Beyond "Business as Usual": Using Critical Storytelling to Engage the Discourses and Complexity of Urban Indigenous Education

• In Event: 63.018 - Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Castagno and Brayboy (2008) in their comprehensive literature review of culturally responsive education for Indigenous youth question why, despite longstanding critiques aimed at improving Indigenous education in the 20s (The Meriam Report, 1928), and echoed again in the 90s (Indian Nations at Risk: An Educational Strategy for Action, 1991), “policy makers have not taken the suggestions seriously and have continued schooling in a ‘business as usual’ fashion” (p. 981). This dissertation explores that question by examining the discourses that enable and constrain Indigenous education within the context of a Title VII program in an urban, public school district comprised of what a National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) study terms “low-density” public schools, schools where “less than 25 percent of
the student body is AI/AN” (NCES, 2012 p. 5). This context is particularly important as roughly 90% of Native students attend public schools, with half of those attending low-density public schools (NCES, 2012).
This field study surveys the cultural, social, and political terrain of Title VII program, exploring the constructive aspects and challenges of the program, as well as the unintended consequences that get reproduced. Of particular concern in this study are the various discourses that Indigenous students, families, and educators navigate, the cultural and personal costs of those dynamics, and an analysis of what educators might need to understand in order to better serve Indigenous students and families.

Author

• Leilani Sabzalian, University of Oregon