American Indian Education Knowledgbase

This KnowledgeBase archive includes content and external links that were accurate and relevant as of September 30, 2019.

The American Indian Education KnowledgeBase is an online resource to aid education professionals in their efforts to improve the education of American Indian students and close the achievement gap American Indian students have faced in public, Bureau of Indian Education, and other schools.

Task 5: Instill Through Writing

Guideline: To do well in school, a student needs to write well. To become a good writer, it is important to practice writing. Students can develop their skills by writing about something they know, about themselves, and about their communities. An effective way to promote student writing that has been used with American Indian students is process writing. Process writing involves students working in groups to brainstorm writing ideas (prewriting), writing a rough draft, reviewing their and other students' drafts and doing revisions, editing their drafts for grammar and spelling, preparing a final draft for review by their teacher, and publishing their final work in some form. Educators working with native students need to be aware of engaging techniques to support their teaching methods.

Tools

Native American Languages with Map

This website lists the mapped native languages of the Americas, which are among the most numerous and varied in the world, and provides scholars with rich sources of information on the many ways people make speech and language. The number of distinct languages in North America figures in the hundreds, however, by studying similarities and differences, scientists have placed most tribes into one of about 12 groups.

References

National Writing Project

This link is to the National Writing Project website. As noted at its website, "The National Writing Project is a professional development network that serves teachers of writing at all grade levels, primary through university, and in all subjects."

Reading and Writing to Create Yourself

Authored by Dr. Jon Reyhner, Northern Arizona University, this article describes how American Indian students can be encouraged to practice and improve their writing skills.

Writing

This website contains resources on writing instruction from the National Council of Teachers of English. "The research, policy statements, and information collected here reflect the National Council of Teachers of English's commitment to improving writing instruction for all students."

Native Education and the Pursuit of Happiness

The NCTE archives hold an extensive collection of materials related to language instruction and literature designed for Native American students in the late 1960s and 1970s, including some focused on Rough Rock [a Navajo-operated school in Chinle, Arizona, sought to combine local control of the school with a curriculum that served its population educationally, politically, and psychically. Students at Rough Rock studied (and continue to study today) in English and in Navajo, and they learned Navajo art and science traditions in addition to the standard curriculum. Through a deep, cross-disciplinary immersion in their own culture and history taught largely by Navajo teachers, Rough Rock students could better understand their people’s intellectual traditions and ideas and, by contrast, those of others, as well.] . In one of the most important of these documents, a report on the school from 1969, four Navajo external evaluators examined the school in its third year, tasked by the Rough Rock school board to determine how well the curriculum was working.

The contents of this website were developed under a grant from the U.S. Department of Education and are intended for general reference purposes only. However, those contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the U.S. Department of Education or the Center, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government. Some resources on this site require Adobe Acrobat Reader. This website archive includes content and external links that were accurate and relevant as of September 30, 2019.