Stop Talking: Indigenous Ways of Teaching and Learning and Difficult Dialogues in Higher Education
This book incorporates voices from educational developers, faculty, and Native Alaskans, exploring how to translate the important learnings from local communities into teaching practices.
I believe “the Native issue” is, in fact, one of our most pressing concerns. It matters deeply, profoundly, and continuously. For many reasons to be discussed further throughout this book, it is central to our mission.
For starters, there’s the simple shared humanity of it. We care about Alaska Native and other indigenous students. We want them to feel comfortable on university campuses, to be engaged in their classes, and to graduate in numbers commensurate with their potential. We want them to have the knowledge and skills they need to survive and thrive in the dominant culture. We also want them to maintain deep and meaningful connections to their communities and cultures. We want their individual investments of time, money, and effort to be well-spent and the sacrifices made by their families and communities to have been worth the cost. We hope to enrich, rather than drain, their individual and collective lives.
Then there’s our responsibility. We are part of a higher education system—in Alaska and beyond—that has for centuries marginalized Native cultures and peoples. Despite significant and laudable initiatives to the contrary, the vast majority of us still are impoverished by a worldview that reflexively considers indigenous cultures and ways of knowing as other or alternative or exotic or primitive. Too few see them as what they are: living bodies of knowledge and wisdom that can enrich teaching and learning and inform humanity’s attempts to grapple with the most pressing problems of the modern world, a key mission of universities.