“Honoring Place, Community & Culture in the Curriculum” session added to MECA
On Sunday, August 20, 2017 at 2:00 pm, Northern Arizona University Education Professor Dr. Jon Reyhner will speak on “Honoring Place, Community & Culture in the Curriculum.”
With the passage of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001, the United States spent millions upon millions of dollars in a largely unsuccessful effort to close the academic achievement gap between American-Indian and some other ethnic minorities and mainstream Americans. NCLB’s focus on teacher quality and evidence-based curriculum and instruction and subsequent reform efforts have largely ignored the negative effects of American popular culture and assimilationist, English-only educational efforts on Indigenous children, which can attack their identity and lead to cultural disintegration rather than assimilation into the dominant culture. This article examines recent American Indian and Hawaiian efforts at language and culture revitalization in schools and how those efforts have helped students to develop a strong sense of identity and show more academic success. These recent efforts focus on human rights and are in line with the United Nations 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Jon Reyhner teaches at Northern Arizona University (NAU). He has written extensively on Indigenous education and language revitalization, including co-authoring Language and Literacy Teaching for Indigenous Education and American Indian Education: A History. He maintains a Teaching Indigenous Languages website at http://nau.edu/til with links to full text on-line copies of his ten co-edited books on language revitalization and culture-based education published by NAU. His newest University of Oklahoma Press book is Teaching Indigenous Students: Honoring Place, Community, and Culture, in which he was lead author of the first, third and final chapters. The final chapter is on language immersion education.