Classroom Inquiry and Navajo Learning

1
Classroom Inquiry and Navajo Learning Styles

• The Problem Previous research establishes Navajo
  children as visual rather than verbal in
  their approach to the world
• This research constructs a style of learning
  that values
• holistic rather than analytic
• imaginative vs reading
• dance vs writing
• poor speaking vs planning
• Unresponsiveness to lines of questioning
• The Result Justification for remedial,
  nonacademic, and unchallenging curricula for
  Native American students

2
Constructing Responses

• Look at the way Navajo children respond to
  measures of learning styles
• The measures themselves create the childrens
  responses or learning styles
• Therefore, different measures will elicit
  different responses or learning styles
• Argument It is not the students culture that
  result in different learning styles but the
  actual pedagogy and measures used to assess the
  children that result in the demonstration of
  different learning styles.

3
Rough Rock Community School

• Bilingual Community that desired a both and
  approach that exposed children to important
  values and customs of both Navajo culture and the
  dominant society
• Core Curriculum English and Mathematics Basic
  Skills Program
• Emphasizes cue-response scripted drills
• Inquiry Based Bilingual Social Studies Class
  open-ended questioning strategies,
  inductive/analytic reasoning, and student
  verbalization

4
The Curriculum

• Promoting competency in both Navajo and English
• Developing, concepts, ideas, and problem-solving
  abilities in the context of culturally relevant
  experiences and topics
• Based on key Navajo values of kinship, clanship,
  and respectful relations with others and with
  nature
• Integrating out of school learning experiences
  that are guided by a Navajo theory of cognitive
  and personal development

5
Curriculum Cont

• Grades K-2 Foundations of Navajo Society
• Families/Clans, Self Awareness, People and their
  Environment
• Grades 3-4 Our Community Today and Yesterday
• Culture, community, adaptation, respect,
  causality, cooperation, sharing, environment,
  interaction, interdependence
• Grades 5-6 Navajo Changes, A History of the
  Navajo People
• All of the above plus culture contact, cultural
  relativity, ethnocentrism, cultural change
• Grade 7-9 Navajo Leadership and Government- A
  History
• All of the above plus government, values, rules
  leadership, sovereignty, balance

6
Curriculum in Action

• Students study photographic posters of local
  scenes
• Teacher asks students to suggest items in the
  pictures that they need in their community
• Students calling out Houses! Sheep!
  Grazing (Grass)! School Clinic Cars
  Relatives
• Teacher Acknowledges all responses
• Result Identified things we need and things
  we like to have in our community and Rough Rock
  is a community because people work together to
  meet their needs and solve mutual problems

7
What Worked

• Materials presented familiar scenes and
  cultural-linguistic content that tapped the
  students background and experiences (Content)
• Curriculum used students experiential resources
  of inductive inquiry that are frequently used
  outside of the classroom
• involves complex relationships and very specific
  constructions of knowledge