“We’re Not Important Enough to Cover”: Impacts of Culturally Responsive Teaching Strategies on Native American Student Writings

• In Event: Multiple Literacies, Multiple Contexts: Leveraging Urban Students’ Literacies in Schools and Beyond

Abstract

“[Native Americans] are not important enough to cover in school,” James says shaking his head as he recalls the lack of teachings about his family’s history, his people and his Native American culture. James, a participant in this study, chose to take part in a unique pilot classroom called Native American Literature. This class is the only one teaching Native American Literature despite the school’s close proximity to two reservations and a large population of Indigenous peoples in Arizona. Its creation also came during a time when Arizona passed legislation to ban ethnic studies from public schools. For many students like James, there is a major disconnect between Native American students’ home and their school and very little is done to help connect this large divide (Kirkland, 2007; Reyhner, 1986; Olson & Wilson, 1986). Still, this class is drastically different than any class James has taken before, and was accompanied with instances of anger, truancy, and even physical removal from the classroom in which James left the room and told the classroom teacher not to call on him.

James was one of six participants in a larger ethnographic study using multiple case studies. The purpose in focusing on one participant is to show the thickness of this environment by employing numerous theoretical perspectives such as Brayboy’s (2006) Tribal Critical Race Theory, Bhabha’s (1994) hybridity and metaphors, Kaomea’s (2003) use of Kaona or the thing unseen, de Certeau’s (1988) tactics via testimonios, and Bakhtin’s (1981) diologism. Collectively, the theorists employed here allow the author to better understand this unique classroom from one Native American participant’s perspective.

The author collected data as a participant observer in the classroom. As with all the participants, James was interviewed twice during the semester for approximately 45 minutes by asking questions that were fueled by classroom interactions, observations, and discussions. In addition, participants’ written reflections were analyzed and coded. My goal in these interviews was to provide a conversation in which participants could reflect on this new space and expand on thoughts that they were revealing during my observations.

This paper attempts to capture James’ voice, his confusion, excitement, collective counter-stories, or testimonios (de Certeau, 1988), in order to show the complexity and complications of this new learning environment that attempts to center Indigenous knowledge in the classroom. The author answers Eve Tuck’s (2009) call to the research community to move toward desire based research frameworks that “are concerned with understanding complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives … by documenting not only the painful elements of social realities but also the wisdom and hope” (p. 416).

The complexity of James’ experience helps to answer the question: How does one student, who has felt forgotten, misunderstood and silenced while in school, make sense of a classroom that now provides a new perspective that attempts to honor the histories, stories, literacies and knowledge of Native Americans?

Author

• Timothy Jose San Pedro, Arizona State University