Volume 10 Number 3
May 1971

Harry A. Kersey Jr., Anne Keithley and F. Ward Brunson

THE AMERICAN Indian has emerged very much in the forefront of our national conscience during the last few years, and at long last the educational and social miasma of reservation life is receiving priority attention from the federal government. On July 8, 1970, President Nixon, calling the American Indians "the most deprived and most isolated minority group in our nation," proposed a broad program to provide more aid, including the creation of a special committee on education to review and recommend improvements on the educational status of all Indian school children. Hopefully, this will lead to a thorough reorganization of federal and public school programs for Indian children which have produced a drop-out rate twice that of the national average, where fewer than half of those who enter school ever finish high school, and less than one percent finish college.

Florida’s Seminole Indians, as is the case with most of the nation’s 600,000 Indian citizens, are fighting for economic and cultural survival. In this process they are caught between the traditional lifestyle and values of their tribe and the economic demands of contemporary society in which they must make their own way. Until recently the Seminoles have been held to a marginal economic existence primarily because they lacked educational skills; few members of the tribe could read, write, or speak English adequately enough to find employment outside the reservation.

This lack of education was deliberate in many cases, as the older people often refused to send their children to school. Today many young adults on the reservations can remember when their parents told them to run and hide rather than board the buses that would take them to school. However, many of these same young adults did attend school and are now assuming leadership of the tribe; for the most part they see education as one of the most important needs at this time.

If the Seminoles are to retain their traditional values and lifestyle, they must develop economic independence that will allow the young people to remain on the tribal lands and work in tribal enterprises rather than be drawn away into urban areas. In addition, a cadre of well-educated young Indians must be available to assume the positions now occupied by government officials in such areas as finance, education, land development, etc., if the tribe is to gain a dominant voice in running its own affairs. To these ends the current tribal leaders are supporting all programs that offer a greater chance for the educational advancement of their people. As might be expected, these educational opportunities are most restricted on the isolated rural reservations.

Even before the President’s recent announcement, a team of educators from Florida Atlantic University had launched a program to help meet the special educational needs of Seminole Indian children residing on one of these reservations. If successful this approach may provide a key to the successful education of Indian youngsters in other parts of the nation as well.

The program described here took place during the 1969-1970 school year at the Ahfachkee Day School on the Big Cypress Reservation deep in the Everglades. The Big Cypress is the most isolated of the Seminole reservations. It is 45 miles from the nearest town and there was no all-weather road connecting the two until the late 1950s. Many of the dwellings on the site are substandard or marginal, although a tribal housing program is rapidly providing better accommodations for the people. Most of the residents work in some type of agricultural enterprise, or for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the tribe. The average annual income for many families is well below the poverty standard, and the formal education attainment among the parents is the lowest of the three reservations.

The Indian children attend a federal day school from kindergarten through fourth grade, and are taught by white teachers assisted by bilingual Indian aides. In the fifth grade these children are transported by bus to the town of Clewiston (a 90-mile round trip) to attend public school. The Seminole child finds this a difficult adjustment to make and the result has been poor attendance, low achievement and a high drop-out rate. There was not a high school graduate from Big Cypress until 1963. Increasing pressure from the Indian leaders, news media, and educators impelled the Bureau of Indian Affairs to take positive steps to rectify the situation.

In the spring of 1969, the Bureau of Indian Affairs arranged for Florida Atlantic University to investigate the educational situation on Big Cypress and make recommendations for upgrading the school program. The university team included clinical psychologists, educational psychologists, speech pathologists, psychometrists and reading specialists. Because there had never been a formal testing program at the school to assess the achievement or intelligence of the children, there were no usable cumulative record folders, and many children were not sure what grade level they had been working at the year before. Therefore, a necessary first step was to arrange for psychological and achievement testing, speech and hearing screening, as well as a survey of parental attitudes.

The data collected and analyzed showed that the children from Big Cypress were operating on a lower achievement level than their Indian counterparts on the other reservations, although as a group they displayed an average range of intellectual abilities and did not suffer from exceptional speech or hearing impairments. The problem, therefore, was to develop a remedial and compensatory program of learning which would reverse the trend of scholastic regression and enable the children to gain, and to compete successfully with their peers in public school. The Florida Atlantic team was given a contract from Title I funds to devise and implement such a program.

The program prescribed for the Big Cypress children is basically a peer-to-peer interaction on a multi-sensory basis, with special emphasis on peer-produced materials and an adaptation of the Fernald perceptual remediation technique. This approach was developed by Dr. F. Ward Brunson of the FAU staff, and has been used successfully with low-achieving migrant children at the Robert Markham Elementary School in Pompano Beach, Florida, as well as with other culturally different children. The additional challenge presented by the Seminole children was the fact that English is a "second language" for them, their native tongue being the unwritten Mikasuki language.

Individuals who have experienced difficulty learning to read need additional stimulation to convince them that they can learn. However, many children find it very difficult, if not impossible, to learn through visual and/or auditory pathways alone. Therefore, VAKT (Visual-Auditory-Kinesthetic-Tactile) makes use of tactile (touch, feeling) and kinesthetic (movement of large muscles) to reinforce the visual and auditory receptors in the system developed by Dr. Grace M. Fernald. Brunson's adaptation of the Fernald technique uses a peer to instruct a peer in most cases, rather than the customary procedures of an adult tutor. The advantages of such an arrangement are:

In order to institute this program at the Ahfachkee Day School a group of eight university students were selected and trained in the Brunson adaptation of the Fernald technique. Twice each week throughout the school year a team of four students was flown to the reservation to work with the children. Each university student worked with two or three Indian children in individual sessions lasting from 30 minutes to an hour.

The first step was to motivate the children to create their own reading materials, using their own experiences and words; these stories were illustrated by the children, then bound and laminated into books for their library. Using these books, the university tutors then employed the VAKT technique with selected Indian children who would become the student-tutors for their peers.

Ultimately, all children in the school would be involved in the remedial reading project, working on a one-to-one basis. The final step in the Brunson Peer-Produced Learning Program would have the peer-teaching followed with children gradually making more sophisticated books and audio-visual presentations as supplements to the regular school texts and materials. However, during this year only the first two steps could be accomplished due to the conditions at the school.

It was determined at the outset to concentrate on the third and fourth grades at the day school, as these were the children who would soon be transferred to public school. During the 1969-70 school year there were 14 children in those grades, ranging in age from 9 years-5 months to 11 years-6 months. The first months of the program were spent in establishing rapport with the children and getting them to make peer-produced books. By January approximately 50 such books had been completed and were available at the school.

When the time came to work with the Indian children using the VAKT technique, and to select those who would serve as peer-tutors, it was found that only two children of the 14 read well enough to serve in this capacity. Therefore, the remainder of the school year was spent in having the university students work with the third and fourth graders on their reading skills. It was felt that it was more important to improve the reading skills of the children as much as possible in the remaining months, than to try and institute a program that they were not ready to handle. Next year the third graders from this year will be in a better position to become peer-tutors, while this year’s fourth graders will be a bit better prepared for public school.

Although the planned remedial reading program was not fully implemented, the university students did succeed in slowing the severe regressive trend that had been found previously in Seminole reading abilities. The instrument used to measure the results of their effort was the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT), on a pre- and post-test basis. Each student was used as his own control and his actual gain was compared with his expected gain (based upon his past performance). The fact that there was no significant difference seems to indicate the severe regressive trend has been replaced by a mild regressive trend and if this positive change continues to be substantiated by further research, a new breakthrough in Indian reading programs may be in the offing.