Native America and Adult Basic Education

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday V)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Indigenous epistemology, sustainability, and adult education

Proposal

While there is extensive literature on adult education, as well as a growing record on Indigenous knowledge and learning, there have been limited examinations of the two’s intersections. Discussions of Native American education in the U.S. often focuses on the boarding school era and its colonializing role of education, in a sense echoing Vine Deloria’s observation that the world perceives the Native American as a historical figure, frozen in some distant time long past (1969). Recent work by Indigenous scholars have worked to update the academy’s conception of Native America, and may include this history as a foundational element important of recognition and reconciliation before offering up their own critiques of academia and attempts to indigenize the academy. Adult education, however, has engaged with this work in limited ways, though often within a marginal and marginalized context. Many of the articles dedicated to Native American populations within peer-reviewed adult education publications are book reviews of titles such as Sandy Grande’s Red Pedagogy or Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies. The seminal Handbook of Adult and Continuing Education, a semi-regular decennial publication, has not published a chapter dedicated to Indigenous Education since 1948—the first and only time the Handbook included such a chapter.
Within the realm of adult education, this particular paper will focus on the area of adult basic education (ABE), or that portion of adult education focused on students working towards a secondary education certificate. This area of education is greatly applicable to many Native American communities as the graduation rate of Native students is 67%, compared to 80% nationwide (Camera, U.S. News and World Report, 6 November 2015). This lower graduation rate is not unexpected as many reservation schools face a variety of challenges, such as underfunding; as an example, schools on the Navajo Nation received 30% less funding per student than the national average (Berry et al., 2003). These statistics, and the consequent need for ABE programs, are a perfect example of Grande’s critique that “Indian students, in comparison to all others, are still the most disproportionately affected by poverty, low educational attainment, and limited access to educational opportunities” (2004, pg. 18). High school equivalency tests, such as the GED, the HiSET and the TASC, require the understanding of certain standardized knowledge, that knowledge deemed important by whitestream entities such as the third-party companies that publish both test and test-preparatory materials. Educators working within ABE, particularly those within Native communities, must continually grapple with how to reconcile teaching this standardized knowledge with a critical acknowledgement and examination of education’s colonizing work, marginalization of communities of color, and the disenfranchisement and attempts at annihilation of Indigenous Knowledge.
This paper seeks to address the largely neglected area of Adult Education within Native America. First, the paper will include a brief overview of adult education’s landscape, focusing on the creation of the GED and the field of adult basic education, as well as the presence, or lack thereof, of Native American narratives within this history. Next, I will position myself both within that adult education landscape and as a member of white, middle-class United States, and discuss the importance of recognizing and problematizing one’s identity when working from both emic and etic positions. I will use this discussion of positionality and identity to springboard into an examination of the tensions inherent within teaching a standardized body of curriculum and attempting to decolonize the classroom at the same time. Central to this task will be a focus on language and the process of language standardization as a means of modern colonization. Then, drawing on the works such as Margaret Kovach’s Indigenous Methodologies, Shawn Wilson’s Research as Ceremony, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies, as well as the words and works of Winona LaDuke, N. Scott Momaday, Keith Basso and Vine Deloria Jr., this paper will attempt to apply an Indigenous and decolonizing lens to the work of adult education by interrogating central andragogical questions such as “how do adults learn?” and “how can educators help adults learn better?”

Author

• Tabitha Rae Stickel, Pennsylvania State University