This chapter will discuss culturally responsive teaching practices, focusing particularly on including Indigenous knowledge, techniques, and voices in the classroom and how doing so will benefit all students, not just Indigenous students. I will highlight examples of experiences of Indigenous people to illustrate the importance of culturally responsive teaching practices, explain culturally responsive practices employed in my teaching practice, and demonstrate how these practices may be included in your classroom in a culturally responsive and respectful way.
This chapter will discuss…
• The experiences of Indigenous people in the United States and their relationship to education.
• What Culturally Responsive Teaching is and how to implement a few culturally responsive teaching practices.
• The value of including Indigenous knowledge and voices within the classroom.
Being Indigenous in the Academy—My
also wrote about the importance of Indigenous perspectives to those outside of the Indigenous community in creating this culturally responsive work, stating:
Our stories and our words are, as well, offerings to non-Indigenous people so they may come to know and move into ally-ship with us for that needed transformative work. (p. 10)
I am Qualla (qua-la) Ketchum, and I am a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. I grew up within the Nation’s boundaries in what is also known as northeastern Oklahoma. My technical background has been in Biological Systems or Agricultural Engineering. As an Indigenous student, I have had firsthand experience with the struggle to connect engineering to my culture.
This struggle has been identified as one of the factors impacting why more Native Americans don’t become engineers (Kant et al., 2015). I have had to work hard to bring together these different sides of myself—the engineer and the Cherokee and the educator—and i t is a continuing process.
I want to acknowledge my white-privilege as a white-passing Native woman, meaning that others do not immediately recognize my identity as a minority. Because of my phenotype, I am seen by society as white, and thus I carry that privilege. I acknowledge that my experience is not the same as those who are automatically coded as a person of color by the dominant culture. I can only speak for myself and my experience. There are more than 573 different Indigenous Nations within the United States which means more than 573 different cultures, languages, histories, and sets of issues. I cannot speak for other Indigenous nations or even for everyone within my Indigenous Nation. The experiences and thoughts expressed here are my perspective as both an Indigenous student and an instructor. It should not be assumed that all Indigenous people experience the academy or hold the same truths as I do.
As a whole, Indigenous people have had a long, storied history with the US education system. Teaching and learning have always been important values in our cultures, mostly in informal ways through our family systems.
As an example, the Cherokee Nation built the first institutions of higher education west of Mississippi for both Cherokee men and women as a way of reclaiming our ways of being after our forced removal to Indian Territory in the mid-1800s (Foreman, 1982). However, education was then turned into a weapon used against Indigenous Nations by the US government. The Curtis
Act of 1898 was used to dissolve tribal institutions of the Five Civilized Tribes, including the Cherokee seminaries (Conley, 2007). This action paved the way for residential boarding schools and the deeply rooted scars that still exist today from this era in Indigenous communities. For many of our Indigenous nations, these schools, where native children were forced away from their families to become “civilized,” were our first real experience with a formal education system. The horrors in these schools haunt many today (NPR, 2008), but these schools are not as far in the past as one might wish to think. In 1969, one-third of Native students were still enrolled in schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE). Now, nearly 50 years later, the bureau still educates 40,000 Native students in over 180 schools (NPR, 2008). These schools’ effects on Indigenous families are still felt every day, especially when it comes to feelings toward education. On reservations in Montana, educators and Indigenous leaders have discussed that families do not seem to value or believe in formal education (Field, 2016).
It is with an understanding of these histories and beliefs that the statistics for Native Americans in education become more clear. Native Americans have the lowest graduation rate in comparison to other minority populations. We are the least likely demographic to enroll in college and are the second least likely to graduate on time (Field, 2016). Only seven out of every 100 Native American kindergarteners earn a bachelor’s degree (Begay- Campbell, 2016). Nearly fifty percent of Native American K-12 students attend a public school where the full range of math and science courses are not being offered (Begay-Campbell, 2016). I, personally, went to a public school that fell within this category. This performance gap can also be attributed to a lack of funding, qualified teachers, technology, and internet access (May
& Chubin, 2003). From 2005 to 2015, the percentage of 25- to 29-year olds holding at least bachelor’s degrees increased for all racial and ethnic groups except Native Americans (Field, 2016).
I share all of this as a framework for understanding why culturally responsive teaching and inclusive pedagogical practices are important to include in our classrooms. Because of the highly colonized nature of the United States education system and society as a whole, many educators are not aware of this history and experience of Native Americans. We must understand where we have been and where others are coming from when we wish to create and hold welcoming spaces within our classrooms.
42 | Indigenizing Your Classroom