Reconciling the Ivory Tower and Indigenous Realities

• In Event: Roundtable Session 96
  In Roundtable Session: Try and Try Again: Reflections on the Uncertainties of Living Out an Ecological Ethic in Academe

Abstract

For the past 40 years I have been striving as a faculty member at the University of Alaska Fairbanks to provide educational opportunities for Alaska Native students that seek to reconcile the learning assumptions and expectations of a campus-based institutional environment and those associated with everyday life and survival in rural Alaska. This work has taken many forms, the most salient being the implementation of field-based education programs that take the university to the students and communities, rather than students having to come to the university (Kawagley and Barnhardt, 1999).

The traditional campus environment is de¬signed to sequester faculty and students from “the real world,” or put another way, it is a reality unto itself. It is a literate world that relies heavily on decontextualized knowl¬edge and in which this knowledge must be displayed in highly specialized liter¬ate forms. As an institution for perpetuating literate knowledge, the university has served us well. However, there are other kinds of knowledge in the world and there are other ways of conveying knowledge than those symbolized by the image of the ivory tower (Barnhardt, 2007).

Native students trying to survive in a campus environment must acquire a new form of consciousness, an orientation which not only displaces, but often devalues the world views they bring with them. For many, this is a greater sacrifice than they are willing to make, so they withdraw and go home, branded a failure. Those who do survive in the academic environment often find themselves caught between different worlds, neither of which can fully satisfy their acquired tastes and aspirations, and thus they enter into a struggle to reconcile their conflicting forms of consciousness.

The difference between working with field-based students and their campus-bound counterparts is that their on-going active participation in a real-world context makes it easier to integrate their learning experiences into the framework of an indigenous consciousness, an accomplishment which, in turn, al¬lows the students to use their formal education in ways that are compatible with the ways of thinking, doing and being preferred in their communities. For the non-indigenous faculty member in such an environment, special considerations are needed to reconcile the tensions between competing forms of consciousness (Harrison, 2001). This presentation will highlight some of the adaptations we have made and challenges we have encountered as we have sought to expand the scope of the university to provide our students with access to multiple forms of knowledge.

Author

• Ray Barnhardt, The University of Alaska - Fairbanks