Teaching without distractions; former IU students teaching on the Navajo Reservation come to share, recruit
Two School of Education grads hope to attract more to enter the “Cultural Immersion Projects”
Thursday, March 13, 2008
A couple of former IU students who are now on the faculty at a middle school on the Navajo Indian Reservation in Pinon, Arizona will speak about their experiences at the IU School of Education on Monday, March 17. They will appear with the principal of Pinon Middle School during a presentation at 5:00 p.m. in the Wright Education Building auditorium.School of Education graduates Marisa Churchill (pictured at left with Pinon students) and Mark Gathmann will share their stories in the presentation titled “Teaching and Living on the Navajo Reservation: IU Graduates Share Challenges, Rewards, and Opportunities.” During the Monday presentation, Grant will offer perspective from his position as principal on important issues in American Indian Education. The presentation is free and open to the public. They’ll also spend Tuesday at the School of Education, along with their principal Rick Grant, interviewing candidates to do their student teaching at Pinon or join the faculty permanently.
The Navajo teaching program is a part of the award-winning Cultural Immersion Projects at the IU School of Education. The American Indian Reservation Project sends student teachers to Navajo Reservations in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah for 16 to 17 weeks, teaching in Indian controlled, public or Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools. Pre-service teachers from Indiana University and a selected number of students from across the country have participated in the program for more than 35 years. The Cultural Immersion Projects also send students to teach in 13 foreign countries from Asia, to Europe, to Africa. A new project will also send students to teach in Chicago public schools.
“They’re not just going in and teaching, then returning to their living quarters,” director of the Cultural Immersion Projects Laura Stachowski said of the Navajo Reservation project. “They’re forging friendships with Navajo people in the community, and those friendships become very deep and meaningful to them.”
Churchill said the relationships led her to stay on as a faculty member once her student teaching assignment at Pinon concluded. “The thing I love most about being on the reservation is the students,” she said. “They teach you so much about their culture and living out on the reservation. Their perspective on life is a lot different.”
The Cultural Immersion Projects are designed to not just expose students to the culture, but to truly allow the pre-service teachers to understand a culture different from their own. Students live among the families and adapt to the cultural values.
For a native of suburban Chicago, everything even sounds different. “I’m used to lots of activity and traffic and shopping malls everywhere,” Churchill said. “I just wanted to get a different perspective on life, kind of see what it was like to live here. It’s like a foreign country inside our own country.”
Without that activity, Churchill said she can teach without distractions, to some extent. Many students live 40 miles apart from each other, which makes school the time when they can see each other and interact. Particularly challenging for her role as a 7th grade language arts and 8th grade honors literature teacher is the fact that for many, English is a second language. “They speak English at school and Navajo at home, and it’s hard for them to pick up all the elements of grammar that they should probably have by now,” she said.
The Cultural Immersion Projects earned the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education "Best Practice in International and Global Teacher Education Award" in 2001. Goldman Sachs made it a co-recipient of the "Best in International Education Award" in 2005. More about the program is available here.
Interview Excerpts
Churchill, who is from Grayslake, Illinois, just outside Chicago, says she had to adjust to the different atmosphere of teaching on the Navajo reservation: (Listen to this sound bite)
“So I’m used to lots of activity and traffic and shopping malls everywhere and I just wanted to get a different perspective on life, kind of see what it was like, to live in this. It’s like a foreign country inside our own country. I wanted to see what the culture was like and what it was like to live without all of those distractions.”
A great challenge for Churchill, who teaches language arts and literature, is working with students who speak their native tongue away from the school: (Listen to this sound bite)
“So they speak English at school and Navajo at home, and it’s hard for them to pick up all the elements of grammar that they should probably have by now, so I have to spend a lot of time going back over those things.”
Churchill says her classroom experience is why she decided to stay on as a permanent teacher: (Listen to this sound bite)
“The thing I love most about being on the reservation is the students. They’re so fun and they love coming and hanging out and learning and they’re just fun to talk to. They teach you so much about their culture and living out on the reservation and just their perspective on life is a lot different.”
Stachowski (Stack-ow-ski) says IU student teachers don’t just go to the schools on the reservations: (Listen to this sound bite)
“So while they’re out there as student teachers, they’re forging friendships with Navajo people in the community and those friendships become very deep and meaningful to them. Whether it’s families that invite them over to participate in a ceremony or to help with the care of their livestock or herd sheep, you know things like that; they get to know the people in the community, the people who work at the school and the cafeteria and the dorm, which are all a part of their life while they’re out there and I think for many of them when the student teaching semester is over they’re not ready for that to be the end of the relationship with these folks and they stay. They stay not only at Pinon, but many of our other schools across the reservation, these young graduates of IU have stayed on and at Pinon in particular there are a number of them now.”
The program sending IU student teachers to the reservations started with an idea more than 35 years ago, Stachowski says: (Listen to this sound bite)
“In the early 1970s here, my predecessor, Jim Mahan, who still lives in Bloomington, started the Cultural Immersion Projects and the American Indian Reservation Project was first. I think it was about 1972. He had connections with John Henderson who is a Navajo man on the reservation who still comes every year for our workshop in April to participate as a consultant and those 2 put their heads together and they thought you know, “What an opportunity for people from the east to go to an American Indian community and really immerse themselves in the culture through a student teaching experience.” So that started it and a couple years after that, Jim Mahan then developed the Overseas Project which has become extremely popular and successful and after that an Urban, Rural and Latino Projects.”
