Author: Robert Heath

Unit 2 – Curricula Adapted to Small Rural Schools

My experience as a classroom teacher is limited: many years ago, I taught an English class in an Adult Education program, and two sections of Freshman Composition at the University of North Dakota during my brief enrollment in an English Ph.D. program (I was there in 1997 when the Red River flooded, no place to relocate and raise a family). Classroom instruction was an awkward fit for me. I struggled with the role of disciplinarian and motivator in a venue that I thought should be populated by self-disciplined and intrinsically motivated learners. The other closest example of “teaching” was my role as Scoutmaster for a local Boy Scout troop and I think that is closer to the models we are exploring in these writings – models that blur the boundaries between institutions and organizations and roles like teacher/student. In my “day job” I insist that we provide job training, mentoring and coaching to our 70 or so college work-study employees, but, that is not “classroom” instruction either. So for me the claims that classrooms and schools are not a good fit for learning and cultural preservation, as we read in these required readings, are self-evident claims.

Working as a supervisor I’ve noticed a number of performance issues that concern me: an inability to translate a specific work ethic (academics, athletics) to broader instances, life and work, for examples. I’ve observed an over-reliance on book learning for the correct answer as opposed to observational and interpretive skills to assess a situation and apply or modify a solution to fit. An ineptitude with basic tools and practical understanding of simple mechanics or materials. Associated with that, a notion that community and civic organizations are ready-made and something one simply consumes rather than something one participates in creating: leadership and communication skills seem underdeveloped. Finally, I see a loss of knowledge about history and historical life-ways. iPads, or whatever gadget is momentarily popular, have always been around and are the best way to get something done. Certainly, these are broad brush strokes and probably reflect the privileged demographic of an elite liberal arts college. However, I draw as well from my experiences in the local community watching parents and children as we raised ours. Below I offer three sketches for curriculum ideas: First Aid, Map and Compass, and Drawing. I believe that they gesture at learning that my background values and priorities.

First Aid

First aid is the immediate response given to the onset of illness or injury.

We will utilize the Red Cross First Aid and CPR/AED certification as one component of this curriculum. This certification offers at least two advantages. First, it is commonly recognized and so students whether in the bush or the urban environment will be able to work with emergency response personnel. Second, it creates a framework on which to hang historic and pre-historic knowledge we acquire. But a provisional framework open to criticism and review based on Native knowledge.

Two insights inform this unit – first, that over the years of taking First Aid and CPR courses the techniques have changed. Second, reading about “Otzi” the mummified remains of a man found in the Alps roughly 5300 years old shows us some about first aid and medical treatment of the era. So from this, we understand that first aid changes as we learn about effective responses and it reflects a moment in time and place, for example, Otzi packing his arrow wound with a particular type of moss. Research may extend into areas of folklore, anthropology, and archeology to theorize and inform inquiry about traditional first aid.

Activities:

  • simulated emergency scenarios and getting student to respond and interpret
  • interviews with elders and with emergency first responders
  • teaching younger students what we have learned

Resources:

Variations:

  • this may extend to include medicinal plants, or a bilingual exercise
  • Wilderness first responder, boating safety, or swift water rescue
  • Special emphasis upon hypothermia, drowning, or childbirth as driven by the learners

Orientation and Navigation

The popularity of handheld or dash mounted GPS units has supplanted and erased quickly a lot of basic navigational skills and knowledge. A consequence of the lost knowledge is excessive reliance on technology that malfunctions, for examples batteries or a forest canopy that blocks tracking the satellites. This results in ineptness that runs from following the GPS voice commands even against better judgment to injury or death because the person became lost and had no other navigational resources.

Navigation across the centuries will be explored both technology and technique. Content will vary including but not limited to Alaska Native methods of navigation, other cultures with strong navigational skills, Polynesians, Vikings, and Chinese for examples.

As with the First Aid lesson plan practical experience, scenario simulation, are vital to making these concepts and skills lived rather than referenced. Again, there is a distinction between “show,” “make,” “do,” rather than “tell” or “locate the resource.”

Activities:

  • Map reading
  • Basic compass
  • Map and compass scavenger hunt
  • Research and make and use ancient navigational tools
  • Handheld GPS, GPS mapping on computers

Resources:

Alternatives:

  • Celestial navigation math
  • Marine Sextant

Images of Exploration: Painting, drawing, and photography as records of Discovery

We see a significant push to enhance our teaching in science, technology, engineering, and math, perhaps as should be. Alas, we seem to forget the importance of art in training our observational abilities. Indeed we forget the role sketching, drawing, and painting had for explorers before the advent of photography. The revolution in inquiry and representation that photography itself offered to both science and art is, as well, assumed.

Activities:

  • Basic skills of drawing, cone, sphere, cube
  • History of photography, pinhole camera
  • Digital Cameras
  • Bait stations and game cameras
  • X-ray, MRI and CAT scan
  • Astronomy and space explorations

Resources:

  • Cave and Hide drawings as field sketches
  • Da Vinci and Michelangelo sketchbooks
  • Paintings by Karl Bodemer, George Catlin, John James Audubon
  • Wildlife photography
  • The Art of Field Sketching, Laws guide to Drawing Birds, Drawing Trees
  • Nobel Laureates Doodle Their Discoveries http://youtu.be/2UtPGydDwVI
  • Images of cells, of organisms and of astronomy

Alternatives:

  • 6” Newtonian reflecting telescope, homemade microscopes
  • Planetarium construction
  • Star mapping
  • Local weather station
  • Language Arts studying the journals of explorers
  • Gathering and pressing plants, plant identification

In their own right, and because of my inclination to render the town and gown barrier porous, these classes would be interesting to plan and execute, and they would create rich experiences for the learners. Remembering three points from our required reading: process emphasis, cultural eclecticism, and “school without walls, I need to become self-reflective. These three values, techniques, show up in my lesson plans. Although assumed or implicit, some of the tasks here is to make that explicit and to justify their presence. While my teaching experience is limited, it still offers me grounds for at least raising questions, if not critique.

For me “school without walls” was an important personal discovery – a chance to reclaim my experience as an independent learner and to receive credit for that. First as an undergraduate I crafted a number of Independent Studies. As a graduate student I crafted my entire degree through the Vermont College program.

The Parkway Program will not be a school with classroom or bells. The organizations around the Benjamin Franklin Parkway will provide laboratories, libraries, and meeting space. Although participation will only be required for the length of the average school year, study and work programs will be available year-round. Students and faculty will form small groups for discussion, research, counseling, and self-evaluation. Learning situations will vary from films, jobs, and lectures to special projects (Bremer and von Moschzisner, 1971: 281).

Certainly, for many learners, these programs are ideal, but for many more they are perplexing and cumbersome. Too, teaching adult education students and college first years, I did not see the intrinsic motivation, the urgent curiosity that these types of programs require. Indeed, “school without walls” probably had trouble with recruitment and retention unless it was aimed at non-traditional students, students returning to high school after dropping out and struggling with real life, hence, fueled by desperation. In this week’s readings we see three young people’s description of a day in school. And in last week’s readings the anguish and frustration of these same young people pressed to imagine suicide as an only option. I fear that saying to them “you are free to learn whatever you need” might actually be no help at all. Knowing what you do not want is not the same as knowing what you need. I do believe that some of this is at play in Wigginton’s work with students, but not the entirety. Rendering the boundaries porous and trespassing them is different from doing away with them entirely. The individual stories his students researched, built and wrote about were perhaps “school without walls” but the work itself was situated in the class, in the magazines which acted as gravity on the individual orbits. I suspect many learners need the walls too. I am afraid that for other learners what I have outlined above in the lesson plans would either be too vague too open ended or for others too content driven, both the first aid and the navigation plans could fall into this.

Alas, I see this opportunity least in my lesson plans. Accordingly, I want to make sure that learners have opportunities to follow their curiosity and passion. Obviously, these plans are at their broadest in shape and direction, and so as planning becomes more granular, I think this omission is easily corrected, however, I believe it is important too for these free places to be real rather than contrived and artificial as that, I think, would cause cynicism.

In my sources for the last assignment I tipped my hand on my own “cultural eclecticism” and that appears again in the lesson plans above. So, first what does “cultural eclecticism” mean?

Thus, we present a goal of “cultural eclecticism” for minority education, in which features of both the assimilationist and pluralist ideologies are incorporated with the emphasis on an evolutionary form of cultural diversity to be attained through the informed choices and actions of individuals well-grounded in the dynamics of human and cultural interaction processes. Eclecticism implies an open-ended process (rather than a dead-ended condition) whereby individuals or groups can adapt and define the functions of the school in response to their changing needs, assuming that they understand those functions and are in a position to influence school programs sufficiently to make them fully compatible with their needs.

It is quite generous of me to engage in multi-cultural enrichment as a member of the dominant culture and of the privileged gender. I suspect that for cultures fighting for their very survival that cultural exclusivity is a very serious matter. The Amish do not negotiate their “in the world but not of the world” from a position of privilege. And as they negotiate their roles as entrepreneurs there is always a nagging self-consciousness that this maybe the turn that takes things too far and unravels the social fabric. Cultures far down the road to assimilation already perhaps have to engage in radical and irrational disruptions to regain cultural identity and cohesion – if they can. Yet interesting that the two authors of last week’s reading Alaska Native Student Vitality, Villegas and Prieto, tell us about themselves and their multi-racial heritage, this too adds complexity to thinking about “cultural eclecticism.” Probably, for many multi-racial heritage is normal. And I feel that this is what drives the possibility of this approach and the urgency of it. If I were in the small school classroom I would want to hold these two poles as constants in conversations about why and how we were going to our learning. As a courtesy to the learners I would check the temperature of the room regarding too violent swings to either extreme regularly. I think “cultural eclecticism” or writing ethnography has been very valuable for me as a learner accomplishing the post-modern turn of never permitting a privileged discourse and enriching my life with the variety of possible solutions to similar problems.

Turning to “process” I think we can criticize No Child Left Behind for excessive emphasis and focus on measurable outcomes of schools and aggregates of students we can also criticize proponents of “process” in excess because in the end… well, there never is any end. Even for the subsistence lifestyle, there is a bottom line: fish in the boat, Caribou on the ground. However, anyone who has hunted also knows that the real work starts then. Shooting a moose is not hard, getting it out of the woods is hard. So what do we mean by “process.”

Another effort to employ process as content in school learning is that of Parker and Rubin (1966), who summarize the tasks to which process-oriented curriculum developers must address themselves as follows:

  • A retooling of subject matter to illuminate base structure, and to ensure that knowledge which generates knowledge takes priority over education which does not.
  • An examination of the working methods of the intellectual practitioner, the biologist, the historian, the political scientist, for the significant processes of their craft, and the use of these processes in our classroom instruction.
  • The utilization of the evidence gathered from a penetrating study of people doing things, as they go about the business of life, in reordering the curriculum.
  • A deliberate effort to school the child in the conditions for cross-application of the processes he has mastered the ways and means of putting them to good use elsewhere (p. 48).

I would suggest that most of these aims are inherent to the three lesson plans I offer above. And I think that is insufficient. I need to make that more explicit. I also think I need to be more explicit in learning outcomes. Certainly, point three of this definition calls for that, but so also does number four: cross-application cannot be made if there is no clarity on the application in the first place. I also think that including the learners in setting outcomes is important as that contributes to their “school without walls” or more simply ownership of the learner’s priorities in learning.

Unit 1 – Critiques of Education in Rural Alaska

The first task of this paper is to demonstrate comprehension of the required readings. The second is to engage critically with some of the issues raised therein. One facet of this critical engagement is to use two sources of data about school performance – this to ground the theoretical. Finally, for those of us in “the lower 48” we can further inform the conversation with relevant local data. In what follows I offer brief summaries of the required readings and then move into a critique. First, my biases in thinking about schooling and education, I, as a graduate student, read materials like Ivan Illich’s “Deschooling Society”, George Dennison’s “Lives of Children”, Eliot Wigginton’s “Sometimes a Shining Moment: The Foxfire Experience”, Michel Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish”, and less about school and more about learning, Gregory Bateson – indeed, everything he wrote available to the public. While I resonate with Foucault’s criticism of the panopticon and its pervasiveness in our lives, I prefer Wigginton because he was first and last about practice, about doing and making with people.

Turning to the four required readings: The Alaska Natives Commission – “Alaska Native Education: Final Report” offers a comprehensive roadmap of the issues affecting the education of Alaska Natives. Specifically, the Findings and Recommendations section maps neatly the landscape from the Native point of view: Skills Necessary for Success, Failure of the Public Education System, Failure of the Social System, Need and Issues. This report then offers fifteen recommendations I touch on the following in what follows: Total Local Control of Schools, Model Curricula for Alaska Native Students, Involvement of Parents and Community, Indian/Native Education Programs for all Native Students.

Paul Ongtooguk offers beyond these points one additional issue: “In fact, the perspective of Alaska Natives, particularly during the contact period of modern times, was almost absent” hence the title of his essay; “Their Silence about Us: Why We Need an Alaska Native Curriculum.”

Leona Okakok’s essay “Serving the Purpose of Education” is the oldest of the resources and yet a pleasure to read, perhaps because she succeeds in melding two voices, the storyteller and the scholar. She identifies: The Role of Local Culture in the Learning Process, Contrasting Definitions of Education, and Educating for Success; Teacher-Student Ratio, Skills Taught, Parental Involvement, Cultural Identity, and Bilingual Education, as key issues with which North Slope Borough School District wrangles.

The First Alaskans Institute “2006 Alaska Native Student Vitality: Community Perspectives on Supporting Student Success” is quite a long article its approach is qualitative; the authors interviewed 45 Alaska Natives, community leaders, community members, and advocates. The findings were categorized within four questions:

  • How do you define Alaska Native student success?
  • How schools define Alaska Native student success?
  • What should schools prepare Alaska Native students for?
  • What are the characteristics of effective schools?

Their Chart 1: Suggested Measures of Success provides an interesting summary and starting point for operationalizing what they learned from the interviewees.

I think the ANC report is particularly useful for thinking critically about some of these issues:

The most thoughtfully designed education system, most current school facilities, best trained and carefully selected teachers, brilliantly conceived and unimpeachable intentions will not, by themselves, significantly improve the education situation of Alaska Native students. The environments in which many young Alaska Natives find themselves must be rid of alcohol and drug abuse, dysfunctional families, and poverty…. Ironically, improved education is part of the solution to these problems and must begin immediately if Alaska Natives are to survive as a distinct culture and the fulfilling lives to which all Americans are entitled.

This quote shows a recurrent theme that occurs throughout these readings; a kind of chicken/egg phrasing of the problem. Here it is cast as we need better schools to have better communities/we need better communities to have better schools. Whenever problems are cast as chicken/egg conundrums, I worry we are trapped in a double-bind, or, perhaps we are excusing our inactivity by falsely casting the circumstance as a double-bind to justify our inactivity.

Returning to Okakok’s article, she does some important work first in distinguishing between “education” and “schooling.” She also reminds us that real, individual young persons are the subject of this conversation. In all of the readings required for this essay the subject is present, there are learners: youth and some older people too. Villegas and Prieto offer us an important example showing the success of a particular young person. This model is useful as it also wrangles with the statistic that shows a slightly greater frequency of learning disabilities among Alaska Native learners:

One can certainly define failure in terms of not passing tests, but there are students, [student name] we have in [village name] who was diagnosed with FAS [Fetal Alcohol Syndrome]…his grandparents raised him…school was not his thing, there was no way he was going to survive in school. His grandparents raised him in the traditional way. He is now the youngest speaker of the language, the best dancer, the youngest and one of the best hunters and trappers, dog team, and I would have to say that he has been prepared to make a life for himself, that is tailor made to [student name], and he is successful at a level that exceeds…as long as you’re not limiting the definition of successfully passing a test, you have to include [student name] as someone who is successful. Academics alone would not…he would be [a failure]. Which is one of the problems in the whole [adequate yearly] progress criteria and whole emphasis on the tests as the only basis that counts any more. (E21)

My switch from “young person” to “learner” is intentional, first to disrupt the roles of teacher/student and second because part of unpacking the double-bind is realizing that this needs to be about lifelong learning rather than something we do to young persons from the outside in and all at once.

As each child shows a proclivity toward a certain activity, it is quickly acknowledged and nurtured. As these children and adults in the community interact, bonds are established that help determines the teacher and the activities which will be made available to that particular child. As education progresses, excellence is pursued naturally. Parents often stand back and let a child explore and experience things, observing the child’s inclinations. If a child shows an aptitude for skills that the parents don’t possess, they might arrange for their child to spend time with an expert, or an adult may ask to participate in the education of the child. Thus, many adults in the community have a role in the education of our children.

I think it is important to unpack this and replace Okakok’s use of “children” with “learner” and to imagine this model extending entirely throughout a life span. For example, I have a proclivity for leadership, and as I mature, the community entrusts me with greater responsibility, naturally. As this goes along, senior community members mentor me on communication, problem diagnosis, and politicking of coalition building until I am myself senior and I, in turn, look for apprentices to influence. Alas, if we have dysfunctional communities and dysfunctional personalities then we must fret about pedophiles and contributors to juvenile delinquency in this model. Therefore, when we render the boundary between school/community porous we take on the responsibility for protecting learners of all ages as they cross the border and interact.

I bridle at the notion of “schooling.” This is informed by Foucault’s critique of the Panopticon. We can easily describe the traditional classroom of ranks and rows of individual desks as “cells” and the teacher standing facing the ranks and rows as situated in the inspection house. Even if we disrupt the architecture and sit in a circle, we have not disrupted the roles of teacher/student, or warden/prisoner. Therefore, in reading Okakok, I had to read closely to understand her meaning of schooling. I take it to be this; “all the circumstance that surrounds and supports education, e.g. “the building, the equipment and materials, the quality of teaching and counseling services – everything about our schools – to ensure that education can take place in the classroom.” When I read, First Alaskans Foundation – “Alaska Native Education Study/Indicators” and Alaska Dept. of Education – “No Child Left Behind/History of Alaska School Reform” I learn about the quality of “schooling” perhaps the panopticon becomes Escheresque infinitely folding back upon itself, “wardens” in their inspection houses which become cells too, inspected by inspectors. I, however, observe little or nothing about particular learners or education in these reports and that harkens back to the coerciveness and double-bind that caused me to bridle over the term “schooling.” Bateson helps me unpack my meaning when he says:

Double bind situations are created by and within the [teaching] setting and the [school] milieu. From the point of view of this hypothesis, we wonder about the effect of [educational] “benevolence” on the [student]…. We would assume that whenever the system is organized for [school] purposes, and it is announced to the [student] that the actions are for his benefit, then the schizophrenogenic situation is being perpetuated.” (Bateson, 1972b)

I have appropriated Bateson shamelessly here, what he said: “psychotherapeutic setting and the hospital milieu,” “medical ‘benevolence’ on the schizophrenic patient,” “hospital purposes and it is announced to the patient.” Given the pervasiveness of the panopticon, this appropriation seems reasonable. Here let us reach back to my misgivings about the double bind, cast as we need better schools to have better communities/we need better communities to have better schools. Dysfunction is at the center of a complex of institutional failures, failures of families, failures of communities, failures of schools. Ongtooguk makes this point:

As recently as the mid-1970s, the teachers and counselors at my high school in Nome had quite different expectations about the future of white students and Alaska Native students. In a certain sense, they didn’t need to worry much about the future of Native students. At that time, close to half the students from Native villages dropped out well before graduating. And suicide rates among male Native students—like myself—were ten times higher than among white students. In my own school, students who had died were initially given their own pages in the yearbook—but when so many died that the yearbook was becoming a virtual obituary column, the policy was dropped.

I find myself struggling with the logic or rather illogic that seems to say schooling got us sick, so more schooling will make us better. Certainly, this is a gross gloss, yet not entirely. Most of this is evident in the literature describing school evaluation, but it also sneaks back into the 15 recommendations of the “Alaska Native Education: Final Report.” For myself, it seems that a more radical break with the forces of colonization and westernization is necessary if any of these aspirations are to be realized. Villegas and Prieto also struggle with how to operationalize the visions and goals articulated by their respondents

Thirteen of the 34 participants who responded to this question also hesitated and struggled to identify any specific examples of effective schools for Alaska Native students. Several respondents (9) wanted to talk specifically about the roles and responsibilities of Alaska Native communities rather than the characteristics of effective schools. Some mentioned their experiences in schools, others referred to what they knew about schooling in other countries, and still, others spoke about what they had experienced or heard about particular schools in Alaska.

Our required readings offer a robust theoretical framework for a better future, alas; they are lean on offering practical guidelines or detailed plans for accomplishing these goals, for realizing this vision. Certainly, there are several different ethnic regions in Alaska and within those regions varying and unique circumstances. None-the-less, if people stuck in the bind of we need better schools to have better communities/we need better communities to have better schools are to create and sustain change, then some recipes, some templates, some guidelines of best practice need to be offered. Villegas and Prieto were able to identify eight schools that respondents felt were on track. “First, there are several schools and initiatives cited that are based on community and cultural values, employ Native teachers and educators, and have meaningful community partnerships – and in some cases are controlled by the community itself.” To my mind, this offers an important starting place for examining these as case studies and potential role models. However, I think it is important to avoid the logic of confirming the content of today’s newspaper by reading the second copy. I believe it is important to look outside of Alaska for successful pedagogies and unique cultures surviving and navigating post-modernity.

I can only sketch in brief of my meaning, but I find Eliot Wigginton’s Sometimes a Shining Moment: The Foxfire Experience incredibly valuable. Wigginton was both a practitioner and theoretician and so much can be learned from him about young people; about learning, about creating school and community exchanges, and about preserving culture. Very simply Foxfire was a magazine capturing southern Appalachian folkways. It was entirely student produced. However, to be in a place to see the opportunity and build on it Wiggington had to fail and to genuinely question his educational experience to be receptive to the clues around him. The chapter, “So What Did I Learn In School, Anyway?” offers us a skeleton:

I began to make a list of memorable, positive experiences…. I found that then experiences could be grouped fairly easily … into broad categories: Times when there were visitors to our class from the world outside the classroom…. Times when, as students, we left the classroom on assignments or field trips…. Times when things we did, as students, had an audience beyond the teacher…. Times when we, as students were given responsibility of an adult nature, and\ were trusted to fulfill it…. Times when we, as students, took on major independent research projects that went far beyond simply copying something out of an encyclopedia, or involved ourselves in periods of intense personal creativity and action…. (Wigginton, 1985)

Indeed, in three of our required readings these same insights are present, but not, I think, in the same self-conscious way that Wigginton offers. The situation that framed Foxfire was parallel and similar in ways to the troubles Alaskan Natives describe: rural, poverty, dysfunction and substance abuse, the traditional life-ways eroded by the consumer society. The young people in his classes were like most young people trapped in the institution of schooling: bored — sometimes to death, de-motivated, and waiting to be old enough to get on with real life. The magazine, and later the books, was the catalyst at that place and time, which allowed Wigginton to accomplish all of the goals our required readings celebrate. Wigginton pulled all facets of the curriculum, English, business math, technology (of the era), history, social studies, and art together into a single project. He ruptured the barrier between town and gown or at least rendered it porous with knowledge flowing in both directions. His project preserved and transmitted lifeways and material culture across generations. Imitation is a kind flattery but it is also bound for failure, and that is why I emphasize Wigginton’s theoretical value. We do not have to re-invent him, rather we can appropriate and adapt to the circumstance of schools, and villages and Alaska Natives. Another strength in Wigginton’s approach is that it cuts through the Gordian knot if the double-bind school/community dysfunction. The function is restored adequately as a together step of both systems in as much as is possible through the restoration and stimulation of life-long learning.

I also recommend various works by Donald Kraybill and his co-authors, on the Amish. I am neither Amish nor particularly religious, so my admiration for these people arises from other angles. In conjunction with a course on the legal and ethical issues in technology, I wrote an ethnographic comparison of Amish and Tlingit ethics of appropriate technology. It probably was not very good, but I was struck by the self-consciousness and intentional albeit inconsistent approach that Amish had in confronting consumer technology. At the most basic if the technology threatened to erode spiritual values and community values then it was rejected. Here I think of a story that Rosita Worl told at a presentation 30 years ago where she talked about how plumbing and running water had damaged the social fabric in many Native villages because it had replaced the trek to the water source – a chore shared by older and younger men and an opportunity for them to transmit cultural knowledge, create trust and respect and hence bonds that preserved communities, for example. Certainly, plumbing is better than Cholera yet perhaps some alternatives could have been negotiated to sustain the culture if greater self-consciousness in the adoption of technology were practiced. Indeed, the Amish display at times inconsistencies or they create loopholes for themselves, yet I think the process and vigorous commitment to values offer some valuable guidelines as Alaska Natives grapple with the issues raised and goals set in these four readings. Similarly, I think the Amish offer insights into getting a living while straddling two worlds. In the 100 years between 1900 and 1992, the Amish population grew steadily. Originally, farming or trade and industry supporting farming were the only acceptable ways of making a living. However, as real estate prices rose, and population encroached on the Amish settlements, family farming became nearly impossible to sustain. The Amish have exploded into the small business economy of the eastern Pennsylvania and the US. However, they have done it with the same self-consciousness and keen awareness of spiritual and communal values. My point again is Alaska Natives will have to find their way, but I believe the Amish offer some absorbing guidelines for how to manage to live between two cultures – “in the world but not of it.”

The response to this Amish “intransigence” eventually pushed the landmark Court case Wisconsin v. Yoder…. Here it was declared in 1972 that the Amish could not be forced to send their children to school beyond the eighth grade. The Supreme Court recognized that education could continue outside the classroom and that “enforcement of the State’s requirement for compulsory formal education after the eighth grade would gravely endanger if not destroy the free exercise of … [Amish] religious beliefs.” (Huntington, 1994)

Above I worry about the illogic of taking more of the poison that makes us ill to cure the ill. The Amish, in the 1950’s, offered a workable and sustainable compromise to minimize this.

Under the vocational plan the children could work at home, supervised by a member of the community, keeping a diary of “what they worked.” One three-hour period per week the children met with an Amish teacher, either in a home or the parochial school to report on their week’s work and to study English, math, German and whatever else was determined by the local community. Attendance records were kept and forwarded to the State. In these localities where school authorities recognized the vocational program many problems were avoided. (Huntington, 1994)

I have wondered far afield, the Appalachian foothills, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania and I have only scratched the surface of both the required readings and the readings I bring to the conversation. However, I hope for a fruitful cross-pollination as these ideas inform subsequent papers. Also, whatever research and publication have been done on the eight schools/initiatives that Villegas and Prieto identify as approximating the desired outcomes should be sought and added to the conversation. While I argue for cross-pollination, I likewise see the value of local assessment and solutions. I also, appropriating the quote about the Amish, celebrate and encourage Alaska native “intransigence” both in self-determination around education, but also in response to documents like, First Alaskans Foundation – “Alaska Native Education Study/Indicators” and Alaska Dept. of Education – “No Child Left Behind/History of Alaska School Reform.” These assessments actually miss the mark and rather can be read in light of hegemonic intrusion really into all communities, not just Alaska Natives. I can, however, easily imagine a school entirely addressing the issues raised in our required readings and yet failing “No Child Left Behind” assessment repeatedly and ultimately facing re-organization.

References

Alaska Natives Commission – “Alaska Native Education: Final Report.”

Leona Okakok – “Serving the Purpose of Education.”

Paul Ongtooguk – “Their Silence About Us: The Absence of Alaska Natives in Curriculum.”

First Alaskans Institute – “2006 Alaska Native Student Vitality: Community Perspectives on Supporting Student Success.”

Bateson, G. (1972b). Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine Books.

Huntington, G. E. (1994). Persistence and Change in Amish Education. In D. C. K. a. M. A. Olshan (Ed.), The Amish Struggle with Modernity (pp. 77-96). Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.

Wigginton, E. (1985). Sometimes a Shining Moment: The Foxfire Experience. Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday.