Internal and Environmental Safety Zones: Applying the Safety Zone Theory to Identity, Motivation, and Engagement in a Native American Literature Classroom

• In Event: Examining and Applying Safety Zone Theory: Current Policies, Practices, and Experiences

Abstract

Dominant and colonizing school discourses, curricula, and pedagogy have historically silenced, discredited and/or stolen the knowledges, experiences, and understandings of marginalized communities, particularly in relation to Native American nations (Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006, 2002). A blatant example of such invalidation of community knowledges and cultures is found in Arizona’s HB 2281, which banned the teaching of ethnic studies in public and charter schools. In spite of this ban, an ethnic studies course called Native American literature began in a metropolitan area public school. This senior-level, English elective classroom continued because of federal legislation protecting Native American subjects and students from dangerous state legislation such as HB 2281. During this three-year IRB approved longitudinal, multiple case, and ethnographic study (Anderson-Levitt, 2006; Yin, 2006), speaker three worked with 13 participants from multi-tribal and multi-cultural backgrounds in the community and within the Native American literature classroom to better understand how students responded to a course designed to sustain students’ cultures and knowledges (Garcia & Shirley, 2012; Paris, 2012). In listening and engaging in story-ing (Author identifying reference), speaker three retells the stories (with participants’ approval) of two students—Eileen (half Navajo, half African American) and Abby (Caucasian) as they navigate feelings of (in)validation and silence in contested classroom, community, and online spaces that contradict histories, literacies and knowledges between spaces. Specifically, speaker three applies and adapts Lomawaima & McCarty’s (2006) Safety Zone Theory on the micro-level to analyze how students’ identity, motivation, and engagement interact with/are impacted by authoritative discourses (from both Western European and Native American ethnic perspectives) that surround them in school and in online communities. The terms Internal Safety Zone and Environmental Safety Zone build from the Safety Zone Theory to more accurately reflect the formation of identity and culture within classroom and community spaces that—at times—validate and—at other times—invalidate Eileen and Abby’s identities, knowledges, and lived experiences. In applying the Internal and Environmental Safety Zones, speaker three asks the question: What/Who is lost when perspectives on history, knowledge, and culture are banned and feared in states such as Arizona? Whose ethnicity is validated? Whose ethnicity is systematically ignored and at what cost?

Author

• Timothy Jose San Pedro, The Ohio State University