Culture-, Community-,
Place-Based Education
(The Case for Culturally Relevant Teaching)
BME 210, Wk. 6 Powerpoint
1
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 local community
issues and challenges and teaching chemistry
around them—issues of water quality, diabetes,
2
and uranium mining.
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. 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
3
lives and the life of their community.
Culture-, Place-, and
Community-Based
Education
Students have trouble
finding meaning in the onesize-fits-all
decontextualized textbookand standards-based
curriculum and instruction.
The best way to
contextualize education is
to relate what students are
learning to their heritage,
land, and lives.
4
Besides the importance of using
relevant curricular materials and learnercentered instructional practices,
psychologists note the importance of
choice in motivating students. Effective
schools researcher Dr. Larry Lezotte declares, “we tell
kids from a very young age that you are responsible for
your own learning, but we don’t give them much
authority over the learning.” He emphasizes that,
“Choice is a powerful variable in the learning game” and
that “virtually all learning is an act of choice on the part
of the learner.” Lezotte quotes author Peter Block to the
effect that, “If you can’t say no, yes doesn't mean
anything.”
5
While students
need to learn the knowledge and skills codified
in state (or provincial)
standards, they also
need to have some
choice in what they read
and what type of learning
projects they work on.
Sovereignty is a nation
making their own
choices about their
future, and education is
the process for preparing citizens to make
intelligent choices.
6
Students with low test scores in high school and
in danger of not graduating were usually behind in
middle school, elementary school, and when they
entered kindergarten. These failed learners can enter
school with very limited vocabularies and just not
understand what their teachers are trying to teach.
These students tend to fall further and further behind
unless they receive intensive tutoring and tend to stop
trying after experiencing repeated failure. The longer a
child is failing and frustrated the less likely they will
ever be able to catch up with more successful
students.
7
To help failing students, schools need
tutoring centers that are proactive, providing
one-on-one corrective instruction. Lezotte
outlined two principles of effective instruction.
First, all students need to be placed at their
appropriate level of difficulty. If their schoolwork
is too easy or too hard, students will not learn
much. Second, students need to be kept at this
appropriate level just long enough so they can
succeed, then they need to be advanced to a
higher level of difficulty.
8
Intentional non-learners in schools have
for one reason or another decided school is not
for them. Intentional non-learners tend to be
smart. They have learned that if you don’t try,
then you can’t fail. Even when the intentional
non-learner does well in school they can
attribute their good performance on luck to
avoid taking responsibility for possible failure
later. They develop a philosophy that the good
and bad are beyond their control.
9
Faith Spotted Eagle (Dakota) speaks about a
special type of American Indian intentional non-learner
who can be eaten up by “red rage.” Red rage is the
result of “impact of generations of trauma, violence
and oppression” that historically colonialism loaded on
Indian nations. Indian students and their parents can
resist being assimilated into white society in schools
and can develop “oppositional identities” that reject
much of what schools have to offer, including literacy,
as acting “white.” She emphasizes the need for
healing in Indian societies to, while not forgetting the
historical oppression, get beyond it to lead a healthy
life.
10
In historically oppressed societies various forms of
dysfunctional behavior can arise. Besides the abuse of
drugs and alcohol, the oppression can lead to intense
jealousy of those tribal members who do manage to
climb out of poverty—the old bucket of crabs story
where the crabs in a bucket pull back down any crab
that starts to escape. In schools this can be seen as
peer group pressure directed at “nerds” who do well in
subjects like math and science and who are accused of
acting “white” and taunted with questions like, “I
suppose you think you are too good for us now.” This
can lead Indian and other ethnic minority students to
direct their efforts at recognition in sports, which their
community celebrates, rather than working for good
11
grades.
Culture-,
Community-,
Place-based
Education
Culture
Community
Place
12
Carl Sauer wrote Man in
Nature in 1939. The notes to the
2nd edition for parents and teachers
states, “Carl Sauer was no easy
romantic. His enthusiasms for
Native America had nothing at all to
do with jade bracelets, eagles’
feathers, or any number of the
forms of conventional Indian tourist
art. For thousands of years before
the arrival of the Europeans these first Americans had
tended our lands with great respect, and Carl Sauer
respected them for the wisdom and good sense they
employed in the administration of this bountiful task.”13
Sauer concluded in his classic geography
book Man in Nature, “Being civilized means first
of all learning how to make good use of the things
nature provides. It means thinking of new and
better ways of living. It means learning to know
more and more all the time. And so we think that
as we have studied how...Indians learned the
ways of living more and more skillfully, we have
learned how mankind has worked its way toward
becoming more and more civilized.”
14
Books that
describe student’s
communities, often
written by students,
can be valuable
educational tools.
They can be fairly
elaborate…
15
and cover topics
such as
traditional
stories, history,
current events,
and anything
else the
community
thinks is
important…
16
17
or community profiles can be quite simple
18
19
In placebased education
students learn
about the landforms, plants,
animals, and
other aspects of
where they live.
20
21
22
23
24
They can learn
about the plants
that grow where
they live and their
uses.
25
An ethnobotany
of a region
usually includes
both scientific
information about
its plants and
their tribal uses.
26
Students can
go on field trips to
gather local foods
and document
their activities
with both photos
and a written
narrative of their
activities.
27
Here, students
are involved in
preparing and
eating the fruit of
cactus called
“tuna.” Traditional
foods are healthier
than “fast food”
and most storebought food.
28
Ethnomathem
atics is an
approach that
relates math to the
cultural background of the
students.
29
With ethnomathematics the
teacher needs to be
careful that s/he
does not drift into
what has been
called “rain forest”
math that fails to
teach basic skills
and and higher
levels of math.
30
As well as
reading about their
community, students
need to write about it.
Gathering and writing
traditional stories can
be a start for students,
but it should not be
the end of their work.
31
T. D. Allen's
advised her students
at the Santa Fe
Institute for the Arts to
use their five senses to
paint a picture in
words of the scene or
event and let the
readers draw their own
conclusions. She then
had them write
about something they
were familiar with, their
own lives.
32
Emerson Blackhorse Mitchell was one
of Allen’s students who
just kept on writing. His
autobiography, Miracle
Hill was originally
published in 1967 by the
University of Oklahoma
Press and has been
reprinted by the
University of Arizona
Press.
33
Students can write about
their “place” in a variety of
ways. Mick Fedullo who wrote
Light of the Feather about his
experiences getting Indian
students to write poetry across
the western United States. He
tells students to not use
adjectives like beautiful, bad,
cute, good, nice, pretty and
ugly that don’t really describe
anything—“show don’t tell.”
34
Famous writers like Louisa
Mae Alcott who wrote Little Women
and Lucy Maud Montgomery who
wrote Anne of Green Gables got
nowhere with their writing until they
took advice to write about what
they knew, about the people and
places they grew up around. Well
known Native writers like N. Scott
Momaday, Virginia Driving Hawk
Sneve, Luci Tapahonso and Laura
Tohe have built much of their
success on the same principle.
35
Some of the
students Fedullo
worked with had their
poetry commercially
published by New
York publisher
Ballantine Books in
Rising Voices in 1992.
36
37
Life stories and
poetry are just a few of
the types of writing that
students need to learn
how to do. Students can
write and publish school
newspapers and
magazines as was done
with the “Foxfire”
publications in the
Southeastern United
States. This magazine
was published by Ramah
Navajo students.
38
Also useful are
five paragraph (or
more) essays and
various forms of
process writing where
students brainstorm
ideas, write drafts,
discuss drafts with
fellow students (and
the teacher!), edit,
and finally publish in
some form their
writing.
39
Mike Rose in his book
Lives on the Boundary writes
about students he met
working at the UCLA Tutorial
Center who got high grades
on their essays in high
school and then F’s for
writing the same way in
college. They learned to
write good summaries of
things they read about, but
not to critically analyze what
they read, which is what their
university professors
demanded.
40
Rose, who was born into poverty and
initially did poorly in school, emphasizes again
and again how a few of his teachers made all
the difference in his life with their encouragement and help. Part of the encouragement and
help teachers can give is to provide students
some choices about what they read and write
about and letting them use their experiential
and cultural background to inform that writing.
Of course teachers also needs to provide
guidance in how this and other types of writing
can be improved.
41
Daniel McLaughlin in his book When
Literacy Empowers writes about a Navajo student
who did well in a reservation school and then
went to a Harvard summer program where just
writing from “the top of her head” was not
enough. She was disappointed to learn that she
would need to take a remedial writing class, and
later wrote to students back at her high school,
“Think what you’re writing. What are you saying?
What is your thesis? Thesis, thesis, thesis:
everything has to relate to your main topic.”
42
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.
43
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.
44
Tribal policies can
promote culturally sensitive
teaching. In his preface to
the policies Navajo Tribal
Chairman Peterson Zah
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.”
45
The Navajo policies required 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
46
the formal grammar of the language.”
At Rough Rock
Demonstration
School, the first
Native-controlled
school in modern
times in the United
States, an effort was
made to educate
Navajo students
about their heritage.
47
Just as past work by
linguists can help people
recover a no longer
spoken language, past
work by anthropologists,
even if they have ethnocentric content can be
used by teachers. If the
facts were “gotten wrong,”
students can work with
elders to help rewrite
these books. This 285
page book published in
1953 by the BIA seems to
be fairly accurate
48
Its author, Dr. Ruth Underhill, was a student
of anthropologist Franz Boas and served as the
U.S. Indian Office’s assistant supervisor of Indian
education from 1934 to 1942 and then supervisor
from 1942 to1948. It was printed at Haskell
Institute by Indian students and drew on both
published sources and interviews with many
Navajos. It did not gloss over many of the failings
of the Indian schools. Profusely illustrated with
photos and drawings, it was designed to
introduce young Navajos and BIA employees to
the history and culture of the Navajo.
49
Written in the
termination era after
World War II, it has some
assimilationist content,
but it also shows a deep
appreciation for Navajo
history and culture.
Through it and other
materials, young Navajos
can develop further a
respect for the struggles
their ancestors faced and
the strength of their
culture.
50
Underhill wrote, “as late as 1928, trucks arrived at
Fort Apache [where chronic runaways were sent] with
the [Navajo] children shackled together to prevent their
jumping out. When they were once inside the school,
scarcely a week passed with some group attempting to
run away…. They were brought back by a Navaho
policeman and, as punishment, were dressed for weeks
in girls’ clothes. In their free time, they had to carry
heavy logs round and round the parade ground of the
old fort as punishment.” However, she also notes how
Navajo leaders over the years have recognized the
importance of their children being educated to live in the
modern world.
51