Wisconsin Indian Education Association Conference
Native Pedagogy

By Jonathan Gramling

Part 1 of 2

    As with any other education conference, the Wisconsin Indian Education Association Conference, held at the Concourse Hotel April 6-8, is a means by which
educators can network and share information about what is happening in their schools and communities. It’s just that it is focused on what works for American
Indian children.
    “The purpose of the conference is to highlight educational achievements throughout the state in Indian education during the past year,” said Adrienne
Thunder, an advisor, in the UW-Madison L&S Student Academic Affairs office. It’s also an opportunity for each of us to talk and highlight our programs and
services that we offer through k-12 programs and post-secondary institutions. Almost by nature because our programs and tribes are unique, all of us have needs
that are very specific to our communities. There are a few approaches that work for Native students. But I would say, for the most part, each of our tribes has
specific initiatives that we are working on. These are what we try to highlight in our schools and our communities.”
    One of the hot topics in this year’s conference was Native Pedagogy, strategies for instructing American Indian students. One of the crucial issues facing
American Indian tribes is the decreasing number of native speakers of languages like Ojibwe. Many Native languages are disappearing, not only in the U.S., but
around the world as well.
    For the past two decades — for the most part fueled by the proceeds of casinos — some tribes have established their own language preservation efforts. But a
difficulty these programs have is that they don’t have the students every day to create a real immersion effect in the Native languages.
Dr. Thomas Peacock, a professor of American Indian Education and associate dean at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, has been an educator for over 40
years. He began his efforts about 14 years ago, to give some formal training to Native language teachers. “Typically, Native language teachers are just elderly
people in the community,” Peacock said during an interview with The Capital City Hues. “They don’t have any formal training in pedagogy at all. So they may
be wonderful speakers, but maybe they aren’t the best classroom teachers in the world.”
    Peacock’s efforts have evolved into designing a curriculum and a process through which Native language teachers would become licensed elementary and
secondary school teachers who could teach in tribal and public schools that have significant American Indian student populations.
“We started this thing called ‘Gekinoo´imaagejig,’ in Ojibwe, which means ‘The Ones Who Teach,’” Peacock said. “That first cohort was at Fond du Lac Tribal
and Community College. We trained 14 teachers to get their k-8 Minnesota teaching license. They take the Wisconsin History course and then they get licensed
in Wisconsin. They actually get a k-6 elementary teaching license and a k-8 license for teaching the Ojibwe language.”
    The initial cohort was exposed to a standard teaching curriculum with the Ojibwe language inserted into the structure. The results were not satisfactory to
Peacock. So he began to ask questions about the appropriateness of the curriculum itself. By the third cohort, the curriculum had evolved.
“We threw out the canned curriculum and said what do these teachers really need to know about for working with Native kids,” Peacock said. “So we started
answering those questions. Those typical things you look at, for example, as a teacher on curriculum models, you wanted to look at backward design, which is
the in-way of looking at planning teaching. Would that work in a Native context? It probably would. So let’s use that one. So we take mainstream stuff and make
sure that maybe there is some context for it in working with Native kids and Native communities.”
    “This is a different kind of approach,” Peacock continued. “We actually are more engaged — the communities are engaged in language revitalization — in
training teachers in the pedagogy of teaching language. What hasn’t been developed yet is an approach to teaching language. It’s been done in English, of
course. There’s a gadzillion books out there on how to teach reading and writing in English. But that hasn’t been done with Native languages. Where do you
begin, what words and concepts do you begin with when you begin to teach Ojibwe? It’s been done in Spanish and Russian and French and all the other world
languages that are taught, for example, in other elementary immersion programs. But it has never been done in the Native languages. So that is what we are
trying to do.”
    While the program has been successful in teaching what Peacock calls “survival” Ojibwe, it hasn’t started to reverse the trend of the loss of Native language
speakers, people who are fluent in the oral and written word. In Peacock’s words, people who can use “the complexity of language to engage in the language
100 percent of the time.” Peacock’s solution is to start working with children at an earlier age.
    “The immersion program we are beginning is complete immersion in Ojibwe,” Peacock said. “We’re beginning at age 4-5 and we are going to work back to
age two. I think the only requirement we are going to have is that they are toilet trained. It will be part of the University of Minnesota’s role in language
revitalization. It will be a placement site for our early childhood and our teacher training program. We’re going to use it as an internship and student teaching
site. That’s our excuse for opening this nest. Of course, the real purpose is to have little kids running around speaking their language.”
At the present time, American Indian educators must travel to the University of Minnesota-Duluth — about 330 miles away — to learn some of the techniques
that Peacock and his colleagues have developed. However, there is an effort currently underway to help the UW School of education to adopt some of   
Peacock’s techniques.
    Next issue: The UW effort
(Above) Rachel Byington (l-r), Adrienne Thunder and Joni Theobold helped stage the
conference; (Right) Dr. Thomas Peacock