Native American dropout rates are nearly twice the national average.
A new certificate program at the University of Washington aims to improve outcomes for Native American students, by teaching educators better ways to connect with them and their heritage.
The courses are designedto help teachers learn how to cultivate more meaningful and effective relationships with Native American students.
Part of this is through what’s called community-based teaching, which emphasizes connections with students’ local surroundings. So a science lesson might take students outside the classroom to see, for example, how fish are managed in a hatchery or a river on tribal lands.
Megan Bang is an education professor at the U-W, where she helped found the program. She says community-based teaching could include curriculum that refers to tribal experiences, either on paper or by taking lessons out of the classroom and into the field. But there’s more to it.
“It also means learning how to better engage families. It means bringing in and understanding who from local communities can help support learning or partner for learning. Not just teaching about, but teaching with local community,” Bang said. “And how do you do that, how do you form those relationships and do that in productive ways.”
A big part of it is also about understanding different cultures and “ways of knowing,” says program manager Dawn Hardison-Stevens. Honoring that might mean teachers bringing in tribal elders as guest speakers -- and then learning to acknowledge that their communication style will likely be different.
Hardison-Stevens serves on the Steilacoom Tribal Council.
“Many times, the question’s not going to be answered right away. It’s going to have a whole different back story that goes along with it. And then if you wait, patiently, without interruption, but learning to listen. And allowing the person to speak. They’re going to come around and answer the question in a very rich, meaningful manner,” Hardison-Stevens said.
Bang says Native American children are often misunderstood in traditional classrooms, leading to higher rates of special education, which might be due to cultural misunderstandings.
The two-year curriculum is a hybrid of online and in-person sessions.
Nearly 70 teachers and community educators start the inaugural program next month.
At least 69 educators from around the region are taking part in the 2-year program, which starts next month. They include large contingents from school districts on the Spokane and Quileute Reservations as well as individual teachers from the Yakima and Puyallup Tribes and in the Tacoma and Edmonds School Districts.
