Stand – Page 2 – UAS MAT Program ~ 2016 Cohort

Standard A

My group focused on Standard A, and I focused particularly on the third aspect of this standard: incorporates contemporary adaptations along with the historical and traditional aspects of the local culture.

I want to get students thinking creatively about contemporary ways to tell stories, but I also want them to be able to draw on the lessons of traditional stories and legends. I think I would start by discussing the differences between written and oral versions of the same story. I would try to find a storyteller who could come in and tell a traditional story to the class. Then I would assign students a written version of the same story to read, and we would discuss the overall lessons of the story and any differences between the two versions.

From here, the assignment can branch in two directions. Students could collect a book of stories – get permission from Elders to record them telling stories and make transcripts. Or, for a smaller assignment, students could discuss traditional stories, identify central themes or lessons in those stories, and then write contemporary stories of their own that have the same themes and lessons. The stories would not be adaptations of the traditional stories – they would be original creative works, but they would draw for inspiration on the purpose and meaning of the traditional stories.

Standard

Our group discussed standard B: A culturally responsive curriculum recognizes cultural knowledge as part of a living and constantly adapting system that is grounded in the past but continues to grow through the present and into the future.

Our poster incorporated the progression of education by depicting representations of a Tlingit longhouse, a boarding school, and a classroom today. We illustrated the resiliency of the culture by drawing a raven on each roof of the buildings and one flying over all of them looking over the past and present and flying into the future.

Incorporating this lesson into the classroom could involve bringing elders in to share their life lessons. Also after thinking about this standard, it reminds me of time when the Inupiaq teacher took her classes to the senior center. On the way back, the class walked by one of the students’ homes. The student suggested to the teacher that they get one of the geese that their family had gotten. The students brought the goose into the home economics room, plucked it, prepared the meat, and made a stew. There was seriously a plucking frenzy 🙂 Being grounded in the past, the student learned to hunt successfully with his family, an Inupiaq cultural value. Moving into the present, he shared his catch with his fellow classmates–sharing is another Inupiaq value.

Curriculum Standard D

In a CRT curriculum, the goal is to create a complementary relationship between different knowledge systems.

it should “draw parallels between knowledge derived from oral tradition and that derived from books.”
it should also “engage students in the construction of new knowledge and understanding that contribute to an ever-expanding view of the world.”

The goal for me, as a teacher, will be to take information from books or spoken words and bring it to understanding of the students within my classes. I will take information from different culture and find a creative way to bring it into common knowledge that will allow the students to make their own parallels to the information.

For groups poster, we came up with the idea of taking a Romeo and Juliette story that most people have at least heard of. They will most likely know the story or the names. We drew the Romeo and Juliette story in a picture that captures the original story to show that it is important to not assume that all students know the same content. We drew it to demonstrate the importance of teaching the common knowledge.

From there, we drew fish in another section. They are both salmon. We drew from the similarity that fish die after they give birth. It is cultural knowledge and links the culture to a story that might need to be taught. This is to teach those that don’t know the story of R&J.

For those that have read or seen the Shakespeare play, there is another lesson that could be taught. We drew another section of the poster to show two ravens. This is to teach about the Tlingit culture from something that is already known (R&J). The information would be to show that two ravens were forbidden to be married.

The students would then be asked to make a play where the plot was about two ravens that were in love. Then at the end, if the students want to, they could act out another students play.

Cultural Standard E

In my group we discussed cultural standard E

A curriculum that meets this Cultural Standard E:

encourages students to consider the inter-relationship between their local circumstances and the global community;
conveys to students that every culture and community contributes to, at the same time that it receives from the global knowledge base;
prepares students to “think globally, act locally.”

On our poster we drew a world and many hands to represent all of our students. The saying, “Think globally, act locally” is something that I hold close to my heart. It was actually up on a poster at a bakery that I used to work at. One thing that immediately came to mind when thinking about this standard was the recent global issue of cutting the arts in schools. Looking at it from a local perspective we can celebrate and teach Alaska Native arts as an important part of community and daily life. This makes the importance of the arts relevant when we look at it through a global lens.

Past, Present, Future

The cultural Standard my group discussed was standard B:

A culturally responsive curriculum recognizes cultural knowledge as part of a living and constantly adapting system that is grounded in the past but continues to grow through the present and into the future.

My group drew a poster depicting a Tlingit home, followed by a mission boarding school, followed by a current classroom. We felt this represented a culturally responsive perspective able to look to the past, present, and future.

Cultural Standard B is also the standard my lesson activity focuses on:

students start with a basic history of Athabascan fiddle and then look at how their fiddle tradition has bloomed into an internationally celebrated tradition and how fiddle is used to support a healthy community. Today there are so many resources available to learn and study about other communities and cultures, I think that Cultural Standard B is very possible to meet in the classroom.

STAND- Knowledge derived from different systems

A culturally-responsive curriculum fosters a complementary relationship across knowledge derived from diverse knowledge systems.

(Our poster of multi-knowledge systems converging to create a canoe)

Our group focused on the combination of information being gathered from the oral tradition and from books. This standard translates quite well to a language arts/English class. Some the earliest stories/myths/biblical tales were passed down orally before being written down as text. Many of the great Raven stories have also been translated to the story book form. Raven stories have been written into plays then performed in many different productions in the theater making a full circle of oral tradition to text and back to a new form of oral story-telling.

It is pretty fascinating to realize how much information (crucial information) was passed down orally for thousands of years. Most of that tradition is nearly gone, and we are at key moment in time where languages are fighting for their survival. Some but not all can be preserved and passed down for future used through the main sources of media to record Elders. The next generation is stepping forward to safe guard their language like our cohort David Sheakley by learning to speak and teach Ling’it. I hope to bring what I can into the class room and encourage student to learn as much of the Ling’it language or any language for that matter that is vulnerable. It will be great to bring these standards to the classroom.

Standard 3

For Standard E, there really was a simple logic involved. The idea with standard E is to “Think globally, act locally”. This is important because it is a standard for change, on every scale. From this standard, students gain to learn knowledge about different things from all over the world, and then in return put that knowledge into a local scale, to help out locally which if done correctly, can begin to have an impact globally.

There are many potential lessons for this standard. For example, for english classes you could look at different traditions or possibly stories of origin from different groups, and compare them to the local ones and find all of the similarities that exist from groups that probably never met each other. Another one you could do is look at what is happening in politics globally, and write to a president or national senator/representative, and then turn that to the local level by writing concerns wanting change to local or state officials. Overall I thoroughly enjoyed this standard and will try to implement it every chance I can.