Native Nation-Building Through Culturally Responsive Professional Development and Teacher-Authored Curriculum on the Navajo Nation

• In Event: Teachers as Co-Constructors of Truth, Knowledge, and Curriculum: Exploring Three Teachers Institutes© Across the United States

Abstract

This paper focuses on the Diné Institute for Navajo Nation Educators (DINÉ), which is a professional development partnership between Northern Arizona University and schools on and bordering the Navajo Nation. We will provide a brief overview of the origins and key features of the DINÉ, and then we will hear from a founding teacher-leader about the curriculum unit she developed in the program.

The teacher has taught for over 30 years in Kayenta, which is a town of approximately 5,500 residents on the Navajo Nation. During the 2021 program year, she was part of a seminar focused on the theme of climate change, and especially climate change in the southwestern United States. Through this 8-month seminar, the teacher researched the Betatakin Canyon, a remote area on the Shonto Plateau about 30 miles from Kayenta. Her research included the history and geology of the canyon, the impacts of livestock introduction and coal mining around the canyon, and the cultural significance of the canyon. Her research led to the development of a rich curriculum unit for her fifth-grade students that aligned to state science and social studies standards, as well as Department of Diné Education standards, through content that was meaningful and relevant to students.

The result is an opportunity for both the teacher and her students to inquire about a place of deep significance in their own backyard, to engage in meaning-making based on primary source texts and lived experience, and to narrate stories about Betatakin Canyon and the relationships embedded in the landscape. Climate change thus becomes something the teacher and students connect to their own lives, landscapes, cultures, languages, and histories.

Although teachers in the DINÉ have written over 80 curriculum units since 2018, we center this one unit as a way to illustrate the type of culturally responsive (e.g. Castagno and Brayboy, 2008; McCarty and Lee, 2014) professional development engaged by teachers in the DINÉ and, most importantly, the innovative curriculum that results when teachers come together in spaces that honor them as professionals, leaders, and knowledge producers. This work is especially important across Indian Country in that it contributes to teachers’ self-determination through self-education (Brayboy and Castagno, 2009) and is, thus, an important element of Native Nation building (Brayboy, et.al, 2012). Ultimately what we strive to do in the DINÉ professional development program is position teachers as Native Nation builders (Anthony-Stevens et.al 2020; Castagno 2021), and this paper centers the voice and experience of one teacher to highlight the possibilities inherent in this positioning for the theme of the 2023 AERA Annual Meeting.

Authors

• Jolene Rose Smith, Northern Arizona University
  Presenting Author

• Angelina E. Castagno, Northern Arizona University
  Non-Presenting Author