A Call to the Classroom
by Theresa Desmond

The American Indian Teacher Training Program and its first group of students respond to a pressing need.

For Bryan Brayboy, the numbers alone make the case most compellingly.

“If 100 American Indian students start the ninth grade, four or five years later, 60 will graduate. Of that, 20 will do some postsecondary education, often at a community college or trade school. Of that, two or three will go to a four-year school. Of that, one will graduate within a four-year period.

“In a white society, that number would be about 22 out of 100,” he says.

And, he adds, for the one graduating American Indian student, “Teaching isn’t the most lucrative field.”

The result? A “tremendous” shortage of American Indian teachers.

Which is why the presence of 12 highly motivated American Indian students on the University of Utah campus this year as part of the American Indian Teacher Training Program (AITTP) is cause for some excitement.

The program is the result of a $1 million grant to the U’s Center for the Study of Race and Diversity in Higher Education, the two-year-old brainchild of Brayboy, assistant professor in the Department of Education, Culture and Society (ECS), William Smith, also assistant professor in ECS, and Octavio Villalpando, assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy.

The center’s goal, says Brayboy, is to “examine the experiences of underrepresented individuals in higher education,” and the AITTP is just one realization of that intention. The three-year AITTP grant, from the U.S. Department of Education, pays tuition and a monthly stipend for 12 American Indian students who have already completed two years of college. The students, who began classes in the summer of 2003, were chosen from a pool of more than 130 applicants and undergo a threetier admission process: they must be admitted to the AITTP, then to the University, then to the teacher education program. All spend two years completing their education degrees at the U and the third year transitioning to a teaching job.

Ultimately, Brayboy and project director Nola Lodge BS’82 MEd’89 hope that the students will return to their home communities to teach, where their services are badly needed. Brayboy notes that American Indian districts around the country have already contacted the program, eager to hire the students when they graduate. “You don’t have to be American Indian to teach American Indian students well,” says Brayboy. “But it helps to have role models.”

A member of the Lumbee-Cheraw Tribe, Brayboy himself grew up in an American Indian community in North Carolina where there were few American Indian teachers. “Some ideas got lost in the translation,” he says. “For example, when I had to take time out of school for the harvesting ceremony, teachers didn’t understand how important that was.”

“Historically, education for American Indians has been a tool to assimilate and wipe out all Indian cultures in the United States,” says Lodge, a member of the Oneida Tribe of Wisconsin. “Because of the boarding school system, children from many different tribes were placed in schools, and a pan-Indian movement began. Education wasn’t envisioned to meet the needs of the students but to remold them so they would not return to their tribes or communities.”

But in fact, says Brayboy, “the research says the opposite: those American Indian students who stay most grounded in their culture and their homes do better. It helps them stay whole.”

The students in the program, who range in age from 20 to “50-something,” have a strong affiliation with their tribes and an understanding of the issues unique to American Indian education. “I hold on to my cultural values, to my spirituality, to my traditional way of life,” says student Michael Redman. “I live the values of the Arapaho. If you lose that connection, you’ll lose that identity.”

Even for American Indian students who are less traditional, “too often education isn’t relevant,” Lodge says. “Teachers don’t understand what it means to be culturally different, to have another language than English as your first language, to be daily confronted by a system that is uninformed and insensitive to your reality and often holds stereotypical views of you.” (Or, as student Sharee Varela puts it, “We’re not all alcoholics, we’re not all uneducated, we don’t wear feathers and buckskin every day, and we don’t live in tepees or ride horses to work.”)

In addition, there can be cultural differences between American Indian and white students that affect classroom learning. For example, says Brayboy, “Classrooms are often competitive, and often individualized. In many American Indian communities, you’re part of a larger whole. There’s an ethic of cooperation. So competition may not go over so well.” Of course, he points out, that may not hold true for every American Indian student, while it may be true of other students, as well.

Another factor is the unique relationship American Indians have with the U.S. government. Through a history of treaties in which land was given up for promises regarding health, education, and welfare, “the federal government is responsible for the education of the American Indian people,” Brayboy notes succinctly. “The government is supposed to set aside money for education; the Office of Indian Education has a budget of about $120 million. So we’re both a political and a racial group.” Thus, programs such as the AITTP are federally funded.

The result is great potential for—and pressure on—the American Indian Teacher Training Program. The hope is that the students, many of whom have made significant life changes to attend the program, will not only have a degree in education, but will also teach in their communities, serve as positive role models, and, perhaps, return to school for graduate degrees to become education administrators. “We want to build something here so that the U becomes known for training American Indian students,” says Brayboy. Indeed, the program was just awarded its second grant and has begun recruiting students for a second class of 12 to begin in the summer of 2004.

And as for the students? “We all talk about wanting to go back to our towns and reservations,” says student Funston Whiteman. “We have one main goal: to make our American Indian education better. We can offer new ideas and stop the assumptions and generalizations about American Indian education. That goal is very dear to us.”

—Theresa Desmond is editor of Continuum.