Principles of Teaching On a Navajo Reservation

In this Chronicle of Higher Education article, Paul Zolbrod writes about teaching upper-level literature and basic composition courses at the Navajo Nation’s Diné College Crownpoint campus in New Mexico. His mission, he says, has been advancing literacy that tribal students need “if they are to pass comfortably between two cultures without relinquishing a proud heritage.” Over 22 years on the reservation, Zolbrod has dealt with serious obstacles, including some elders who regard teachers as the enemy, kinship ties that matter more than student-teacher relationships, a strong oral tradition, and a defining creation mythology. Here are the lessons he’s learned. “They overlap, they remain tentative, and they invite possible application into the educational mainstream,” he says.

• The medium of print is fundamental. “Together with reading, learning to write remains fundamental both on and off the reservation,” says Zolbrod, “even as electronic media supplant print.” 

• Students should have the same professor through an entire course sequence. “Trust develops early,” he says, “and progress and problems alike are easily observed without formal assessment.”

• Grammar matters, because language is a system. Zolbrod’s students come to school having mastered their own language, but haven’t learned how it works (i.e., nouns, verbs, etc.), so mastering grammar is essential to literacy in English.

• The coupling of subjects and verbs is the starting point. Zolbrod likens subjects to males, verbs to females, and the resulting clause their living offspring: “Likewise, a compound or complex sentence assumes the characteristics of extended kinship, just as a paragraph resembles a clan… In written English, each clause is to be as carefully crafted as turquoise inlay as it takes its proper place in forging a silver bracelet.” 

• Successful teaching is designed in a cultural context. Drawing on Navajo creation stories, Native American concepts about the four parts of human life, and the four steps in undertaking tasks, Zolbrod has his students craft essays in these stages: thinking, planning, execution, and perfecting. “It all begins with recognizing one’s own cognitive Navajo self,” he concludes. “For me it adds to the continuing pleasure of learning from those I have come to teach.” 

“On the Reservation, Balancing Literacy and the Oral Tradition” by Paul Zolbrod in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 2, 2012 (Vol. LIX, #10, p. B34-35), 

http://chronicle.com/article/On-the-Reservation-Literacy/135288/ 

From the Marshall Memo #459