William G. Demmert
This literature review examines research-based information on educational approaches and programs associated with improving the academic performance of Native American students. A search reviewed ERIC's over 8,000 documents on American Indian education, as well as master's and doctoral dissertations and other sources of research on the education of Native Americans. Selected research reports and articles were organized into the following categories: early childhood environment and experiences; Native language and cultural programs; teachers, instruction, and curriculum; community and parental influences on academic performance; student characteristics; economic and social factors; and factors leading to success in college or college completion. The status of research and major research findings are reviewed for each of these categories; brief summaries of research findings with citations are included following the review of each category. Also included are an annotated bibliography of more than 100 research reports, journal articles, and dissertations, most published after 1985; and a bibliography of 23 additional references to other literature reviews and non-Native studies.
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Yves Sioui; Isabelle Picard; Louis-Jacques Dorais
Yawenda : « la Voix ». C’est le nom d’un projet ARUC (Alliance de recherche université communauté) de cinq ans subventionné par le CRSH (Conseil de recherche en sciences humaines du Canada) depuis août 2007. L’objectif de Yawenda est de travailler à la revitalisation de la langue huronne-wendate, dont les tout derniers locuteurs ont disparu au tournant du xxe siècle. Le projet repose sur un partenariat entre le Conseil de la Nation huronne-wendat (CNHW), le Centre interuniversitaire d’études et de recherches autochtones (CIÉRA) de l’Université Laval, l’Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue (UQAT), le Conseil en éducation des Premières Nations (CEPN) et la First Peoples’ Cultural Foundation (de Victoria, C.-B.).
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Yvonne Da Silveira
La maîtrise de la langue écrite est un facteur incontournable de la réussite scolaire, l’école étant ancrée dans l’écrit. Pour l’élève ou l’enseignant inuit, cela implique d’être confronté à la double réalité d’une culture première, orale, et d’une seconde, scolaire et écrite. Or l’enseignant a pour tâche de socialiser l’élève à cette dernière. À la suite de deux cours portant sur l’identité culturelle, l’éducation et le développement institutionnel donnés aux enseignants inuit dans le cadre d’un programme de formation des maîtres, nous nous sommes intéressée à leur rapport à l’écrit. Nos observations proviennent de cours donnés dans un village du Nunavik à l’automne 2007 et à l’hiver 2008. Notre discussion soulève des questions concernant la formation d’enseignants inuit dans des contextes multiculturels.Proficiency in writing skills is essential to academic success, school being based on written materials. For Inuit students or teachers, this implies confronting the dual reality of a first culture that is oral and a second that is written and academic. Teachers therefore have the task of socialising their students into the second culture. Following two courses on cultural identity, education, and institutional development for Inuit teachers in a teacher-training program, we became interested in their relationship to written materials. Our observations were collected from courses in a Nunavik village during the fall of 2007 and the winter of 2008. Our discussion raises questions about the training of Inuit teachers in multicultural contexts.
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Tracy Lynn Friedel
This a study centered on a non-formal place based learning program delivered to ten First Nation and Metis urban youth during the summer and fall of 2006. I used Cajete's (2000a) notion of curricula as maps, the growing body of literature associated with place-based learning (Gruenewald, 2003), and understandings of place as known by Indigenous Elders and academics (Kawagley & R. Barnhardt, 1999) to initiate a program
that sought to teach at the intersection of knowledge and nature. Place-based education has special significance in contexts where Indigenous people have developed a deep, longstanding relationship to the place in which they have lived for millennia. Newhouse & Peters (2003) importantly point out that when Aboriginal people move into cities, unlike other urban in-migrants, very often they are travelling within their traditional territories.The intent of the study was to garner an understanding of how urban Native youth experience identity, place and education in the early twenty-first century. I employed both a conventional and visual research approach to data collection, the latter helping to privilege the frequently silenced voices of Indigenous youth. The use of a visual research method along with critical race theory (CRT) in qualitative research (Parker & Lynn, 2002) allow for greater emphasis on the 'voice' of participants, male and female, fourteen to sixteen years of age. Made explicit through their voice is that race and racism heavily influence their sense of Indigenous identity and experience of place on the Canadian prairies. Using CRT in education (Ladson-Billings, 1999), I highlight the contradictions produced by an ecology-focused place-based learning for urban Native youth. I argue that an uneven emphasis on environmental, rural, and outdoor learning in place-based education, at times tied to the discourses of authenticity and neo-primitivism, obscures ongoing oppression and a full analysis of the ways in which identities are constructed and maintained in the domination of peoples, places, and knowledges. Suggested by this research is an alternative conception of place-based learning that is concerned with the
local environment in ways that resonate with anti-racist education and the noncompartmentalized ways of knowing available in Indigenous knowledge systems.
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