ebook_Promising Practices in Indigenous Teacher Education by Paul Whitinui,Carmen Rodriguez de France,Onowa McIvor (eds.) (z-lib.org)

Promising Practices in Indigenous Teacher
Education

Paul Whitinui · Maria del Carmen Rodríguez
de France · Onowa McIvor

Editors

Promising Practices in
Indigenous Teacher
Education

Editors Onowa McIvor
Paul Whitinui Indigneous Education
School of Exercise Science, Physical and University of Victoria
Victoria, BC
Health Education Canada
University of Victoria
Victoria, BC
Canada

Maria del Carmen Rodríguez de France
Indigneous Education
University of Victoria
Victoria, BC
Canada

ISBN 978-981-10-6399-2 ISBN 978-981-10-6400-5 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6400-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017955961

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Foreword

Indigenizing the academy: Promise and hope in Teacher
Education

As I set out to read Promising Practices in Indigenous Teacher Education and
consider my invited Foreword, little did I expect until I got reading these inspiring
essays how valuable they would be for me, a senior Mi’kmaw scholar working in
teacher education at the University of Saskatchewan (U of S). For over 23 years
my teacher education life-work has been in decolonizing and transforming public
education through a trans-systemic synthesis with Indigenous knowledge. My
enthusiasm to this book came in the context of my new teaching responsibilities
within the first mandatory course in First Nations, Metis and Inuit education to
teacher candidates at the College of Education. My interest also comes about in
the context of the College’s mandate to prioritize Indigenous education in teacher
education and also within the mandates of Canadian universities to advance
Indigenous student’s success and culturally relevant and responsive supports and
services (Universities Canada, 2015). Just as I began thinking about the issues,
challenges and topics this course would cover, this manuscript appeared.

I was immediately drawn to the personal stories and experiences of educators
and the vast activities from Indigenous communities around the globe, both
Indigenous and non-Indigenous, who have been engaged in and with Indigenous
education. My interest was piqued by the wide ranges of experiences and assess-
ments of educators who were involved through partnerships, allies, policies, and
programs in conventional institutions throughout many Indigenous peoples’ home-
lands. Not only had they successfully achieved milestones with building programs
for Indigenous teacher candidates to work more effectively in their own commu-
nities drawing on their own Indigenous knowledges and pedagogies, but they
had also managed the growth and changes in the conventional teacher education
over the past 40-plus years in making sure all teachers have been introduced to
Indigenous issues, perspectives, knowledges, and student learning from within
diverse ontologies and epistemologies.

v

vi Foreword

Understanding now those lessons learned come from important insights drawn
when facing political and cultural challenges in the post-secondary education, where
for most of the last century Indigenous peoples’ participation in the governance of
education was only on reserves and in Indigenous-led educational institutions. The
political climate and policy planning options are now far greater for Indigenous
peoples to be involved in governance in public institutions, although it is still a
challenge within an increasing discourse of austerity politics in universities.
Revitalizing Indigenous languages, place-based knowledges, and enhancing connec-
tions to Elders, communities, and parents are part of Indigenous communities’ self-
determination and well-being initiatives exercised through their Indigenous rights as
now has been accepted by most countries with the UN Declaration of the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples.

The significance of the book is its valued experiences and perspectives of both
Indigenous and non-Indigenous educators, teachers, practitioners who have mobi-
lized the ‘Indigenous’ and cultural and language content into teacher education in
postsecondary institutions. Documenting the early days when the teacher education
programs were established to prepare Indigenous candidates for the work of enter-
ing schools with populations of Indigenous children and youth, it examines the
growth in preparing both Indigenous and non-Indigenous teacher candidates for cul-
turally diverse populations and cultural and holistic responsive teaching approaches
that recognize and enhance the identities and capacities embedded in Indigenous
communities. Research on developing, implementing and measuring the successes
of Indigenous language programs has provided new theoretical frameworks and
enhanced cultural competence among all teacher candidates in preparation for their
working with diverse students and for their awareness of the peoples on whose
lands they reside. Thus the book’s central value is revealed in its articulation of the
theories, principles, practices, and challenges for educators engaging the
Indigenizing initiatives of postsecondary teacher education, while also tracing the
prolonged and incremental process involved both in centring Indigenous learners
and learning and in developing new cultural and language competencies among tea-
chers. Many forms of action are necessary for Indigenizing the teacher education
curricula, and is reflected in the experiences, literature and research generated to
establish a fair and inclusive educational system.

As I read about the diverse challenges and successes of educators from Canada,
United States of America, New Zealand, Australia and beyond, I reflected on our
still remaining challenges of mobilizing the TRC’s Calls to Action (Truth and
Reconciliation (2015a) so that Indigenous peoples throughout Canada might be
acknowledged appropriately within the histories and perspectives, and to provide
the first steps toward balancing diverse knowledge systems. Antiracist and antico-
lonial courses have set an important stage to build upon to carry out mandatory
Indigenous courses for teacher candidates, and for social and cognitive justice,
inclusion, diversity, equity, and reciprocity. The striving to transform and theorize
change in diverse socio-political climates has been a long and protracted task for
educators, and systems, and while there has been significant progress over these
years, the job is deep and wide and there is so much yet to do.

Foreword vii

This book is not only vital to those in the front lines of Indigenizing the acad-
emy but also for those preparing to work in schools where Indigenizing the acad-
emy is mandated, regulated or being planned. While many resistances and gaps in
teacher education still remain in countries where Indigenous peoples live, how to
approach trans-systemic, multi-cultural inclusive, purposeful and relevant educa-
tion systems and curricula that engage Indigenous topics, content, languages,
knowledges, pedagogies from the land, students, and their self-determining futures
will be invaluable for many more years to come.

Within Promising Practices, we benefit from the experiences coming from edu-
cators and scholars working with and among Indigenous communities; and we
learn from them how we can continue with confidence to decolonize our practice
in engaged ways, centring social and cognitive justice, and hold our institutions
and professionals accountable for the fair equitable outcomes that education is
meant to achieve for everyone. It aims to offer a collective response from which
we all benefit and from which processes of change can continue to evolve.

In considering the promise of IK, the courts in Canada have duly recognized
aboriginal and treaty rights as distinctive processes embedded in Aboriginal peoples’
experiences, languages and knowledges that create a knowledge system that is not
Eurocentric ally-driven. In the case of R. v. Cote (1996), the court noted that where
aboriginal rights exist that Indigenous peoples have the right to pass on that knowl-
edge through their generations. The Indigenous equivalents to Eurocentric ontolo-
gies, epistemologies and axiologies are distinctively generated among Aboriginal
peoples and have their own theories and methodologies generated within them.

After studying the cultural genocide of the past educational system, the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015b) reported that the minimum
standards of the global consensus were found in the UN Declaration on the
Rights of Indigenous People (2007) and was the appropriate framework for a
new holistic vision of reconciliation. The Declaration, consistent with the consti-
tutional framework of the rights of Aboriginal people, provides the necessary
principles, norms and standards for reconciliation to flourish in twenty-first
century Canada. These include:

– Indigenous peoples have the right to the recognition, observance and enforcement
of treaties and to have States honour and respect for such treaties (Article 37.1);

– Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as diminishing or eliminating the
rights of Indigenous peoples contained in treaties and agreements (Article 37.2);

– Indigenous peoples’ rights to maintenance of their cultural institutions (Article 5);
– Practising and revitalizing their cultural traditions and customs (Article 11.1);
– Focuses on Indigenous intangible heritage, stressing that Indigenous peoples

have the right to “revitalize, use, develop and transmit to future generations
their histories, languages, oral traditions, philosophies, writing systems and lit-
eratures” (Article 13);
– Indigenous peoples have the right to establish and control their educational sys-
tems and institutions providing education in their own languages, in a manner
appropriate to their cultural methods of teaching and learning (Article 14);

viii Foreword

– Affirms the right of Indigenous peoples “to maintain, control, protect and
develop their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural
expressions” (Article 31).

In compliance with teaching and learning involving Indigenous populations,
these rights-based frameworks of reconciliation demands a new understanding of
the history of colonialism, new approaches to reverse the negative impacts of cog-
nitive imperialism through a reliance on Indigenous language awareness and revi-
talization, Indigenous knowledges, community partnerships on the land,
unpacking and restoring of the significant lifelong work and nourishing the learn-
ing spirit of teachers and students.

Promising Practices, as its title suggests, offers hope, inspiration and visions of
educators and activists aspiring to maintain and revitalize Indigenous knowledges,
languages, identities, while it builds on relevant and promising practices to recon-
stitute inclusive holistic cognitive justice. Cognitive justice is indeed for everyone,
and we can continue to benefit from shifting the terrain of teacher education from
duress and humiliation to centre and nourish Indigenous peoples’ knowledges and
their learning spirits. More importantly, the movement as these authors illustrate
in their strategic research and scholarship is an effective practice in the hashtag
adage: #NothingAboutUsWithoutUs.

Dr. Marie Battiste

References

Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (2015a). Calls to action. Winnipeg. Retrieved
from http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/File/2015/Findings/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf

Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (2015b). Honouring the truth, reconciling for
the future. Summary of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of
Canada. Winnipeg. Retrieved from http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/File/2015/Findings/
Exec_Summary_2015_05_31_web_o.pdf

United Nations. (2007). Declaration on the rights of Indigenous peoples. Retrieved from http://
www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/DRIPS_en.pdf

Universities Canada. (2015). Principles on Indigenous education. Retrieved from http://www.
univcan.ca/media-room/media-releases/universities-canada-principles-on-indigenous-education/

Preface

This book makes a welcome addition to the existing literature on Indigenous edu-
cation. It also provides a ‘state of the art’ overview of innovative thinking and
responses occurring across Indigenous education and schooling. Indigenous com-
munities across the world, and around the Pacific Rim in particular, often share
similar experiences of high and disproportionate levels of educational underdeve-
lopment. These circumstances of poor educational and schooling outcomes show a
strong correlation with Indigenous social, cultural, political and economic under-
development. For this reason education and schooling remain critical sites of
struggle for improving, not just Indigenous people’s success ‘in’ and ‘through’
education, but also improving the downstream needs related to their social, politi-
cal, cultural and economic well-being. Despite a long history of well-meaning
initiatives intended to confront, and to positively transform Indigenous education
and schooling, societal underdevelopment has tended to persist across many
Indigenous jurisdictions; and in some places the learning outcome inequalities
between non-Indigenous and Indigenous communities is widening, not closing.
This is precisely why this publication is important. It assembles a number of scho-
lars who contribute new ideas, practices and strategies aimed at improving
Indigenous educational success and outcomes.

In recent years there has been a rising tension between the educational impera-
tives of ‘educating Indigenous learners for the world at large’ and the growing
need to ‘build educational opportunities’ that protect Indigenous language, knowl-
edge and culture against ongoing outcomes of colonisation. This volume, as can
be seen in the variety of contributions and sites of engagement, reinforces the
stance, that both of these educational aims are important. The range of issues and
topics examined in this publication also reinforce the point that the Indigenous
struggle for transformation is not a singular struggle. That is, there are multiple
sites of learning and teaching that need to be engaged and changed (often simulta-
neously). Seemingly, the struggle to improve Indigenous education outcomes
requires critical reflection and transformation in many different areas across the
education and schooling system. The eclectic nature of the contributions made
here confront one of the underlying problems that tend to constrain government

ix

x Preface

and official strategies to effect change—the idea that there is a ‘silver bullet’ solu-
tion or a ‘single strategy’ that will on its own make the difference in transforming
Indigenous educational and schooling underdevelopment. Moreover, the contribu-
tions contained within this volume create the opportunity for like-minded scholars
to not only share their transformational thinking related to improving Indigenous
educational and schooling success, the reader also has the opportunity to compare
where they are at in their ‘own’ particular struggle. Perhaps more importantly, this
volume creates a communication platform to enable the sharing of innovative
ideas, strategies and practices that potentially can make a difference. For example,
authors address issues in initial teacher education, curriculum concerns, cultural
pedagogies, language revitalization, alternative education and schooling models,
policy critique, Indigenous leadership in education, and so on.

The struggle to improve and transform Indigenous education and schooling
outcomes is critical. This is because education and schooling have been key
mechanisms to enhancing, and reproducing the interests of the dominant cultural
groups while simultaneously marginalising, and subordinating Indigenous inter-
ests. The Indigenous struggle to reclaim the transforming potential of education is
a vital prerequisite to broader societal change. In essence, there cannot be a sus-
tainable social, cultural, and economic revolution without a prior or simultaneous
educational revolution. This educational revolution must not only prepare our
Indigenous communities to access learning from within the existing system, there
is also a need to adapt the education system to complement the Indigenous learner
more appropriately. These tasks are not about dismantling the whole of the educa-
tion system. Rather, I argue that change is necessary because the ‘status quo’
approach to education and schooling is only having limited success in meeting
Indigenous aspirations.

While it is also important to remember that our Indigenous communities are not
homogenous in their expectations of education and schooling—there is room in the
system to create a greater range of genuine options that respond to Indigenous hopes
and dreams. The Indigenous struggle for education and schooling is urgent; it is not
one struggle but many struggles in many sites; it is a struggle for new rationale as
much as it is for new practice; our struggle is to also free our own thinking from
dominant hegemony; our struggle must be positive and proactive and our struggle
must be for self-development—not waiting for others to liberate us. Finally, as
the Ma¯ori scholar, the late Rangnui Walker noted—our Indigenous struggle is
on-going—it is “a struggle without end” — “Ka Whawhai Tonu Ma¯tou!”

Distinguished Professor, Graham Hingangaroa Smith CNZM; PhD, MA (Hons.),
Dip. Tchg (University of Auckland); D.Litt (Hon. Causa) Okanagan University; LLD
(Hon. Causa) UNBC; Fellow of the American Educational Research Association,
and Director of the Pourewa Arotahi: The National Institute for Post-Treaty
Settlement Futures, at Te Whare Wa¯nanga o Awanuia¯rangi, Whakata¯ne, N.Z.)

Acknowledgements

The authors of Promising Practices in Indigenous Teacher Education wish to offer
the following thanks:
To the various academic, and teacher-based institutions for providing the time,

support and resources for contributors to write their chapters.
To Springer Publishers for providing supportive and constructive feedback on our

book proposal and manuscript.
To Dr. Marie Battiste (our Sage) for reviewing the entire manuscript to provide an

enriching Foreword to the book.
To all the future Indigenous teacher education programmes to persevere, transform

and emerge as a result of having read this book—what we believe, we can
conceive.
Finally, to all our family and friends without whose love, support, patience and
encouragement this book would have never have come to life.
Nga¯ mihi kia koutou katoa! kinana’skomitina’waw. Muchas gracias.

xi

Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Maria del Carmen Rodríguez de France, Paul Whitinui and Onowa McIvor

Part I: Locating Indigenous Education in Conventional 9
Teacher Education Programmes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Lessons and Legacies: Forty Years of Alaska Native Teacher 11
Preparation at the University of Alaska Fairbanks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Amy Vinlove

Teaching the Teachers: Re-educating Australian Teachers in 27
Indigenous Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Jessa Rogers

Building Indigenously Culturally Competent Teacher Education 41
Programs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Greg Auhl, Annette Gainsford, Barbara Hill and Lucia Zundans-Fraser

Developing Understanding of Indigenous Culture: Experiences From 57
Australian Pre-service Teachers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Maria Bennet, Michelle Doolan and Beverley Moriarty

Integrating Indigenous Ma¯ori Frameworks to Ignite Understandings 71
Within Initial Teacher Education—and Beyond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Te Hurinui Clarke, Sonja Macfarlane and Angus Macfarlane

Beyond the Classroom: The Impact of a Required Indigenous 87
Education Course in the Lives of Pre-service Teachers . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Maria del Carmen Rodríguez de France, Alexa Scully and Onowa McIvor

Part II: Indigenous Language Teacher Education . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

Bridging the Gap in Indigenous Australian Languages Teacher 105
Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
John Hobson, Kymberley Oakley, Michael Jarrett, Melissa Jackson
and Natalie Wilcock

xiii

xiv Contents

Connecting Indigenous Languages Policy, Programs, and Practices. . . . 119
Heather A. Blair, Linda Pelly and Rochelle Starr

Distinctive Pathways of Preparing Hawaiian Language
Medium-Immersion Educators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
Makalapua Alencastre and Keiki Kawaiʻaeʻa

Huarahi Ma¯ori: Two Decades of Indigenous Teacher Education at the
University of Auckland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
Georgina Stewart, Tony Trinick and He¯mi Dale

Diving into the Language Work: Preparing Teachers for the Diné
Language Classroom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
Velma M. Hale and Louise Lockard

Building on Achievements: Training Options for Gumbaynggirr
Language Teachers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
Susan Poetsch, Michael Jarrett and Gary Williams

Lighting a Fire: Community-Based Delivery of a University Indigenous- 189
Language Teacher Education Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Onowa McIvor, Trish Rosborough, Catherine McGregor and Aliki
Marinakis

Part III: Indigenous-led Teacher Education Programmes . . . . . 205

Raven’s Response to Teacher Education: NITEP, an Indigenous Story . 207
Jo-ann Archibald – Q’um Q’um Xiiem and Jessica La Rochelle –
Lhkwemiya

‘Hold Strongly to One Another’: The Development of an Indigenous
Teacher Preparation and Professional Development Program . . . . . . . . 221
Lee Francis IV, Cheryl A. Torrez and Marjori Krebs

Looking at the Evolution of University of Nuhelot’ine Thaiyots’I
Nistamêyimâkanak Blue Quills Language Programmes . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237
Kevin Lewis, Marilyn Shirt and Jesse Sylvestre

Part IV: Living to Lead in Indigenous Teacher Education . . . . 249
251
Aloha Kumu, Aloha ‘A¯ ina: A Graduate Program to Prepare Teacher
Leaders for the Health, Wellbeing, and Prosperity of La¯hui Hawai‘i . . .
Kimo Alexander Cashman

Strong Foundations, Stronger Futures: Using Theory-Based Design to 265
Embed Indigenous Australian Education Content in a Teacher
Education Programme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Lucia Zundans-Fraser, Barbara Hill and Alan Bain

Contents xv

onikanêw: ‘She Who Leads’: Learning to Lead in Education . . . . . . . . . 279
Belinda Daniels

The Price of Equity Working in Aotearoa New Zealand Teacher
Education: A Critical Institutional Ethnographic Perspective. . . . . . . . . 291
Paul Whitinui

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305

About the Editors

Paul Whitinui (Nga¯puhi, Te Aupo¯uri, Nga¯ti Kur¯ı, and Pa¯keha¯) is an Assistant
Professor in the School of Exercise Science, Physical and Health Education
(EPHE), based at the University of Victoria in the Faculty of Education. He was
born and raised in Whakata¯ne, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand, and has been a grate-
ful visitor here on the sacred lands of the Coast and Strait Salish for the past year.
Paul completed his EdD in 2007 at the University of Auckland, New Zealand; his
dissertation, “The Indigenous factor: Exploring kapa haka as a culturally respon-
sive learning environment in mainstream secondary schools in New Zealand”
explored the educational benefits associated with Indigenous Ma¯ori students
participating in Ma¯ori performing arts (i.e., kapa haka). His current research inter-
ests include exploring the effectiveness of Indigenous cultural safety training prac-
tices in higher education and community, successful learning pathways for
Indigenous learners in higher education and community, as well as, investigating
Indigenous children’s wellbeing in public schools. [email protected]
Maria del Carmen Rodríguez de France is an Assistant Professor based in the
Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria, Vancouver Island, BC, Canada.
Dr. Rodriguez de France was born and raised in Monterrey México where she was
a classroom teacher for 12 years prior to earning her Ph.D. at the University of
Victoria in 2002. Her career in education and related fields spans 30 years with
participation in a broad range of educational, community service, and research
activities. Currently, she teaches courses in Indigenous education, and her research
focuses on early childhood education, bilingualism, diversity and social justice, and
knowledge building. [email protected]
Onowa McIvor is an Assistant Professor in Indigenous Education, based at the
University of Victoria, in the Faculty of Education. She is maske¯kowak (Swampy
Cree) and Scottish-Canadian. She was born and raised in Northern Saskatchewan
and has been a grateful visitor on Coast and Straits Salish territories for over

xvii

xviii About the Editors

15 years. Onowa completed a PhD in Education at the University of British
Columbia in 2012; her dissertation ‘îkakwiy nihiyawiyân: I am learning [to be]
Cree’ explored adult Indigenous language learning. Her current areas of research
are Indigenous language revitalization and Indigenous education (K-12 & post-
secondary). [email protected]

About the Contributors

Makalapua Alencastre is an Associate Professor at Ka Haka ‘Ula O
Ke’elikolani College of Hawaiian Language, University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo. She
has focused her life’s work on the reestablishment of the Hawaiian language as
the primary language of home and education. As a Native Hawaiian educator at
the elementary, secondary, and university levels for over 40 years, Makalapua cur-
rently coordinates the college’s graduate education programs to prepare teachers
for P-12 Hawaiian language medium-immersion education. [email protected].
Jo-ann Archibald – Q’um Q’um Xiiem is from Sto:lo and St’at’imc First Nations.
She was the former Associate Dean for Indigenous Education, former NITEP
Director, and full professor in the Faculty of Education at UBC. Jo-ann has a B.Ed.,
M.Ed., & Ph.D. Dr. Archibald is the author of “Indigenous Storywork: Educating
the Heart, Mind, Body, and Spirit.” Her research uses an Indigenous Knowledge fra-
mework. She has worked with Native Indian Teacher Education Program (NITEP)
for 19 years. [email protected]
Greg Auhl is based at Charles Sturt University, NSW, Australia. He has extensive
experience in developing programs and courses for diverse learners at both second-
ary and tertiary levels, including the development of programs for Indigenous stu-
dents. His research interests are somewhat eclectic, including Science education,
Inclusive education, collaboration within education and approaches to course and
program design. Greg has been the recipient of a national excellence in teaching
award and several institutional awards. [email protected]
Alan Bain is an Associate Professor in the School of Teacher Education at
Charles Sturt University. Alan’s career has focused on addressing the perplexing
whole-or-organization challenge of making schools and universities better at learn-
ing and teaching. He has been engaged in the design and/or leadership of major
organizational change projects in Asia, the Americas, and Australia. Alan is the
recipient of multiple competitive Faculty, University and national awards for his
leadership, innovation, teaching and research in the United States and Australia.
[email protected]

xix

xx About the Contributors

Maria Bennet is a lecturer in Professional Studies, Literacy and Inclusive
Education in the Bachelor of Education (Early Childhood and Primary) in the
Faculty of Education, Charles Sturt University, Dubbo, NSW, Australia, as well
as the Academic Liaison for the Teacher in Community project which supports
Indigenous pre-service teachers in rural and remote communities. Her current
research is focused on developing pre-service teachers’ capacity to engage with
and work effectively with Indigenous students, their families and communities.
[email protected]

Heather Blair is a full Professor working in Elementary Education based at the
University of Alberta. Dr. Blair’s research focuses on the intersections of lan-
guages, literacy, culture, and gender. Her work is grounded in socio-cultural the-
ory and ethnographic research practices. Dr. Blair is also the co-founder of the
Canadian Indigenous Languages and Literacy Development Institute (CILLDI) at
the University of Alberta. [email protected]

Kimo Cashman is a Native Hawaiian originally from ʻEwa, Oʻahu. He currently
lives with his wife and daughter in Wahiawa¯, Oʻahu. Dr. Cashman was an art and
history teacher at Na¯na¯kuli High and Intermediate School before accepting a
faculty position at the University of Hawaiʻi at Ma¯noa, College of Education
where he is an Associate Professor. His research interests include Indigenous edu-
cational leadership, Indigenous teacher education, and Aloha ʻA¯ ina Education.
[email protected]

Te Hurinui Clarke (Te Arawa) is a lecturer and programme co-ordinator for
Hoaka Pounamu based at the University of Canterbury. An experienced teacher,
he has a history in teaching te reo Ma¯ori (Ma¯ori language) at all levels. His
research and publishing focus on Ma¯ori language revitalisation through pedagogi-
cal approaches that are innovative and culturally congruent. This includes online,
blended and face-to-face modes. [email protected]

He¯mi Dale is from the Te Rarawa, Te Aupo¯uri tribe and has taught in the Ma¯ori-
medium teacher education pathway Te Huarahi Ma¯ori since its inception in 1997.
He was the principal writer of the national Ma¯ori-medium Tikanga a¯ Iwi (Social
Sciences) curriculum from 1998 to 1999 and has been extensively involved in the
cycle of national teacher professional development for Tikanga a¯ Iwi from 2001 to
2003. His research interests are the development of the Ma¯ori-medium curricula,
the Tikanga a¯ Iwi learning area, bilingualism and biliteracy, and teaching through
the medium of te reo Ma¯ori. [email protected]

Belinda Daniels is the founder of ne¯hiyawak Summer Language Experience,
and teaches others how to teach Cree as a second language on various
First Nations Reserves. Belinda won the Outstanding Canadian Aboriginal
Educator Award in 2015 for work in language development, and was one of
the 2016 Global Teacher Prize finalist. Belinda is currently a doctoral candi-
date at the University of Saskatchewan and Alberta, and volunteers on several

About the Contributors xxi

boards such as United Way, Dr. Sterling McDowell Foundation and Indspire.
[email protected]

Michelle Doolan is a Wiradjuri student enrolled in the Bachelor of Education
(Early Childhood and Primary) through the Indigenous Teacher Education in
Community Program at the Dubbo campus of Charles Sturt University. She is a
strong community spokesperson and has extensive experience working with
families. Michelle is highly regarded for her community development work which
focuses on empowering families to work with educational providers. michelle-
[email protected]

Lee Francis IV (Pueblo of Laguna) is the current CEO of Native Realities and
the Executive Director for Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. He
has been an educator for almost 20 years, serving as a teacher, professor, and
administrator throughout the P-20 spectrum. His work has been primarily with
Indigenous communities in the United States and Canada, though recently his
work carried him to work with Aboriginal communities in Australia. He has
numerous publications both as a scholar and as a poet and is also an award-
winning performer. He received his B.A. from the University of Missouri, his
M.A. in Educational Leadership from the University of New Mexico, and his
Ph.D. in Education from Texas State University. He is a proud father, devoted
husband, and dog owner. He currently resided in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Annette Gainsford is an Indigenous Australian woman of Wiradjuri heritage
based at Charles Sturt University, New South Wales. She has worked in
Indigenous education programs and courses at elementary, secondary and tertiary
levels. Annette is a graduate of an Indigenous-focussed tertiary course and is cur-
rently pursuing post-graduate studies. She has also been an invited guest speaker
on Indigenous education at numerous forums, including the Catholic University of
Paris, and has particular interests in building community trust and collaboration
and Indigenous ways of knowing and learning. [email protected]

Velma M. Hale (Diné) holds an AA degree in Liberal Arts from Diné College, a
BSED in Secondary Education and an MEd in Bilingual Multicultural Education
from Northern Arizona University. Velma is also a teacher educator in the Center
for Bilingual Teacher education at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona and teaches
courses in Elementary Science and Social Studies Methods and Indigenous
Special Education. [email protected]

Barbara Hill is responsible for the co-ordination of the inclusion of Indigenous
curriculum and pedagogy in all-undergraduate courses at Charles Sturt University
(CSU) by 2018. Dr. Hill has extensive experience in working with Indigenous stu-
dents and Indigenous community members and has been involved with
Indigenous student support and Indigenous student advocacy in higher education
for two decades. She is a recipient of a national award for her work in this area.
[email protected]

xxii About the Contributors

John Hobson is a linguist and lecturer at the University of Sydney where he
directs the graduate program in Indigenous languages education. He has over 30
years’ experience in community-based and institutional activity in Australian lan-
guages and was lead editor of the inaugural volume on Australian language revi-
val: Re-awakening languages. John is currently undertaking doctoral research on
activists’ expectations of the language revival process in south-eastern Australia.
[email protected]

Melissa Jackson is of Bundjalung descent with family links to the Baryulgil area
near Grafton, New South Wales. Melissa has worked in various New South Wales
government departments, including the Department of Housing and the Attorney
Generals Department, before starting work at the State Library of New South
Wales in 1991. She has degrees in teaching and librarianship and graduated from
the University of Sydney with the Master of Indigenous Language Education in
2011. [email protected]

Michael Jarrett is a well-respected member of the Gumbaynggirr tribe on the
mid-north coast of New South Wales. His ancestors belong to the sea and rainfor-
ests of the Nambucca River. Michael teaches language to his own people, children
in schools, and people in the wider community, and sings traditional and contem-
porary Gumbaynggirr songs in a local band. He holds qualifications in early child-
hood education and a Master of Indigenous Language Education from the
University of Sydney. [email protected]

Keiki Kawaiʻaeʻa is currently the Director, and Associate Professor at Ka Haka
‘Ula O Keʻelikolani College of Hawaiian Language, University of Hawaiʻi at
Hilo. Dr. Kawaʻaeʻa has played a pioneering role in the development of Hawaiian
medium-immersion education as a full P-25 indigenous model of education—
cradle to community. She has contributed to the growth of Hawaiian education,
Indigenous teacher education and Hawaiian language renormalization to elevate
traditional Hawaiian practices into a modern contemporary context as a platform
for re-establishing and advancing Hawaiian education. [email protected]

Marjori Krebs is an Associate Professor in the Department of Teacher
Education, Educational Leadership, and Policy in the College of Education at the
University of New Mexico. She has been an educator for over 30 years, as a
public-school teacher and faculty member. Dr. Krebs teaches both undergraduate
and graduate students in teacher preparation. Her research focuses on teacher pre-
paration, service-learning, and project-based learning. She has worked with the
Zuni: Engaging Teachers and Community (ZETAC) Project for the past 4 years.
[email protected]

Jessica La Rochelle, Lhkwemiya, is Sto:lo from the Sts’ailes First Nation,
Okanagan, and Trinidadian. She is the Assistant Director of NITEP and a graduate
student in UBC’s Faculty of Education pursuing a Masters of Education Degree in
Education Administration and Leadership with an emphasis on Leadership in
Indigenous Education. Her grandmother is a Native Indian Teacher Education

About the Contributors xxiii

Program (NITEP) graduate and Jessica has worked with NITEP for 6 years. jes-
[email protected]

Kevin wâsakâyâsiw Lewis is from Ministikwan Lake Cree Nation, SK. Research
interests have been around Indigenous knowledge systems, Cree roles in tradi-
tional parenting practices, and an active oskâpêwis whenever called upon.
Mr. Kevin Lewis has worked with language teaching programs for University of
Alberta, University of Nuhelot’ine Thaiyots’I nistamêyimâkanak Blue Quills
(UnBQ), University College of the North, First Nations University of Canada and
University of Saskatchewan. [email protected]

Louise Lockard is the Project Director of the Diné Dual Language Teachers
Project a Title III National Professional Development Project. She holds a PhD in
Language, Reading and Culture from the University of Arizona. Louise coordinates
the Master’s program in Bilingual Multicultural Education at Northern Arizona
University in Flagstaff, Arizona, where she teaches courses in ESL and bilingual
methodology to in-service and pre-service teachers. [email protected]

Angus Hikairo Macfarlane (Te Arawa) is a Professor of Ma¯ori Research at the
University of Canterbury. He is an experienced educator and practitioner and has
been an advisor and professional development provider for Special Education
Services and the Ministry of Education on a number of national projects. His inter-
est is the exploration of cultural concepts and strategies that affect positively on
professional practice, on which he has published widely. angus.macfarlane@can-
terbury.ac.nz

Sonja Macfarlane (Nga¯i Tahu) is an Associate Professor at the University of
Waikato. She has a history in education and special education. She taught in pri-
mary schools, was a Resource Teacher Learning and Behaviour, and then was a
Special Education Advisor and the national Practice Leader: Services to Ma¯ori at
the Ministry of Education. Her academic career explores culturally responsive
evidence-based professional practice. [email protected]

Aliki Marinakis is the Indigenous language revitalization program coordinator
within the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria. She is of Greek and
British descent, raised in the traditional territories of the Kwakwaka’wakw, and
has been a grateful visitor on the Lekwungen and W’SANEC territories for almost
20 years. She has a Masters of Arts in Linguistics, and has been vested in the
development and delivery of language revitalization programs and courses
throughout her career. [email protected]

Catherine McGregor is an Associate Professor at the University of Victoria. She
has been a visitor to the territory of the Coast and Straight Salish peoples for
many years and has been working with Indigenous colleagues at UVic to learn
about her own colonial and settler history, the oppressive nature of Western
schooling and how to become an informed ally working with Indigenous peoples
and communities. She is grateful for her teachers, as well as their generosity and
patience. [email protected]

xxiv About the Contributors

Beverley Moriarty is senior lecturer in the School of Teacher Education at the
Dubbo campus of Charles Sturt University. She has a particular interest in online
post-graduate teaching and working with students and staff in the early years of their
research careers. Her most widely cited research is in self-efficacy and learning envir-
onments. Dr. Moriarty has also published extensively with the Australian Traveller
Education Research Team and in lifelong learning. [email protected]

Kymberley Oakley is a Malgana woman who until recently worked as lecturer at
Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, where she coordinated the Bachelor
of Education Regional and Remote—a course dedicated to increasing the number
of Indigenous teachers in that state. She is now the Coordinator for Aboriginal
Education at La Salle College in Western Australia. Kymberley has over 12 years’
experience in Indigenous education and is extremely passionate about Aboriginal
languages, their revival and teaching. Kymberley graduated from the Indigenous
Languages Education program at the University of Sydney in 2010. koa@lasalle.
wa.edu.au

Linda Pelly is a seasoned professional with many years of experience in manage-
ment and with over 30 years working for various governments, First Nation Band
Schools in Saskatchewan and Alberta. Linda has extensive experience leading cur-
riculum resource teams in developing aboriginal languages and culture, locally,
regionally and nationally. Her professional background is enhanced by a strong
grounding in First Nations culture and language. [email protected]

Susan Poetsch is a lecturer in the Education Faculty at the University of Sydney,
where she teaches units of study on morphology of Australian languages, language
teaching methods and approaches, and curriculum development, in a program for
Indigenous Australian teachers of their own languages. Susan is also a PhD candi-
date at the Australian National University. Her research is on children’s language
acquisition and use in home and school contexts in a remote community in central
Australia. [email protected]

Jessa Rogers is an Assistant Professor in Teacher Education at the University of
Canberra. She was an Australian National University Indigenous Reconciliation
PhD scholar at the Australian National University, and has taught in Indigenous
education for several years. Jessa was the ANU Postgraduate Student of the Year
in 2016 for her PhD research looking at the experiences of Aboriginal and Ma¯ori
girls attending boarding schools using photoyarn, an Indigenous arts-based metho-
dology she developed with Indigenous students. Jessa sits on the National
NAIDOC Committee under the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet,
and was the inaugural school principal of Girl Academy, Australia’s only boarding
school for Indigenous young mothers and their babies in Far North Queensland.
[email protected]

Trish Rosborough is an Assistant Professor in Indigenous Education, based at
the University of Victoria, in the Faculty of Education. Dr. Rosborough is from
the Kwakiutl Nation of northern Vancouver Island, and is presently an Assistant

About the Contributors xxv

Professor for Indigenous Education at the University of Victoria. In the past, Dr.
Rosborough was the Director of Aboriginal Education for the BC Ministry of
Education. Her research specializes in Indigenous language revitalization and edu-
cation, particularly the revitalization of Kwak’wala—the language of the
Kwakwaka’wakw people. Dr. Rosborough’s doctorate in education is from the
University of British Columbia, Canada. [email protected]

Alexa Scully is a PhD student and contract lecturer in the Faculty of Education at
Lakehead University. She is a settler, Celtic, apprentice ally, and socio-cultural
environmental educator. She is honoured to be in Thunder Bay, in the traditional
territory of the Fort William First Nation, to study Indigenous and place-based
education to learn to help to facilitate the reconciliation between the peoples and
the lands of Canada. [email protected]

Marilyn Shirt is from the Saddle Lake Cree Nation and is currently the team
lead for the Indigenous Language program at UnBQ. Marilyn’s commitment to
the revitalization of nehiyawewin stems from her desire to ensure that there is a
language community her daughter Nepeya can return to. Marilyn has worked in
adult education for 27 years; four years in small business, and four years in Early
Childhood Development Cree Immersion before devoting her time to Cree lan-
guage revitalization. She received her Bachelor in Fine Arts from the University
of Calgary, a Master of Arts in Transpersonal Psychology from JFK University
and a Doctorate degree in iyiniw pimâtisiwin kiskeyihtamowin from UnBQ (for-
merly the Blue Quills First Nations College). [email protected]

Rochelle Starr spearheads the Young Indigenous Women’s Circle of Leadership
(YIWCL) at the Faculty of Education, University of Alberta. The Young
Indigenous Women’s Circle of Leadership (YIWCL) program is for young abori-
ginal women aged 10–16 who are immersed in Indigenous language and cultural
activities, drama, dance, digital technologies, and leadership building. rmstarr
@ualberta.ca

Georgina Stewart is from the Nga¯ti Maru ki Tainui, Nga¯puhi and Nga¯ti Kahu
tribes, and works in Te Kura Ma¯tauranga School of Education, AUT University,
with research interests in Ma¯ori and Indigenous philosophy of education. Her
background teaching science in Ma¯ori-medium schools and as a member of the
writing group for the inaugural national Ma¯ori-medium Pu¯taiao (Science) curricu-
lum from 1993 to 1996 led to her doctoral studies investigating the Ma¯ori science
curriculum. After graduating EdD in 2007, she held research positions with the
Starpath Project and NZCER before being appointed to the University of
Auckland Faculty of Education and Social Work. From 2010 to 2016, she taught
on the Te Huarahi Ma¯ori programme delivered at the Tai Tokerau Campus in
Whangarei. [email protected]

Jessie Sylvestre, edlánet‘e, si jésí húshye, ejeredésche hots‘˛i denesu˛‘łiné hesł˛i,
comes from Ejerdésche Buffalo River Dene Nation in northern Saskatchewan,
Treaty 10 territory. denesu˛‘liné is her first language and mother tongue. Being

xxvi About the Contributors

proficient in denesu˛‘liné has provided her with insights into resilience from an
Indigenous perspective that would not otherwise be possible. Jessie has been an
advocate for the preservation, practice, promotion and revitalization of her linguis-
tic heritage through denesu˛‘liné ways of knowing and being. Jessie’s lineage is
denesu˛‘liné, Cree, and Métis, which she is proud to claim. Jessie is currently
working with UnBQ developing the Denesu˛łine Curriculum as the BA Degree
Instructor. [email protected]

Cheryl Torrez is an Associate Professor at the University of New Mexico in the
Department of Teacher Education, Educational Leadership and Policy. Dr. Torrez
has taught in elementary schools in California for 11 years, and was recognized as
a Distinguished Teacher in Residence at California State University-Sacramento.
Dr. Torrez’s research interests include: K-12 education, teacher education, school-
university partnerships, and clinical preparation. [email protected]

Tony Trinick is from Te Wha¯nau-a-Apanui tribe and has taught in the Ma¯ori-
medium teacher education pathway Te Huarahi Ma¯ori since its inception in 1997.
He was the principal writer of the inaugural national Ma¯ori-medium mathematics
curriculum in 1993. His research interests are broadly focused on a number of
areas within the teaching and learning of mathematics in the medium of Ma¯ori.
This includes researching the complex relationship between te reo Ma¯ori and
mathematics, particularly the development of the mathematics register, as well as
the teaching and learning of the register. His research also focuses on student
achievement in Ma¯ori-medium mathematics, and the factors that support and
impinge on student progress. [email protected]

Amy Vinlove University of Alaska Fairbanks, School of Education, Elementary
Teacher Education Department. Dr. Vinlove is an Assistant Professor of
Education at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and has been working with the
elementary teacher education department at UAF since 1999. Having lived in
Alaska for over 40 years, she considers herself an established, but not Indigenous,
Alaskan. Her research focus is on preparing new teachers to work with diverse
populations and to learn with, from, and about their local communities. alvinlo-
[email protected]

Natalie Wilcock is a Gamilaraay woman from central New South Wales. She has
a Bachelor of Education (Primary) and graduated with the Master of Indigenous
Language Education in 2015. Natalie is currently employed as the Aboriginal
manager with the Northern Sydney Institute of Technical and Further Education
New South Wales. She is a passionate advocate for Indigenous community
engagement and raising cultural awareness and sensitivity within workplaces and
schools. [email protected]

Gary Williams is a Gumbaynggirr/Bundjalung man from the north coast of
NSW. Having grown up around speakers but, for various reasons, not learning to
speak it, he jumped at the chance when Muurrbay Language Centre offered a full-
time Gumbaynggirr language course. He has taught language at Muurrbay,

About the Contributors xxvii

Nambucca Heads High School and the annual languages summer school at the
Koori Centre, University of Sydney. Gary now divides his time between
Muurrbay and the Many Rivers Aboriginal Language Centre. He finds it reward-
ing to talk to other language groups and see how they approach language reclama-
tion. [email protected]

Lucia Zundans-Fraser is currently Acting Deputy Dean in the Faculty of Arts
and Education as well as, the Head of School for the School of Teacher Education
at Charles Sturt University, New South Wales (NSW), Australia. Her research
examines higher education course and subject design, pre-service teachers and
their understandings of inclusion, exceptional learners in higher education, and the
use of evidence-based pedagogies. [email protected]

Introduction

Maria del Carmen Rodríguez de France, Paul Whitinui and Onowa McIvor

The need to re-launch who we are as Indigenous peoples working in Indigenously
involved Teacher Education has never been greater. We also live in an exciting
time of rapid change, growth and global opportunity. This opportunity of promise
allows us to appreciate different ways of knowing, traditions, and understandings
and enables us to share more coherently our educational futures together.
However, and despite the positive and committed efforts occurring in many tea-
cher education programs today, the challenge associated with meeting the wider
educational needs of Indigenous peoples as learners, parents, teachers, decision
makers and community remain vulnerable to cultural bias, minimalization, shifting
priorities and poor recruitment strategies. In a time of Indigenous resurgence and
renewal around the world, education ought to play a foundational and fundamental
role in bringing forth the hopes, dreams and aspirations of Indigenous peoples,
and their communities.

The contributors acknowledge that bringing Indigenous peoples together to dis-
cuss the many challenges in Teacher Education requires a collective, committed
and consistent effort. The need, therefore, to embody a comprehensive view of
Indigenous Teacher Education primarily from the lived realities and experiences
of Indigenous peoples themselves, was considered deeply necessary, and timely.
Moreover, the parts in the book speak to how we can all—Indigenous and non-
Indigenous—work together to enact social change, build international educational

M. del Carmen Rodríguez de France (✉) · P. Whitinui · O. McIvor 1

Faculty of Education, University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada
e-mail: [email protected]

P. Whitinui
e-mail: [email protected]

O. McIvor
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018
P. Whitinui (eds.), Promising Practices in Indigenous Teacher Education,
DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-6400-5_1

2 M. del Carmen Rodríguez de France et al.

coherence and promote cultural inclusion. This book includes 48 contributors
from across four different countries who together answered the call to share a
number of exemplary teacher education practices that are making a distinct differ-
ence. Across the twenty chapters that make up this book, thirteen are led by
Indigenous scholars, five are in collaboration with Indigenous scholars and two
chapters are written by non-Indigenous scholars who have long-standing relation-
ships working with/in Indigenous communities.

The examples heralded in this book also showcase what is working well
in Indigenous Teacher Education, and in what context. Seemingly, building effec-
tive Indigenous Teacher Education programmes that have a strong foundation in
Indigenous languages, leadership and relational cultural pedagogies enhances the
learning experience of all students enrolled in doing Teacher Education.
Tomorrow’s teachers working with Indigenous and non-Indigenous learners will
not only be expected to enable culturally connected learners to achieve socially and
academically, they will also need to be open to (re)learning how to become cultu-
rally safe and biculturally competent working with diverse learners who are
Indigenous, and/or who come from Indigenous backgrounds.

Meaningful contributions by leading Indigenous educational scholars such as
Graham Hingangaroa Smith, Marie Battiste, Jo-Ann Archibald, Linda Tuhiwai
Smith, Margie Maaka, Frank Deer, Jean-Paul Restoule, Dwanyne Donald, Turoa
Royal, Boni Robertson and others over the past 30 years have resulted in a grow-
ing cadre of Indigenous scholars who meet regularly at international conferences
in education around the globe. Namely, AERA (American Educational Research
Association), NAISA (Native American and Indigenous Studies Association),
WIPCE (World Indigenous Peoples on Education), CSSE (Canadian Society for
the Study of Education) and others show very clearly that Indigenous peoples in
education matter. Indeed, the years of seeing only one or two Indigenous students
graduate from post-secondary education are long gone. Today successive govern-
ments and institutions readily acknowledge their duty to fund, resource and build
Teacher Education programmes that learn from the mistakes of the past, are rooted
in addressing the present barriers associated with schooling and education, and are
focused on honouring the educational aspirations of Indigenous peoples, and their
communities moving forward in a good way.

The contributions in this book are from Aotearoa-New Zealand, Canada,
Australia and the United States and are strategic, in that, they are four nations who
not only share a similar colonial experience, but who are each working to
self-determine and shape their educational futures more positively. The insights,
reflections and learnings shared in this book explore four high-interest parts speci-
fically related to teacher education programmes, namely: (1) The place of
Indigenous education in conventional teacher education programmes; (2) The pas-
sion and dedication underpinning Indigenous language teacher training pro-
grammes within the academy; (3) The benefits and advantages associated with
Indigenous-led teacher education programmes and (4) The personal challenges,
pitfalls and successes of Indigenous academics learning to lead in Indigenous
teacher education today.

1 Introduction 3

Locating Indigenous Education in Conventional Teacher
Education Programmes

Authors from various backgrounds and experiences consider the need for non-
Indigenous people to appreciate and understand the place of Indigenous Education
in conventional Teacher Education programs. The first section of this book explores
the work being done to broker the space of Indigenous Education in post-secondary
teacher education programmes, and the diverse ways in which this can be achieved.

In a retrospective personal narrative, Amy Vinlove recounts how her parents
were hired in 1970 to design a teacher education program at the University of
Alaska with a focus on preparing teachers for rural schools in Alaska. In this chap-
ter, she reflects on the challenges and victories in the development of the Alaska
Native teacher preparation.

Australian scholar Jessa Rogers explores the challenges of embedding mean-
ingful Indigenous content in teacher education programs such as a lack of
Indigenous teachers and Indigenous content in Australian schooling as well as the
experiences of racism and discrimination faced by Indigenous staff and students in
schools. The chapter is informed by Rogers’ reflections, insights and learnings as
an Aboriginal educator, and considers what a culturally-inclusive Australian
schooling system might look like in the foreseeable future.

Auhl, Gainsford, Zundans-Fraser and Hill’s chapter discusses how Charles Sturt
University has been working in consultation with Indigenous elders and communities
to facilitate Indigenous cultural competence training for staff and graduates. Their
chapter employs a unique approach to course design, where courses are developed
collaboratively to reflect both professional requirements and university expectations,
including Graduate Learning Outcomes based on Indigenous cultural competence.

Using an innovative approach to working with pre-service teachers, Bennet,
Doolan and Moriarty explore the impact that the Healthy Culture Healthy Country
Programme has on pre-service teachers’ knowledge and understanding of cultural
competence for engaging with Indigenous communities and teaching Indigenous
students. The main parts include the need to live, appreciate and understand con-
structs and processes such as country, community and relationship building, as
well as pedagogical knowledge as part of developing cultural competency.

From a Ma¯ori perspective, Clarke, Macfarlane and Macfarlane share the ways
in which Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programmes are being re-shaped to locate
culturally responsive pedagogies at the centre of students’ learning in their one-
year Masters in Teaching and Learning degree based at the University of
Canterbury, New Zealand. The authors suggest a difference is occurring with how
students see themselves as change agents in the classroom, and discuss the implica-
tions for the academy, aspiring teachers and student teachers in classrooms where
language, culture and identity are at the heart of becoming an effective teacher.

The final chapter in Part I is by Rodríguez de France, Scully and McIvor who
share their findings on the impact of a required Indigenous Education course for pre-
service teachers within two Canadian post-secondary teacher education programs.

4 M. del Carmen Rodríguez de France et al.

The authors discuss how the reactions of non-Indigenous pre-service teachers in their
respective institutions are similar; ranging from resistance and opposition on one end
of the continuum, to understanding the need for reconciliation and a commitment to
Indigenous resurgence on the other. The authors propose co-constructive ways to
work together with students’ adverse reactions and responses, towards a mutually
respectful view of Indigenous peoples.

Indigenous Language Teacher Training

Perspectives within this part include Hawaiian, Australian, Ma¯ori, Canadian and
American where authors share a number of programmes, initiatives and interven-
tions that are successfully leading the revitalization of Indigenous languages the
world over. Indeed, growing bi/multilingual Indigenous teachers that speak their
own and other languages, who can walk confidently in both worlds and are willing
to serve in the best interest of their own tribal communities, is critical to our survi-
val as Indigenous peoples.

In their chapter aptly entitled ‘Connecting Indigenous languages policy, pro-
grams and practices’, authors Blair, Pelly and Starr look at how three strands of
Indigenous language teacher preparation, policies, programs and practices play out
in one ethnographic case study. They contextualize what one province in Canada
has done to prepare Indigenous languages teachers at the Canadian Indigenous
Languages and Literacy Development Institute (CILLDI).

Exploring new understandings and insights into the emerging field of
Indigenous teacher education, Alencastre and Kawai‘ae’a describe ways to create
and implement Indigenous models of initial teacher certification, and Master’s
degree programs for Hawaiian language medium-immersion education from pre-
school to high school. The authors provide examples of distinctive practices used
to cultivate Hawaiian language proficiency, cultural competence, and pedagogy
skills, and share a number of pressing issues underpinning advancing the unique
needs of Indigenous teacher preparation in Hawai’i.

In a Ma¯ori account of two decades of Indigenous teacher education within the
Huarahi Ma¯ori programme—an immersion teacher training pathway, authors
Stewart, Trinick and Dale explore the question: What has Huarahi Ma¯ori
achieved? The chapter documents the impact of such programme on the lives of
Ma¯ori, and the wider schooling and university community. Additionally, it criti-
cally examines the paradoxes and problems inherent in the Huarahi Ma¯ori pro-
gramme, and resulting limitations by undertaking an internal review and critique
of the programme since its inception.

Hobson, Oakley, Jarrett, Jackson and Wilcock’s chapter offers an appraisal of
the success of the Master of Indigenous Languages Education (MILE) based at the
University of Sydney. The chapter looks at some of the issues of implementing an
ITE degree in Australian languages in Sydney, and how to move forward in sup-
port of Indigenous peoples’ desire to teach their languages.

1 Introduction 5

Hale and Lockard’s chapter highlights working with teachers of Diné language
within the Diné Dual Language Teachers Professional Development Project based
in Arizona, USA. The chapter describes the need for place-based learning as para-
mount to overcoming cultural and historical biases of teachers working in the
Navajo Nation. As teacher educators, the authors call for teachers to examine the
relations of power, and the ideologies that define their roles as teachers of Diné
language and culture.

Using a case-study approach, Poetsch, Jarrett and Williams describe a language
teacher-training program in the Gumbaynggirr community on the mid-north coast
of the state of New South Wales (NSW) in Australia. Their chapter explores recent
initiatives and the potential of collaborations amongst institutions, communities
and schools to achieve language proficiency and enhance language revitalization
efforts. The chapter also describes the MILE qualification as a promising way to
develop language teachers working at a locally based community language centre.

In the final chapter in this section, McIvor, Rosborough, McGregor and
Marinakis document how the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada,
has responded to the need for language revitalization through partnerships with
two First Nation communities in the development and implementation of the
Bachelor of Education in Indigenous Language Revitalization program (BEDILR).
Considering the findings of a formal program review conducted in 2014, the
authors share the successes of the programme contained within the stories of deep
learning of Indigenous educators who talk about the power of their culture, their
spiritual learnings, their efforts in language advocacy and revitalization, and the
legacy that language learning creates for engaging children and families.

Indigenous-led Teacher Education Programmes

Within this part, three chapters describe successful programmes that, albeit the
challenges, have supported Indigenous and non-Indigenous graduates in their
quest for self-determination and self-governance in their communities. Many
Indigenous peoples are actively ‘taking back’ their education and making a plan to
deliver education for themselves. Many Indigenous peoples are creating a counter-
cultural educational narrative towards developing educational strategies that are
self-determining, sustaining, empowering and autonomous at a communal level.
As Indigenous peoples, we understand that being able to exercise control, make
decisions, transmit our worldviews and be the benefactors of what happens in edu-
cation for Indigenous peoples is fundamental to empowering Indigenous people’s
aspirations in education.

In the first chapter of this part, Archibald and La Rochelle share the story of
the development of the Native Indian Teacher Education Program (NITEP) which
was established at the University of British Columbia in 1975. By reflecting on
seven key cultural principles, the authors share some of the strategies, challenges

6 M. del Carmen Rodríguez de France et al.

and successes connected to following these principles over the years that have
guided NITEP’s development.

The second chapter describes the collaboration between the Pueblo Bonito
School District in New Mexico and a university in the Southwest of the United
States, where Francis, Krebs and Torrez have worked together to develop the
Pueblo Engaging Teachers And Community (PETAC) initiative, a professional
development strategy to support students to revitalize culture. The authors describe
the impact on the participants, the school district, and the higher education institu-
tion, and posit that such an initiative can serve as a model for other organizations
and institutions looking to include Indigenous professional development
opportunities.

With a level of sensibility and sensitivity, Lewis, Shirt and Sylvestre describe
the ways in which healing is an integral component of education. The authors
examine how the concepts of ownership, reintegration of ceremonies and self-
determination have informed the training of Indigenous language teachers at
University nuhelot’˛ine thaiyots’˛i nistameyimâkanak Blue Quills (UnBQ). The
chapter also discusses how the structure of Indigenous languages can inform curri-
culum and teaching methodologies.

Living to Lead in Indigenous Teacher Education

The last part of our book focuses on providing examples from four different con-
texts: Hawaiian, Canadian, Australian and Ma¯ori where each author describes the
unique joys and challenges faced in creating vibrant, distinct and prosperous
Indigenous teacher education programmes.

A native Hawaiian, Cashman describes a Native-Hawaiian graduate program to
prepare educators and education leaders (Hawaiians and Non-Hawaiian) who are
committed to the health, well-being and prosperity of La¯hui Hawai‘i (Nation of
Hawai‘i) to be well-grounded in Hawaiian history, language and culture. The
author reflects on some of the challenges and advantages of developing a graduate
Indigenous educational leadership program within a conventional university, hop-
ing to contribute to the important conversations amongst Indigenous peoples
worldwide on how we are empowering ourselves through education.

Zundans-Fraser, Hill and Bain propose a whole institution approach alongside
a theory-based design to embed Indigenous Australian Education content in a tea-
cher education programme based at Charles Sturt University. They describe the
first phase of the design process that incorporated a specific set of programme
commitments and standards to ensure that all undergraduate programmes across
the university, with teacher education as one example, incorporate Indigenous
Australian content.

In her chapter, through woven narratives Daniels maps the cultural connection
to her ne¯hiyawe¯win language, exploring how formal education deeply affected her
own schooling experiences, and those of her family. The author shares her

1 Introduction 7

worldview about teaching, life-long learning and her passion for leading in various
aspects of education, understanding language revitalization and preservation as
part of the practice in achieving self-government, education and leadership.

Giving closure to our book, Whitinui describes ‘The price of equity’ from an
institutional ethnographic perspective. In addressing the lack of support for Maori
Teacher Education in the academy, he critiques how ‘white-streaming’ ideologies
negatively impact not only on how institutions prepare teachers to teach in
Aoteaora New Zealand schools, but also on how such ideologies if left unchecked,
can erode and/or dismantle Indigenous leadership in teacher education. The chap-
ter offers possible solutions for how we might reconcile these power and cultural
imbalances moving forward.

Summary

Sharing the vision of nurturing healthy and prosperous future generations, we
hope to inspire scholars from diverse disciplines with these exemplars. This
volume aims to bring encouragement to understand and appreciate Indigenous
Education as the force that can ‘bring forth’ Indigenous knowledge and wisdom,
and as a field that transcends classrooms and institutions. We hope you will find
here the dreams, hopes and aspirations of students and teachers, young and old, in
order to create a more respectful and reciprocal shared future for humankind.

Part I

Locating Indigenous
Education in Conventional
Teacher Education Programmes

Lessons and Legacies: Forty Years of Alaska
Native Teacher Preparation at the University
of Alaska Fairbanks

Amy Vinlove

Introduction

My parents, Ray and Carol Barnhardt, moved to Fairbanks, Alaska in 1970. My
father had taken a job at the University of Alaska College of Behavioral
Sciences and Education. One of his primary tasks was to help design a new tea-
cher preparation program focusing specifically on preparing teachers for rural
schools in Alaska. Prior to developing the new program, a survey was conducted
to assess the number of teachers living in rural Native communities. At the time,
it was determined that only six licensed Alaska Native teachers were teaching in
the state. The remainder of the rural teaching population was non-Native. Over
the past 45 years since the creation of the Alaska Rural Teacher Training Corps,
the University of Alaska Fairbanks has prepared and graduated 446 Alaska
Native teachers. This chapter will tell the story of the evolution of programs, les-
sons learned and challenges faced in Alaska Native teacher preparation at one
public university, a university where I now work to sustain the efforts led by
those who came before me, and to prepare Alaska Native teachers to teach
Alaska Native students. Teacher turnover was (and continues to be) a significant
problem in rural Alaska, as nearly all rural teachers were imported from outside
of Alaska, and their tenure in the state was typically 3 years or less. As Orvik
(1970) noted:

The adjustment problems encountered by a non-Alaskan to the physical elements of life
in the Bush are by no means small … with the drain on the emotional and intellectual
reserves of a teacher facing perhaps his initial encounter with virtual isolation, confined in
an interpersonal maze of cultural unfamiliarity. (p. 1)

A. Vinlove (✉) 11

University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), Fairbanks, AK, USA
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018
P. Whitinui (eds.), Promising Practices in Indigenous Teacher Education,
DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-6400-5_2

12 A. Vinlove

The Alaska Rural Teacher Training Corps

To address the issue of recruitment and retention of teachers for rural Alaska, a con-
sortium consisting of the University of Alaska, Alaska Methodist University1 and the
Division of State Operated Schools put forth a proposal in 1969 to create an Alaska
Rural Teacher Training Corps (ARTTC) to prepare both Alaska Native and non-
Native teachers for Alaska’s rural schools. ARTTC had a significant budget (i.e. over
a million dollars a year, equivalent to $6.5 million per year in 2016 dollars) and was
jointly funded through federal grants from the National Teacher Corps program, the
Career Opportunities Program and the Alaska Division of State Operated Schools
(Murphy, 1972). The ARTTC consortium was autonomous of the traditional teacher
preparation program at the University of Alaska. Outside of the ARTTC program,
teacher preparation programs in 1970s Alaska were limited to campus-based offerings
at the UA campus in Fairbanks, the UA community campus in Anchorage2 and the
then Alaska Methodist University. An analysis of course catalogues from the early
1970s suggests that the ‘on-campus’ degree requirements for teacher certification pro-
grams were not geared towards preparing teachers for rural Alaska. Courses such as
‘Anthropology of the Natives of Alaska’ and ‘Sociology of Education’ were offered,
but not required components of certification programs (University of Alaska, 1970).

While the ARTTC emphasis was on preparing Alaska Native teachers, early
challenges in recruitment (due to a Teacher Corps grant requirement that funded
students be halfway through a degree program) created an initial cohort of 11
Alaska Native students and 19 non-Native students (Rider, 1974, p. 86). The sec-
ond cohort, funded primarily through the Career Opportunities grant, allowed
funding for first-year college students, and consisted of a 30 student cohort that
was 96% Alaska Native (Rider, 1974, p. 74). By 1975, ARTTC had increased the
population of Alaska Native teachers nearly fivefold, having graduated approxi-
mately 25 new Alaska Native teachers.

ARTTC was described, in the 1972 UA catalogue, as a ‘four-year experimental
field-based teacher training program … with particular focus on a cross-cultural
environment’ (University of Alaska Fairbanks, 1972, p. 99). Barnhardt, who served
as the project coordinator and conceptualizer, describes the underlying assumptions
that led to the field-based and cross-cultural focus of the new program:

1. The university campus contributed to the low academic achievement rate of
Native students. Coming to the university was a one-way street for many
Native students. A Native person who learned to survive on campus often was
no longer satisfied with, or acceptable to, his home community.

2. Contemporary teacher training curricula … did not provide an adequate per-
spective for assessing and responding to the needs of children in rural Native
communities. Their individual needs had to be assessed within the context of

1Now called Alaska Pacific University.
2Now the University of Alaska Anchorage.

2 Lessons and Legacies … 13

the broader social and cultural environment within which they existed
(Barnhardt, 1977, p. 88).

The program also provided significant financial support to the cohort members,
covering tuition costs and providing a living stipend large enough for the partici-
pants to forego work and focus exclusively on completing their degree program.

Ten field sites were set up in small Alaska Native communities across the
state, each one containing a (non-Native) ‘team leader’ and 4–8 pre-service tea-
chers working towards a Bachelor’s of Education degree and elementary certifi-
cation. The team leaders assisted in facilitating a distance-delivered education to
the program participants, helping them to coordinate access to community phones
to participate in audio conferences, teaching organization and study skills, and
serving as liaisons between the local school and program participants. Three
times a year, team leaders and cohort members from across the state would be
brought to Fairbanks for a face-to-face gathering and course instruction. The
field-based approach, as Barnhardt writes, allowed ‘Native students to maintain
contact with their own community. Although they were developing many skills
and ideas of non-Native origin, they were learning and changing within the con-
text of the community, so that no major discontinuity was experienced’
(Barnhardt, 1977, p. 91).

The program curriculum also attempted to ‘anthropologize’ the process of
becoming a teacher, by focusing the pre-service preparation on coming to know
the community and understanding students in a cultural context. The curriculum
and overall approach to the preparation process had, as Barnhardt described it, ‘a
very strong kind of anti-bureaucratic orientation to things. We decided that the stu-
dents were studying to become a new kind of teacher, and we didn’t want them to
get contaminated by being immersed in the school’. Activities and assignments
during the first 2 years of the degree program were based on community interac-
tions and the documentation of community-based knowledge. Participants mapped
their communities, interviewed community members on educational histories and
attitudes, documented community activities through photography and completed
comprehensive community studies (Barnhardt, 1977, p. 92). One program partici-
pant reflected on the program focus on culture and community, stating, ‘Today if I
happen to be a teacher I will be different. I will teach the students about my cul-
ture. I will even teach them about your culture to show them the difference’
(quoted in Rider, 1974, p. 83).

ARTTC 2.0: The Cross-Cultural Education Development
Program (X-CED)

By 1974, the ARTTC program had been in place for 4 years and the program
administrators decided to, ‘take stock of our experience and revise the program
to expand on its strengths and reduce its weaknesses’ (Barnhardt, 1977, p. 94).

14 A. Vinlove

This led to the development of a newly branded field-based teacher preparation
program called the Cross-Cultural Educational Development (X-CED) program,
pronounced by all as ‘Exceed’. The X-CED program remained a rural focused,
field-based education degree and certification option through 1995, evolving gra-
dually during this 20-year period. During these years, an additional 215 Alaska
Native teachers graduated from UAF’s teacher certification and degree programs,
although the historic databases create challenges in discerning how many com-
pleted the field-based X-CED program and how many completed their degree on
the Fairbanks campus.

The evolution of ARTTC to X-CED is reflected in changes to program fund-
ing, administration, structure and content. As mentioned above, the original
ARTTC program relied on substantial federal grants and had an annual budget of
over a million dollars. External funding for the X-CED program persisted through
the end of the 1970s, when a successful effort was made to formally move the
program into the University of Alaska system and secure the necessary state
funding. As Booker (1987) notes, ‘in 1980 rural education prospered with the
economic boom created by oil discoveries in the region (and) the program
became a permanent part of UAF’ (p. 3). When asked about the stipends given to
program participants to support their full time enrolment in courses, Barnhardt
stated, ‘we were the last Teacher Corps program (in the U.S.) and up to the early
80s we had stipends for students’ but after that, ‘(financial support) shifted over
to the Native foundations and regional corporations that offer higher education
funding’.

As the ‘team leader’ positions in the original ARTTC structure were not univer-
sity level faculty, the X-CED program moved to hire full-time ‘rural faculty’ who
served not only as program facilitators but also taught courses for the degree pro-
gram. The number of field sites was reduced from ten to eight, each of which
served a large geographic region in the state instead of just a single community.
Rural faculty travelled extensively to communities across their designated region,
checking in with program participants and establishing relationships with local
schools and communities. Advances in distance-delivery teaching technology,
including the development of video-based courses, additional phone lines in rural
communities, audio conferencing options and even the rudimentary use of e-mail
communication via dial-up modem expanded the quality of course offerings and
facilitated program communication.

The curriculum of the X-CED program also evolved from the original set of
courses that made up the ARTTC B.Ed. As the ARTTC program was attempting
something new, it relied on both courses offered during periodic face-to face ses-
sions, new courses developed by program faculty and attempts to deliver tradi-
tional ‘core’ courses through a variety of printed, video and audio-taped, and
phone-based approaches. Barnhardt acknowledges that in addressing degree
requirements in the first years of ARTTC ‘we had a lot of waivers’. The need for
a more coherent degree program that was designed specifically for the preparation
of teachers in and for rural Alaska, but also aligned with the campus-based B.Ed.
requirements led to the development of a new B.Ed. specific to the needs and

2 Lessons and Legacies … 15

goals of X-CED. The 1977 UAF catalogue lists the new degree option, which
included the requirement of either Sociology of Education or Education of
Culturally Different Youth and incorporated nine required courses in ‘Alaskan stu-
dies’. Courses offered as part of the Alaskan studies requirement included Alaska
Native Languages, Bilingual Methods and Materials, Alaska Native Politics,
Native Alaskan Music and many more. B.Ed. students completing their student
teaching experience in rural Alaska also enrolled in Socio-Cultural Foundations of
Education and The Rural Community as an Educational Resource (University of
Alaska Fairbanks, 1977–79, p. 74).

1995–2005: Alignments and Administrative Upheaval

The 1990s and early 2000s brought about many changes in the University of
Alaska Fairbanks education programs. The issue of where education, as a discipline,
should be housed within the university was itself contentious and education degree
programs (X-CED included) moved from being part of a College of Behavioral
Sciences and Education in the 1970s, to a stand-alone School of Education in 1977,
to being housed in a College of Human and Rural Development in 1983, to being
part of a newly formed ‘Rural College’ at UAF in 1988 (which was then re-branded
the College of Rural Alaska in 1991), to return to being a School of Education now
housed in the College of Liberal Arts in 1993, and then to finally reside in its own
stand-alone unit (as it remains today) as a School of Education in 1998.

While education programs bounced around the Fairbanks campus trying to find
a home, teacher certification programs within the School of Education were also
being examined and reconsidered in relation to cost-savings, national accreditation
directives and mandates from the state-wide Board of Regents (a governor
appointed governing body for the University of Alaska system). Both the campus-
based B.Ed. program and the field-based X-CED B.Ed. program received accredi-
tation from the National Council on Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE)
in 1988. Unfortunately, under poor leadership, the UAF School of Education lost
its NCATE accreditation in 1997 and did not regain it until 2003.3 During the per-
iod between 1996 and 2003 a variety of structural changes occurred in the School,
including the suspension of the on-campus undergraduate (B.Ed.) secondary certi-
fication program in 1996, a disappearance of the distance-delivered secondary
B.Ed. program from the catalogues in 1998, and suspension of both the on-
campus and distance-delivered elementary B.Ed. programs in 2000 (all changes
directed by the Board of Regents). I joined the faculty in the elementary depart-
ment at UAF in 2000; at the start of a 2-year period during which UAF offered no
undergraduate degree programs in education. This status severely impacted the

3The School still operated under state accreditation during this time and was able to offer valid
teaching certificates.

16 A. Vinlove

number of Alaska Native teacher education graduates for several years to follow.
After a peak of 183 Alaska Native teacher education graduates in the 1990s, the
2000s at UAF produced only 90 Alaska Native teachers.

In 2002, following a collaborative state-wide effort, a new undergraduate ele-
mentary degree program was unveiled at UAF (and at the other two UA campuses
in Anchorage and Juneau). The new Bachelor of Arts in Education (BAE) was
developed from the ground up and in addition to being transferable between the
three campuses, was also made available entirely via distance-delivery from UAF
from the first course through to the culminating ‘internship year’. The new BAE
degree program did not have an Alaskan studies concentration like its B.Ed. pre-
decessor, but included a healthy dose of courses designed to prepare all tea-
chers—both those preparing for urban classrooms and for the classrooms of rural
Alaska—to work with and understand students from diverse backgrounds.
Required BAE courses that show a legacy from the Alaskan studies concentration
included: Native Cultures of Alaska; History of Alaska; Language, Education and
Linguistics; and Communication in Cross-Cultural Classrooms or Alaska Native
Education or Native Ways of Knowing. The BAE degree program remains today
the primary option for Alaska Native students pursuing a teaching certification at
UAF, either on-campus or via distance-delivery, although it was not until 2014
that a secondary undergraduate certification program was reinstated. Additional
legacies of the ARTTC and X-CED programs visible in the current BAE will be
examined below.

Alaska Native Education Student Association: Maintaining a
Cohort Model

An identified strength of the initial ARTTC and X-CED models was the creation
of ‘cohorts’ that gathered students who progressed through the program together,
forming supportive and collaborative relationships, building on each other’s
strengths and knowledge and sharing in collective successes and challenges. Rider
(1974) notes, ‘the team relationship was the essential link’ (p. 108). Maintaining
this supportive cohort approach with Alaska Native education students on the
Fairbanks campus was more challenging as students continuously entered and
exited degree programs and groups of individuals did not progress simultaneously.
In 1988 an on-campus student organization formed as an attempt to simulate a
supportive cohort environment for Alaska Native students completing education
degree programs in Fairbanks. The Alaska Native Education Student Association
(ANESA) had, as its primary purpose, ‘to provide support for Alaska Native edu-
cation students at UAF through monthly meetings; organize study sessions for
education classes and disseminate information about rural and Alaska Native edu-
cation issues’ (Barnhardt, 1994, p. 245). Participation in ANESA peaked in the
early 1990s, but the long-term maintenance of the association has depended

2 Lessons and Legacies … 17

primarily on the presence of an energetic faculty member willing to organize the
group and facilitate gatherings.

Challenges and Changes

Over the past 40 years Alaska Native teacher preparation at the University of
Alaska Fairbanks has been subjected to a complex set of both external and internal
pressures. Although they no longer exist as separate programs, ARTTC and
X-CED left lasting and rich imprints on continued efforts at UAF to prepare and
graduate Alaska Native teachers for Alaska Native students. Before that legacy is
examined, several of the internal challenges that faced ARTTC and X-CED will
be discussed, along with the external factors that have changed in both K-12 and
higher education since the programs were created.

Lessons Learned From ARTTC and X-CED

While the overall focus of ARTTC and X-CED on community and cultural-based
teacher preparation, and on preparing Alaska Native teachers to teach Alaska
Native students proved to be pioneering, and shaped the evolution of future pro-
grams, a few components of the programs did not endure. Most notably, the cost
of the innovative programs was not sustainable in the context of a public univer-
sity budget. To put the cost of these programs in perspective, consider that the
1-year budget of ARTTC, a program that graduated approximately 10 teachers per
year, is equivalent in today’s dollars to more than the entire yearly budget of the
UAF School of Education, which in 2014 graduated 65 students with an initial
teaching licensure degree and another 47 students with a graduate degree in educa-
tion. A program that costs more than half a million dollars per graduate simply is
not feasible as a fiscally sustainable option. Needless to say, a program that was
funded exclusively by grants also needed to eventually transfer cost and adminis-
tration to a permanent home for sustainability, which—as noted above—was
accomplished when X-CED received state funding to continue as an established
part of the UAF School of Education.

The transition from being a relatively autonomous entity with shared leadership
and administration across multiple organizations to being a permanent part of an
established institution created some philosophical disconnects between ARTTC
and X-CED’s vision and the reality of the university. Booker (1987), a UAF
faculty member outside the education department who completed a review of the
X-CED program, notes ‘the problem of institutionalization is best seen as a
conflict between (X-CED’s) heritage and conventional university life’ (p. 4).
In being absorbed into the pre-existing structures of the University, the program
encountered ‘the well-documented tendency for the conventional to co-opt the

18 A. Vinlove

innovative … where the innovators can be persuaded to abandon crucial elements to
achieve political compromise’ (Booker, 1987, p. 6). One example of this tension can
be seen in the incompatibility between the X-CED rural faculty responsibilities and
the demands of achieving tenure on full-time university faculty. X-CED rural faculty
spent a great deal of time focusing on teaching, travelling around their region
and providing student support. These responsibilities left limited opportunities to
complete the externally imposed tri-partite faculty duties of research, teaching and
service necessary to ensure continued employment (Booker, 1987).

A second exemplar of the need for ‘political compromise’ can be found in the
change in program orientation towards schools and school districts in rural com-
munities. Under ARTTC the ‘anti-bureaucratic’ orientation of the program led to
some schisms between program participants (both teacher-leaders and cohort
members) and the local schools (Rider, 1974, p. 121). While X-CED maintained
an orientation towards creating teachers as ‘change agents’ in the Western educa-
tional system, it also acknowledged through changes in program structure and
modified fieldwork requirements that positive relationships with schools and
school administrators were essential in a teacher preparation program, and that stu-
dents enrolled in a pre-service teacher preparation program needed to have early
and frequent experiences in classrooms as part of their degree experience (Tetpon,
1998, p. 117).

Internal reflection and externally imposed factors also motivated ARTTC and
X-CED to standardize the program curriculum to align with the degree programs
being offered through the ‘traditional’ on-campus programs, and to increase the
focus on pedagogical skills. In reflecting on the lessons learned through the first
6 years of ARTTC and X-CED, Barnhardt (1977) made the following observations:

Six months into their first year of teaching, we brought the first group of graduates back
together at a meeting to find out how they were doing in their hard-won profession. They
related a variety of concerns, particularly in reference to the day-to-day routine of teach-
ing. They did not feel satisfied with such everyday teaching responsibilities as lesson
planning and classroom management. (p. 95)

While the curricular focus on an anthropologized approach to learning to teach
was successful in its efforts to graduate teachers who would serve in leadership
positions and could ‘overcome the ethnocentric confines of the existing educa-
tional system’ (Barnhardt, 1977, p. 93); the anti-bureaucratic curriculum was not
as successful in helping them learn the skills necessary to facilitate learning in a
public-school classroom.

An additional factor motivating the standardization of degree program course-
work came from outside the program; primarily as a response to the need to ensure
outsiders that program and degree requirements were rigorous and aligned with
those in ‘traditional’ certification programs. Questions about the rigor of course-
work and grading in the Alaska Native focused preparation programs—often with
disturbingly racist undertones—lingered around the programs in the 1970s, 1980s
and early 1990s. Rider (1974) examining the first 2 years of ARTTC wrote,
‘during the first summer of my study I was informed on numerous occasions that

2 Lessons and Legacies … 19

ARTTC was “a give-away program and academically inferior to the on-campus
experience”’ (p. 93). As a program administrator for the program, however, he
was quick to note, ‘my subjective evaluation as a teacher is that, controlling for
language problems, the Native students were not better or worse students than

non-Natives. In my teaching, I found a full range of ability in students of all ethnic
and cultural heritages’ (p. 93).

Similar allegations sparked a public controversy in 1991 when a (non-Native
and non X-CED affiliated) faculty member at the UAF School of Education
alleged that ‘the education department too often passes some unprepared Native
students in an effort to put more Native teachers in the classroom’ (reported by
(O’Donoghue, 1991, p. 8). The remarks, shared publicly first at a Fairbanks
Chamber of Commerce meeting and then again in an interview on the local radio

station, led the UAF Chancellor to initiate an investigation into education faculty

grading practices, and also led to campus protests against the faculty member and

in support of Alaska Native students on the UAF campus. The individual who

made the allegations was eventually transferred out of the education department
and later subjected to an investigation by the U.S. Department of Education’s
Office of Civil Rights, but the aftermath of the accusations lingered and certainly
influenced the development of subsequent education degree programs at UAF
(Hamilton, 1998, p. 74). It was critical that programs serving a high population of
Alaska Native student be rigorous and aligned with other certification programs in
the university.

Changes in Context

A variety of external social, economic and policy changes have also occurred
since the initial implementation of the ARTTC and X-CED programs in the 1970s
that have significantly impacted the structure, administration and content of tea-
cher preparation programs at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Most of these
changes would be considered positive in nature. Overall improvements in K-12
education and an expansion of higher education and job opportunities for the
Alaska Native population have extended the options for Alaska Native students
who want a college degree but also want to live in their home communities.
Teaching is not the only salaried position in town, as it often was 50 years ago.
Alaska Native students can get degrees in rural development or health care fields
and find employment with rural economic development organizations or rural
health care providers. They can get degrees in business and find work with
the regional profit and non-profit corporations formed through the Alaska Native
Claims Settlement Act. They can join the Alaska Native Engineering and Science
Program (ANSEP) and receive support as they pursue a degree in a STEM field.
Expanded options in higher education, including a UAF-initiated Ph.D. program
in Indigenous Studies, have brought the number of Alaska Native Ph.D.s up from
1 in 1970 to 76 today (Jones, 2016).

20 A. Vinlove

Expanded opportunities in higher education have also positively impacted tea-
cher preparation programs at UAF in that we now have two Alaska Native faculty
members in the School of Education, and multiple Alaska Native students pursu-
ing a Ph.D. through UAF in an education-related topic. Additional opportunities,
however, also mean that it is more challenging to recruit Alaska Native students to
the field of teaching. In the 1980s Alaska’s salaries for teachers were 170% of the
national average teacher salary and in the 1990s were still 138% of the national
average. That salary incentive has since dropped to only 111% of the national
average, while the cost of living in rural Alaska remains typically 150% of the
average cost of living in the USA (Fried, 2015; National Education Association,
2013). In 2006 the Alaska legislature, in one of many cost cutting efforts, changed
the teacher retirement system in the state from one of the best ‘defined benefit’
systems in the USA to a ‘defined contribution’ plan that is subject to market fluc-
tuation and employee motivation in contributions (Alaska Division of Retirement
and Benefits, 2010).

Alaskans, as a whole, have also become much more mobile since the 1970s.
In examining migration patterns and motivations of the Alaska Native population
Huskey, Berman, and Hill (2004) note that ‘during the 1980s Alaska’s rural
regions experienced net out migration of Natives while its urban regions had net
growth of Natives through migration. This trend continued through the 1990s and
the share of the state’s Native population in its urban regions increased’ (p. 77).
This mobility has been evident in the Alaska Native student population that has
entered and exited the teacher preparation programs at UAF over the last three
decades. For example, of the 16 Alaska Native students that graduated from our
elementary preparation programs at UAF in the past 3 years, half of them com-
pleted their preparation program on campus in Fairbanks and half completed their
program via distance delivery from their rural home community. Of the distance
delivery graduates, all ended up teaching in their home communities following
graduation, while 70% of the Fairbanks graduates ended up teaching in urban
areas of the state.4 We are no longer preparing Alaska Native teachers for only
rural, homogenous schools and students. The reality is that we have to graduate
teachers who are competent and confident teaching in both rural, predominantly
Alaska Native classrooms and in culturally and economically diverse, heteroge-
neous urban classrooms and every context in between.

Another external factor impacting teacher education that has evolved signifi-
cantly since the 1970s is the level of accountability to which schools, teachers and
educator preparation programs are held by outside stakeholders. Teacher prepara-
tion programs, in order to maintain national accreditation, must demonstrate a
high level of rigor and adherence to a set of externally imposed mandates, impact-
ing the structure and curriculum of preparation programs. Suffice it to say that
some of the more innovative aspects of ARTTC would not meet the accreditation
standards currently set by the Council for Accreditation of Educator Preparation

4Information obtained through personal communication and documentation.

2 Lessons and Legacies … 21

(the national accrediting body for teacher preparation programs in the USA). The
enhanced national emphasis on accountability has naturally impacted all teacher
preparation programs in the last few decades, but has a more pronounced affect
when considered in relation to the innovations attempted in ARTTC and X-CED.
Programs wishing to prepare teachers with valid, externally accredited teaching
certificates no longer have the option to graduate individuals who do ‘not feel
satisfied with everyday teaching responsibilities’ (Barnhardt, 1977, p. 95), as some
of the early ARTTC graduates expressed upon reflection.

A final external change that has impacted the structure of teacher preparation
programs at the University of Alaska Fairbanks is the technological advances that
enable far more effective distance-delivery teaching techniques than were avail-
able in the 1970s. We now teach distance-delivery courses to students across rural
Alaska using synchronous video conferencing systems, shared collaborative com-
puter screens, audio conference lines that automatically record and archive class
sessions, and apps that allow intern teachers to video record themselves teaching
on their smart phones and then upload the recordings to a central digital storage
cache, all facilitated by high speed fibre optic networks throughout even the most
remote parts of the state. Technological advances have improved the ways in
which rural teacher education can be delivered and increased opportunities for
interactions between pre-service students across the state.

Strengths and Legacies: The Centrality of Place and Community
in Teacher Preparation

Having now arrived at the present following our historical journey through Alaska
Native teacher preparation at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, we arrive at the
questions: What do we do now to broker the space of Alaska Native education in
our mainstream education programs? What are the lasting legacies of the ARTTC
and X-CED programs and how can they be seen in the content, vision and orienta-
tion, structure and administration of UAF’s teacher preparation programs today?

Legacies of Structure and Administration

The central structural component of ARTTC and X-CED that has prevailed over
the 45 years since the programs were envisioned is the ‘field-based’ approach to
teacher preparation. The UAF School of Education has continuously offered a
distance-delivered teacher preparation program to residents of rural Alaska since
the first ARTTC cohort began the experimental program in 1970. The early vision
of ‘bringing the university to the students’ is a reality that remains a steadfast
commitment today. Our distance-delivered program has remained on the forefront

22 A. Vinlove

of technological innovation and continues to emphasize the community as the cen-
tral focus of all field-based experiences. To enhance this field-based model, we
have cultivated strong relationships with many of the 50+ school districts in
Alaska, to ensure that our distance-delivery students have positive experiences in
and access to schools, beginning from their first education class.

As this narrative has revealed, we no longer have a distinct and separate teacher
preparation program designed to prepare teachers, Alaska Native or otherwise, for
rural Alaska. Instead, a complex set of learned lessons and external pressures have
led UAF to approach the preparation of Alaska Native teachers as part of a larger
mission to prepare teachers for all of Alaska’s schools. While the absorption of a
program specifically geared towards one population into a program designed for a
general population could be seen as having a detrimental impact on the extent to
which the specific population’s needs are met, instead we find that our merged
programs positively impact the preparation received by all of our program gradu-
ates, and acknowledge the multiple contexts today’s graduates—both Alaska
Native and non-Native—now teach in. On-campus and distance-delivered courses
populated by both Alaska Native and non-Native students allow for positive and
productive opportunities for sharing and collaborating across a wealth of back-
grounds and experiences. Particularly in our distance-delivered courses, students
in urban settings learn from students in diverse settings and vice versa.
Participation in courses involving students from across the state allows new tea-
chers to learn in a mediated environment about the extreme diversities, both cul-
tural, linguistic and geographic, that exist in Alaska and its schools.

The flexibility to differentiate program components to meet individual student
needs is also a key aspect of our efforts to systematically attend to a diverse pre-
service teacher population being prepared to work in a variety of educational con-
texts. In our program, we offer multiple pathways to degree completion, including:
alternative approaches to course assignments depending on community and district
context; external support for students needing additional academic assistance due
to inadequate high school preparation or issues with written or oral communica-
tion; creative opportunities for fieldwork that acknowledge the realities of rural
Alaskan communities; and extended program timelines to accommodate student
needs in relation to family and community obligations. We understand, as
Barnhardt did in 1977, that ‘the most successful courses (are) those in which the
instructor has been aware of the students’ needs and has devoted considerable
time and effort to take interest in, and personally address issues, problems and
concerns raised by each individual student’ (Barnhardt, 1977, p. 97).

Administratively, the legacies of ARTTC and X-CED lie in the continued recog-
nition of a need for ‘political compromise’ if our teacher education programs want
to maintain continuity and continued funding within the larger structure of our pub-
licly funded university. The innovations of the 1970s programs rested, in large
part, on the autonomy afforded by external funding sources and an ambiguous,
multi-institution organizational structure. Conversely, our teacher preparation pro-
grams are squarely housed in a largely inflexible institutional structure that, for the
most part, not only ensures our longevity but also limits the opportunities for

2 Lessons and Legacies … 23

out-of-the-box thinking. Program modifications, unless external grants are secured,
must occur within the context of fiscal limitations, existing organizational struc-
tures, faculty workload regulations and the dictates of tenure and yearly evaluation.

Legacies of Content and Orientation

In program content, the legacy of the ARTTC and X-CED programs can be seen
in the continued use of the unifying concepts of place and community in current
program curriculum. Rather than preparing our teachers for a specific population
of students, we use place and community as a contextual foundation for preparing
teachers, acknowledging communities and individuals as the central focus of the
educational process. By putting place, community and individual experiences at
the centre of the learning-to-teach process we have held fast to our roots of
‘anthropologizing’ the teaching process. However, recognizing the expanded
notions of culture as a fluid and constantly evolving construct we have, as good
institutions should, grown in our understanding of what it means to operationalize
the process of ‘anthropologizing’. Rather than exposing pre-service teachers to a
fixed body of knowledge about the cultural characteristics of a group of students,
we teach them how to learn, themselves, about their individual students, their
communities and the larger places where they are teaching. We then teach them
strategies to integrate local knowledge into the academic curriculum in a meaning-
ful manner, as well as ways to locate and utilize community resources in the edu-
cational process.

Recently, our program faculty has identified a set of core practices in place-
and community-based teaching that we are using as a foundation for instruction,
practice and reflection in our pre-service teaching classes. The practices include:

• The rejection of deficit thinking by cultivating and promoting an ethic of excel-
lence for all students in every classroom;

• The ability to identify and respectfully incorporate local resources (including
people, the land and any aspect of the community) into the classroom;

• The ability to actively listen to students and to learn from them and other non-
conventional sources of knowledge;

• The ability and inclination to engage students in learning experiences that inte-
grate the local environment and community.

A sample assignment that helps students to acquire these practices includes a
semester long project in their social studies methods course titled ‘Place-based
mapping and curriculum development’. The assignment requires interns to create
an interactive, annotated place-based Google map of the community surrounding
their school. After creating the map, interns locate and provide interpretive infor-
mation on points of geological, ecological, cultural, historical, social and economic
interest around the school and community and develop a narrative list of curricular
ideas and tie-ins that connect the academic curriculum with items on their maps.

24 A. Vinlove

Each time the class meets interns share components they have recently added to
their maps. These sharing sessions allow interns in diverse rural and urban contexts
across the state to learn from each other about Alaska’s school populations, geogra-
phy, communities and natural resources. A more in-depth look at the ways in
which we emphasize place and community in our pre-service programs, and differ-
entiate instruction to address our heterogeneous student population, can be found
in Vinlove (2016a, 2016b, & 2017).

In the past year, there has been a strong movement within the Alaska Native
population to move towards Indigenous ownership and control of schools in
Alaska Native communities. Peter (2016) writes ‘Over the past 50 years, Alaska
Natives have been on a journey toward increased self-determination in govern-
ance, business, and health care, and now is the time for self-determination in edu-
cation’. Viewing the educational process through the lens of place and local
community creates a strong foundation for helping Alaska Native pre-service tea-
chers consider ways to decolonize the educational experiences of their students, as
it refocuses the educational process on contextualizing and individualizing learn-
ing in a way that honours the knowledge and backgrounds of the students being
taught. We hope that our pre-service teacher preparation programs will produce
Indigenous teachers capable of leading a self-determination movement in Alaska
Native schools, while also helping new non-Indigenous re-connect with the land
and learn about their local communities in order to better teach students how to
address the complex issues facing the world today.

References

Alaska Division of Retirement and Benefits (2010). Teachers’ Retirement System (TRS) plan
comparison chart. Retrieved from http://doa.alaska.gov/drb/pdf/trs/trstieri-iiichart.pdf.

Barnhardt, C. (1994). Life on the other side: Alaska Native teacher education students and the
University of Alaska Fairbanks (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Vancouver, BC:
University of British Columbia.

Barnhardt, R. (1977). Field-based education for Alaskan Native teachers. In R. Barnhardt (Ed.),
Cross-cultural issues in Alaskan education (pp. 87–99). Fairbanks, AK: Center for Northern
Educational Research.

Booker, J. M. (1987). The institutionalization of a teacher corps program: An approach to the
evaluation of innovation. International Journal of E-Learning and Distance Education, 2(2),
1–13.

Fried, N. (2015). Alaska’s cost of living. Alaska’s economic trends. Retrieved from http://laborstats.
alaska.gov/col/col.pdf.

Hamilton, N. W. (1998). Zealotry and academic freedom: A legal and historical perspective.
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Huskey, L., Berman, M., & Hill, A. (2004). Leaving home, returning home: Migration as a labor
market choice for Alaska Natives. The Annals of Regional Science, 38, 75–92.

Jones, A. (2016). Alaska Native scholars: A mixed-methods investigation of factors influencing
PhD attainment (In-progress doctoral dissertation). University of Alaska, Fairbanks, AK.

Murphy, D. M. (1972). Field centered teacher preparation: A progress report. Anchorage, AK.
Retrieved from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED070747.pdf.

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National Education Association (2013). Estimates of school statistics 1969–2013. Retrieved from
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_211.60.asp.

O’Donoghue, B. (1991, November 18). Jump from village to classroom can intimidate Native
students. Daily Sitka Sentinal, 8

Orvik, J. (1970). Teacher survival in an extreme environment. Retrieved from http://files.eric.ed.
gov/fulltext/ED048972.pdf.

Peter, E. (2016). Alaska is failing its indigenous students. Education Week. http://www.edweek.org/
ew/articles/2016/11/30/alaska-is-failing-its-indigenous-students.html?qs=tribal+schools&print=1.

Rider, C. D. (1974). The Alaska Rural Teacher Training Corps, 1971–1973: A case study and
analysis in anthropological perspective (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Eugene, OR:
University of Oregon.

Tetpon, B. (1998). Being Native and becoming a teacher: Perspectives of Cross-Cultural
Education Development (X-CED) program graduates (Unpublished doctoral dissertation).
Fairbanks, AK: University of Alaska Fairbanks.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks (1970). Academic Catalog. Fairbanks, Alaska.
The University of Alaska Fairbanks (1972). Academic Catalog. Fairbanks, Alaska.
The University of Alaska Fairbanks (1977–79). Academic Catalog. Fairbanks, Alaska.
Vinlove, A. (2016a). Preparing teachers for place-based teaching. Occasional Paper Series, 2015

(33), 105-118. http://educate.bankstreet.edu/occasional-paper-series/vol2015/iss33/10.
Vinlove, A. (2016b). Place, positionality and teacher preparation. Journal of Sustainability

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(pp. 147-167). Bingley, United Kingdom: Emerald Publishing Limited.

Teaching the Teachers: Re-educating Australian
Teachers in Indigenous Education

Jessa Rogers

Introduction

Recent Australian education reform has resulted in qualified teachers recognising that
they are inadequately prepared to teach content within the area of Indigenous educa-
tion. The knowledge and theoretical understanding imparted in teacher education pro-
grams over the past decades did not prepare educators to embed Indigenous content
across all years and areas of the curriculum. Today, pre-teachers in Australian univer-
sities are assessed on their ability to deliver content that is relevant to Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander students and peoples in our contemporary world, to varying
degrees. This chapter aims to discuss some of the challenges facing the embedding
of meaningful Indigenous content in schools today. These include, but are not limited
to: lack of teacher preparedness, a lack of Indigenous content historically in
Australian schooling, a lack of Indigenous teachers, the experiences of racism and
discrimination faced by Indigenous staff and students in schools as well as a lack of
Indigenous content in university teacher preparation courses. This chapter is informed
by my learnings as an Aboriginal educator, and is a sharing of experiences aimed at
informing the reader of the challenges. I will also consider what a culturally inclusive
Australian schooling system might look like in the foreseeable future.

Situating Myself

My name is Jessa Rogers. I was born to my Aboriginal mother on Ngunnawal
country in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory (ACT). My mother was adopted
by a non-Indigenous family at birth, and she reconnected with our Aboriginal

J. Rogers (✉) 27

Faculty of Education, Science, Technology & Maths, University of Canberra,
Canberra, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018
P. Whitinui (eds.), Promising Practices in Indigenous Teacher Education,
DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-6400-5_3

28 J. Rogers

family when I was in primary school. I have known myself to be an Aboriginal
person since childhood, and have identified as such throughout my life. My family
has been affected by forced child removal and adoption, over several generations.
My mother, after her adoption, was raised in Cootamundra, New South Wales
(NSW), until she moved to Canberra, where I was born shortly afterwards. These
places and their histories form an important part of my own identity and my perso-
nal connection to my research conducted in the ACT and NSW.

In describing myself as an Aboriginal person, I believe it is important for me to
define my own sense of Aboriginality and indigeneity. The core of my understand-
ing of Aboriginality is that my identity, and my connection to country, cannot be
broken, regardless of colonisation, removal or separation from family and place,
‘Our relation to land, what I call ontological belonging, is omnipresent’ (Moreton-
Robinson, 2003, p. 24). This is different to traditional or stereotypical beliefs
about Aboriginal identity, connection to country or Indigenous belonging, incor-
porating all Indigenous people who have connection through blood to country in
Australia. Moreton-Robinson (2003) states:

[O]ur ontological relationship to land, the ways that country is constitutive of us, and
therefore the inalienable nature of our relation to land, marks a radical, indeed incommen-
surable, difference between us and the non-Indigenous … this has not diminished the
ontological relationship to land … [it] cannot be erased by colonizing processes. (p. 31)

While some Aboriginal people are born into families with unbroken knowledge
of country, language and culture, I was not. As with my own ancestors, many
Indigenous Australians were taken from their families, adopted by white families
and removed from their land and language groups (Moreton-Robinson, 2003).
Many Indigenous students today are from families such as mine, with broken and
unknown parts of their genealogy, culture and histories. I have no lived experience
on my own Aboriginal country. This does not affect my sovereignty as an
Indigenous woman, and my Aboriginality is the identity I have always proudly
claimed since we met my birth Grandmother. As West (2015) describes, this process
is confusing, painful and upsetting at times, but we as Indigenous people know that
the past, present and future are inseparable, as is our indigeneity and connection to
country, regardless of colonial destruction. My work as an Aboriginal educator is
heavily influenced by my own identity, which has been heavily impacted by coloni-
sation, however as an Aboriginal woman I am inextricably connected to other
Aboriginal people, and to my country. As Moreton-Robinson (2003) explains:

Indigenous women perceive themselves to be an extension of the earth, which is alive and
unpredictable. Hence their understanding of themselves, their place and country also
reflect this view. In their life histories Indigenous women perceive their experiences and
others’ experiences as extensions of themselves … beyond the immediate family. (p. 34)

My connection to Aboriginal students is of a different nature to my relation-
ships with non-Indigenous students, because of our shared ontology. Our shared
indigeneity, spiritual connection to land and all physical and spiritual aspects of
life is something that connects us. I too, however, as mentioned, know that many
Indigenous students are still finding their own identities, and that identities are
‘unique to the individual and their life history: some have always identified as