Telling Native America's Story: Traditional Native American History through Media and Literacy is a grant I am currently writing to target Title I elementary and secondary schools in need of improvement within the Las Cruces Public School System where student performance has been poor on New Mexico’s standardized history and literacy assessments.
Participating teachers from K-6 classrooms from these schools will engage in the following professional development activities each year: eight full-day Saturday workshops featuring content and technology lectures from Smithsonian scholars and pedagogy sessions at various museums and historic sites, four lectures by professional technologists, concentrating on interactive creative based tools, two monthly school-based study group/peer coaching meetings, and a culminating 4-day summer institute on creating new curriculum with a concentration in the use of emerging web 2.0 based learning. Teachers will also receive free passes to state museums, DVD and graphic based literacy readers and laptops for networking and curriculum development. Workshops will be held to help teachers better understand the use of web 2.0 tools as a major part of both the historical and literacy program.
These activities will be supported by an interactive website dedicated to the project. It will facilitate ongoing communication between LCPS teachers and Smithsonian faculty, and showcase teachers’ best lesson plans for teaching American history, concentrating on Native American content.
While I've been working on the grant, I've taken note of two questions that continue to be asked by both administrators and faculty, and thought I'd use this blog to craft a stock answer.
The first question is about content. Everyone I've talked to about the grant want to know why a historical curricula about Native American's is relevant to New Mexico, especially southern New Mexico. This questions is pretty easily answered. LCPS serves a high numbers of American Indians and have a duty to ensure effective teaching of American history and American Indian contributions, especially to new arrivals in the United States. These new arrivals are primarily of Mexican origin, and comprise 15% of the LCPS population. Of these, 80% are of Mestizo, or mixed blood ancestry, making them at least part Native American. In addition, over 10% of LCPS students are American Indian. This means that 20% of students in the LCPS are at least part Native American. Currently New Mexico, and by extension LCPS has no dedicated historical or literacy based curricula with content that concentrates on Native Americans and their contributions to American history. The grant would help develop a program that would finally recognize the contributions of Native Americans in Southern New Mexico, from pre-Columbian settlements to present efforts by tribes to recoup lost tribal lands.
The second question - "Why the concentration on interactive web based tools?" is harder to answer, since it requires an argument for a new pedagogy and is based on direct experience in another school system. My experiences in British Columbia taught me that the use of web based tools caused students to engage more in daily assignments, especially if those assignments allowed them to creative engage with the subject matter. I also found that teachers willing to work to develop classroom specific content and exercises that integrated web based tools generated greater interest among their students, who in turn scored higher on standardized tests.
These experiences and observations have lead to my belief that any program that integrates web based tools intelligently will attract student interest.
