indigenous education

My Dreams for Indigenous Education in Canada

Jo -Ann Archibald
  1. By: Jo-ann Archibald.

Stó:lō educator Jo-ann Archibald, new Order of Canada recipient, imagines the brightest future for her field.

[Editor’s note: Jo-ann Archibald, University of British Columbia professor emeritus of education and member of the Stó:lō First Nation, is one of 15 people appointed Officer of the Order of Canada for 2019. Archibald, whose Indigenous name is Q’um Q’um Xiiem, spent her 45-year academic career Indigenizing education, from teaching, to teacher education and curriculum development, to university education. Archibald spoke to Tyee reporter Katie Hyslop about where she wants to see Indigenous education in 20 years.]

I’d like to be able to look back in 20 years and say, “Gee, we’ve really made some big steps, instead of the small steps we’ve been making over the years.” For example, ensuring Indigenous ways of knowing are more firmly embedded in all areas of education, moving from the margins to core parts of learning in early learning, Kindergarten to Grade 12, and post-secondary education.

Now we’re at the stage where we have pockets where Indigenous ways of knowing have been introduced, and in some areas we actually have Indigenous programs. We have had success for those who are lucky enough to experience these programs. But those are few.

In 20 years, Indigenous ways of knowing should be more widespread and shared in ways that are meaningful, of good quality and engaging. Teachers who take on this role should feel more confident in introducing the topics, the resources and most importantly work with Indigenous families and community members to supplement what the teachers are doing. Research should be connected to these approaches so that we can learn what’s working, what needs to be improved, and share that widely.

Some teachers will say, “I can’t do anything about the Indigenous kids; they come from poor homes,” and feel hopeless. I would hope this feeling shifts to excitement and confidence in working with Indigenous students and parents, rather than feeling it’s a dismal situation. That point came out in a 2015 auditor general’s report in British Columbia; it is called the racism of low expectations. I hope we wouldn’t have that anymore in 20 years time.

And we need to question our biases and keep examining our own perspectives: “What’s my attitude to Indigenous peoples or the history? What has shaped my attitudes and how I approach these areas in my own practice?” Those questions are so important, and even somebody who feels they are not biased, when they look at their assumptions might think, “Oh, maybe I need to get more informed, get some help from others to deal with some of these questions that I have.” I think it’s really important to question, but you need to act on those questions.

More Indigenous teachers!

We seem to have more Indigenous teachers who act as resource teachers in the public school system, which is important, but at the same time we need to have the Indigenous teachers as classroom teachers, too. That leads up to post-secondary education, where many more Indigenous faculty members are needed for teaching and doing research.

I do see more Indigenous people entering post-secondary education now, and these could be the future teachers and educational leaders at all levels of education. The teachers to me are so central to Indigenous students’ success, which is why I have dedicated much of my educational career to teacher and graduate education.

Including more Indigenous ways of knowing in curriculum

We’ve been working on many areas of Indigenous curriculum, preparation of teachers and educational leaders and increasing the educational involvement of community members. But we really need to ensure that the funding for these approaches continues, and that’s a difficult area, because if educational systems and universities start to have a financial issue the Indigenous programs are often the ones that suffer the most.

Currently, there is a requirement from the B.C. Ministry of Education to include Indigenous topics and resources at every grade level and subject area. Some innovative approaches ensure that students have opportunities to be out in nature to learn about the rivers, the land and the affinity and kinship one can acquire by being on and with the land. They have stories to help them, Elders or knowledge holders doing activities with them out on the land, and the teachers help relate this Indigenous knowledge to science, math, reading, physical activity and more. It can be holistic and integrated, starting with the use of Indigenous traditional stories.

In contrast, it’s not doing a little bit and feeling, “Okay, that’s my Indigenous activity for the year,” which may give students the impression that this learning is not that important. It’s important that teachers, whether they are K-12 or at university, try something, and that could be their first time. But it should not be their last time.

Non-Indigenous students benefiting, too

Non-Indigenous students may develop an awareness that Indigenous people were living on this land going back thousands of years. They managed to survive, to live on and with the land, learned or developed technologies to help them and had their own values and laws.

The other part that students have to know is the history of colonization and to think about the results. If they then hear on the news that Indigenous people are protesting some of the pipelines, logging or the missing and murdered Indigenous women, they will have an understanding about why our society is in this predicament today. Whereas when they don’t learn the history, all they see are the images on the news, and they’re not given an understanding about what are the issues, how they’ve come about, what people want to happen and the racism and how that plays out.

More emphasis on education as a life-long journey

I’d like to see more Indigenous families and community members feeling positive about their engagement with the school, that school is not for them a scary place or a place they don’t belong, which is often a prevalent feeling.

We need to also put the same attention on this lifelong or long-term commitment. It is important for these different systems to work co-operatively: the early childhood education to K-12, then K-12 into post-secondary, then post-secondary to career/business/industry. Right now, it’s not a seamless kind of journey for the learners.

Indigenous learners have often been channelled into some areas that are limited, where they may not take the math or English courses that would get them into a university, for example. That can be problematic when it’s done through bias; we want to make sure if learners decide they want to go into a trades program, they do it knowingly and they feel good about it. At the same time, they should have the option to go to college and university.

Twenty years from now we would have much more flexible educational systems where Indigenous learners feel included, that they belong, that they feel good about who they are as Indigenous people, and that there is this caring and meaningful trajectory for them.

Stronger connections between education systems, community

Where I see a lot of exciting things happening right now is in the Indigenous early childhood programs. Across the country they have been working on ensuring the programs are Indigenous — learning an Indigenous language, Indigenous stories — while they’re also doing child development, learning and communication activities that all children should get at that level.

At the same time, post-secondary Indigenous education in Canada is expanding to include more Indigenous courses, programs and support units for students and faculty. What is needed are ways to connect these various public and Indigenous educational systems so that those students who experience Indigenous learning transition successfully to their next level of learning, where that system is also responsive to Indigenous learners and to Indigenous ways of knowing.

If Indigenous students do need any particular supports, there are ways to find the supports, or draw on the strength that child has or strength from the family and community. That’s where the educational systems could then work with the community.

Or later, for career or job areas, there are partnerships where students can have internships and co-op placements. So that child knows, ‘Hey, somebody cares about me,’ and they are prepared and they are given options. In 20 years, that continuum should be a standard way of thinking about Indigenous students.

That kind of approach is starting to happen. I have been involved with a non-profit society, Dogwood 25, that’s trying to look at this Indigenous learning continuum going from the early years right through into career and work. We are trying to get school districts, post-secondary, business and industry working in partnership so we can develop this kind of continuum planning and program approach.  [Tyee]

Source of the article: https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2019/01/14/Indigenous-Education-Dreams/

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EEUU-Massachusetts: Native Language Schools Are Taking Back Education

Noticias
Por:  intercontinentalcry.org/ Abaki Beck/ 02-05-2018
MORE THAN A CENTURY AGO, THE LAST FLUENT SPEAKERS OF WÔPANÂAK PASSED AWAY. NOW THIS SCHOOL IS WORKING TO REVIVE THE LANGUAGE.
For more than 150 years, the Wôpanâak language was silent. With no fluent speakers alive, the language of the Mashpee Wampanoag people existed only in historical documents. It was by all measures extinct. But a recently established language school on the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe’s reservation in Massachusetts is working to bring back the language.

The threat of extinction that faces the Wôpanâak language is not uncommon for indigenous languages in the United States. Calculated federal policy, not happenstance, led to the destruction of Native American languages such as Wôpanâak.

But today, Native language schools are working to change that by revitalizing languages that have been threatened with extinction.

In the 19th century, federal policy shifted from a policy of extermination and displacement to assimilation. The passage of the Civilization Fund Act in 1819 allocated federal funds directly to education for the purpose of assimilation, and that led to the formation of many government-run boarding schools. Boarding schools were not meant to educate, but to assimilate.

Tribal communities continue to be haunted by this history. As of April, UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Endangered Languages listed 191 Native American languages as “in danger” in the United States. Of these, some languages are vulnerable—meaning that children speak the language, but only in certain contexts—to critically endangered—meaning the youngest generation of speakers are elderly.

Today, the education system in the United States fails Native American students. Native students have the lowest high school graduation rate of any racial group nationally, according to the 2017 Condition of Education Report. And a 2010 report shows that in the 12 states with the highest Native American population, less than 50 percent of Native students graduate from high school per year.

By founding schools that teach in Native languages and center tribal history and beliefs, tribal language schools are taking education back into their own hands.

Mukayuhsak Weekuw: Reviving a silent language

On the Massachusetts coast just two hours south of Boston is Mukayuhsak Weekuw, a Wôpanâak language preschool and kindergarten founded in 2015. The school is working to revitalize the Wôpanâak language. As one of the first tribes to encounter colonists, the Mashpee Wampanoag faced nearly four centuries of violence and assimilation attempts; by the mid 19th century, the last fluent speakers of Wôpanâak had died.

In the 1990s, Wampanoag social worker Jessie Little Doe Baird began to work to bring the language back to her people. It began like this: More than 20 years ago, Baird had a series of dreams in which her ancestors spoke to her in Wôpanâak. She says they instructed her to ask her community whether they were ready to welcome the language home.

She listened, and in 1993 she sought the help of linguists and community elders to begin to revitalize the language—elders like Helen Manning from the Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribe, with whom she would later co-found the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project.

Baird found a lot of resources. To translate the Bible, colonists had transcribed Wôpanâak to the Roman alphabet in the 1600s, which the Wampanoag used to write letters, wills, deeds, and petitions to the colonial government. With these texts, Baird and MIT linguist Kenneth Hale established rules for Wôpanâak orthography and grammar, and created a dictionary of 11,000 words.

In 2015, the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project was ready to open the Mukayuhsak Weekuw preschool. According to the school’s Project Director Jennifer Weston, 10 students attended in the first year it opened, growing to 20 in the current school year. As part of the language program, parents or grandparents of students at the school are required to attend a weekly language class to ensure that the youth can continue speaking the language at home.

The curriculum is taught entirely in the Wôpanâak language, and it is also grounded in tribal history and connection to the land. “Our languages embody our ancestors’ relationships to our homelands and to one another across millennia,” Weston says. “They explain to us to the significance of all the places for our most important ceremonies and medicines. They tell us who we are and how to be good relatives.”

In addition to language learning, the children also learn about gardening, hunting, and fishing. They practice tribal ceremonies, traditional food preservation, and traditional hunting and fishing practices. At Native American language schools like Mukayuhsak Weekuw, students experience their culture in the curriculum in a deeply personal and empowering way.

‘Aha Pūnana Leo: Overcoming policy barriers

Considering the violent history of America’s education system towards Native Americans, it is perhaps unsurprising that policy barriers continue to hinder contemporary language revitalization schools.

Federal policies are often misaligned with the reality of tribal communities and language revitalization schools. Leslie Harper, president of the advocacy group National Coalition of Native American Language Schools and Programs, says schools often risk losing funding because they lack qualified teachers who meet federal standards. But these standards are paternalistic, notes Harper, who says that fluent language teachers at Native schools are often trained outside of accredited teaching colleges, which don’t offer relevant Native language teaching programs. These teaching colleges don’t “respond to our needs for teachers in Indian communities,” she says.

In Hawai’i, ‘Aha Pūnana Leo schools have had some success in overcoming policy barriers like these. The schools have led the way for statewide and national policy change in Native language education.

When the first preschool was founded in 1984, activists estimated that fewer than 50 children spoke Hawaiian statewide. Today, ‘Aha Pūnana Leo runs 21 language medium schools serving thousands of students throughout the state, from preschool through high school. Because of this success, emerging revitalization schools and researchers alike look to ‘Aha Pūnana Leo as a model.

Nāmaka Rawlins is the director of strategic collaborations at ‘Aha Pūnana Leo. Like Harper, she says that required academic credentialing burdened the language preschools, which relied on fluent elders. This became an issue in 2012 when kindergarten was made compulsory in Hawai’i, and teachers and directors of preschools were required to be accredited. But she, along with other Hawaiian language advocates, advocated for changes to these state regulations to exclude Hawaiian preschools from the requirement and instead accredit their own teachers as local, indigenous experts. And they succeeded. “We got a lot of flack from the preschool community,” she says. “Today, we provide our own training and professional development.”

One of the early successes of ‘Aha Pūnana Leo was removing the ban on the use of Hawaiian language in schools, which had been illegal for nearly a century. Four years later, in 1990, the passage of the Native American Language Act affirmed that Native American children across the nation have the right to be educated, express themselves, and be assessed in their tribal language.

But according to Harper, progress still needs to be made before NALA is fully implemented by the Education Department. Since 2016, Native American language medium schools have been able to assess students in their language. This took years of advocacy by people like Harper, who served on the U.S. Department of Education’s Every Student Succeeds Act Implementation Committee and pushed for the change.

While this is an important first step, Harper is concerned that because language medium school assessments must be peer reviewed, low capacity schools—or those that lack the technical expertise of developing assessments that align with federal standards—will be burdened. And the exemption doesn’t apply to high schools.

Studies from multiple language revitalization schools have found that students who attend these schools have greater academic achievement than those who attend English-speaking schools, including scoring significantly higher on standardized tests. “We are beginning to see the long-term benefits of language revitalization and language-medium education in our kids,” Harper says. “But the public education system and laws are still reticent about us developing programs of instruction for our students.”

Looking back, looking forward

A movement to revitalize tribal languages is underway. The success of ‘Aha Pūnana Leo and promise of Mukayuhsak Weekuw are examples of communities taking education into their own hands. When Native American students are taught in their own language and culture, they succeed.

Weston says parents are eager for Mukayuhsak Weekuw to expand into an elementary school, and in fall 2018, the school will include first grade in addition to pre-school and kindergarten. It is a testament to the work and vision of the Wampanoag that just two decades ago, their language was silent, and today, they have a school that expands in size each year. “All of our tribal communities have the capacity to maintain and revitalize our mother tongues,” Weston says—no matter how daunting it may seem.

This article was originally published by Yes! Magazine. It has been re-published at IC under a Creative Commons License.

*Fuente: https://intercontinentalcry.org/native-language-schools-are-taking-back-education/

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