Chilkoot. I know that three days and a handful of conversations do not a deep understanding make. First, however, I was struck with how forthcoming folks were with the “white-guy-from away.” Second, it is the work of a leader to diagnose what ails the human situation he/she is engaged with. Certainly, this diagnosis is provisional and theoretical at first. Certainly as data is collected or created those hypothesis should and will modify. Part of that data are the “views of others” that Barnhardt charges us to seek out before prescription and treatment plan is made. None-the-less a good leader has solid gut instincts for what is broken, the “content” as it were, but the “context” of the dysfunction will tell us much about the cure. And that is where the work of the leader is. Actually, the first step is to understand oneself as a leader with skills, a sense of responsibility and work ethic that extends in all pursuits. This sense of self has been eroded in American culture as we see in the book “Bowling Alone” by Robert Putnam. I wonder if Putnam’s book has a place in a class for teachers learning about themselves as leaders. Too, I wonder what leadership looks like from an Alaska Native perspective. Here I am less focused on skills like diagnosis and more on communication. I recall hearing Walter Sobeloff speak — a version of his testimony before US Congress and I was awed by his oratory. But, I’m also thinking of many Native young people who preferred to say nothing in seminars – they were being respectful, in part. Communication is a crucial leadership skill and yet we often forget that most of that is listening with the goal of understanding – not just words, but cadence, omissions, a switch to gesture.
This paper has been an interesting challenge since the focus of the work and the reading is on classroom teachers and I am not one. I believe that I reviewed five of the assigned curriculums within the critical context of Burnhardt’s essay, Teaching/Learning Across Cultures. Finally, I tried to think about how one or two of these might inform my leadership in a small Alaskan community.