Here I am back at Lathrop High School in Fairbanks... It seems like quite a culture shock - all these white kids sitting in the classroom... kind of scary... :)
Looking back at Buckland, I find the clear division between white/Caucasian and native very saddening. It seems like the white population in Buckland (teachers...) plays such an elitist role. Teachers are the only ones that have running water and a sewage system in teacher housing and the school. The huge, modern, white school is so much newer than all the other buildings in the town. Other than the principal and two native elementary teachers, all the well-payed positions at the school seem to be in the hands of white people. Teacher aids, cooks, custodians are all native Bucklanders. I guess that wouldn't be all too bad in itself, but there sometime almost seemed to be resentment towards the native lifestyle and community... ("Eskimos don't get cold...") I guess the high teacher turn-over rate does not help to improve the situation - particularly towards the end of the school year. Actually just about all the high school teachers are not planning on staying for the next school year. This feeling of moving on and therefore not necessarily caring as much didn't seem nearly as pronounced among the elementary teachers. Unfortunately, this does not mean that the "white education" does not seem detached in the elementary classrooms either...
One of my last days in Buckland, I visited the preschool class! The kids were adorable, they were just working on learning their alphabet. The teacher asked me whether I would like to read a "ABC on the farm" book to them. I was more than happy to do so, of course. Very soon, I realized that my task was much harder than it seemed at first. "F stands for farm" - there are no farms anywhere close to Buckland's vicinity... But the word "farm" still seems somewhat relevant... Not so much the case anymore for some of the other examples... "C stands for corn"... My favorite one: "S stands for silo" !!! How do I explain to a native Buckland student what a silo is and what it's used for?!? After my explanation, I actually found out that not even the teacher knew what a silo was used for and had successfully lived in Buckland for decades! Talk about making the education relevant for the students!!! I would have loved to make an alphabet book for the region: "C stands for Caribou" and "S stands for seal"!!
I really enjoyed this practicum and learned a lot. Nevertheless, more questions than answers remain... Is there any point in teaching these kids the education that white people happen to deem as relevant and important? How about their native ways of knowing and teaching? How about their native language, Iñupiaq, that is getting ready to disappear from the street into dry and dusty anthropology textbooks?
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3 comments:
Thank you so much for this summary, Mirjam. Your thoughtfulness and examples really help!
I actually got quite emotional reading your blog on teaching in Buckland. I can relate to the students there, having been educated in Arctic Village. I hope they can get more relevant teaching materials, reintroduce Inupiaq language, and also long term teachers who care about the people whose lives they are impacting. We had a few really crappy teachers show up in Arctic Village, but we were also fortunate to have some really amazing people as well, Bill and Debbie Bjork for instance. Someone who really cares about what they're doing can make an incredible impact on a young developing mind.
You have a good eye for racialized inequalities and how they play out in terms of infrastructure. Perhaps you should add a study of the anthropology of power to your training, for example: how policies such as No Child Left Behind hinder programs like Inupiaq studies.
Interesting blog!
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