Charles E. Kozoll and Edward H. Heneveld

"SHUT UP!" exploded through the chatter of noisy students at the rear of the classroom. The clear and unmistakable command restored silence. Anita Straight Head, still slightly flustered, returned to work.

This minor incident occurred at a workshop in cross-cultural communication sponsored by the Education Division of the Bureau of Indian Affairs for teachers, administrators and aides from BIA and public schools throughout the United States. The incident was minor, except in demonstrating that 17-year-old Anita, after one week of intensive training, could control a class of adults whose average age was 43.

Anita’s command startled her students because it was the only time English had been used in the class. All other lessons, including this one, had been conducted entirely in Sioux, a language Anita had spoken since childhood.

With 30 other Indian high school students, Anita was demonstrating to adults how an Indian child feels when he enters a strange English-speaking classroom. The language teaching method chosen created an emotion-laden situation for the older educators. Indian teenagers, intensively trained to teach their native language, were the mechanism for role reversal.

As originally conceived, the students were to offer descriptions of tribally specific aspects of contemporary Indian language, customs, values and problems, both in and out of school. This conception was changed, as it became apparent that many of the students spoke their Indian languages well enough to be trained as teachers of them. Students were made responsible for a course that was half Indian language and half discussions of Indian culture in English.

A structure was developed prior to staff training. The guides in it did much to allay student fears and build their confidence. During the training week, the Indian students learned how to present stimulating lessons on Indian language and culture to a large number (350) of Indian and white adults. The training sessions were partially responsible for this growth—but they would have been an incomplete part of the whole process, if the senior staff had not spent much time listening to and encouraging the students to build a program of presentations that were honest individual creations. Daily group discussion and continual informal meetings at meals and recreation sessions facilitated dialogue. Senior and junior staff also lived together, in male and female wings of a student dormitory.

One particular incident perhaps best exemplifies the means by which honest communication was achieved. After the first day of training, it was apparent that the junior staff was not comfortable with some of the decisions about course content that had been made without their help. That evening a staff meeting was held. After about an hour of getting nowhere, a white school psychologist on the senior staff pointed out, using a times analysis of who had been talking, that less than 20 percent of the comments had come from the junior staff. From then on, the tone of the meeting changed until after almost three hours, the senior staff departed, leaving the junior staff to prepare their course outline. The next morning the outline was ready and the Indian students from then on used the senior staff as technical advisors on teaching method and very little on course content.

The constant interchange between the senior staff and the Indian student junior staff complemented and supported the intensive training program. Exchanges such as the one just described clarified the objectives of student involvement. These exchanges helped the training program move students very rapidly from observers to active participants.

There was a controlled pace to the training and each element in the process was carefully explained to the students. The training was divided into two parts, one dealing with the teaching of Indian language and the other in the development of presentation on Indian culture. In both parts, the process employed a basic structure which the students need as a guide in developing their own lessons.

The model for Indian language training was derived from similar work done with the Peace Corps. In that setting, adult native speakers of a language were trained to teach that language for periods of 12 to 15 weeks; written material in the target language was usually available. There was little or no material available in the eight Indian languages to be taught; most material used was prepared phonetically by the students, with the guidance of the course director and trainer. Languages taught were Navajo, Hopi, Crow, Creek, Tewa, Jemez, Sioux, and Yakima.

A regimen developed in Peace Corps language training was used to prepare the Indian students. The first morning a small class of ten senior staff people were taught basic Somali, using the audiolingual method; this involved listening to and speaking the target language, at the direction of the instructor who was the model for all of the students. No writing of any kind or speaking in another language was allowed. Prior to this demonstration lesson, the course trainer explained the audio-lingual method, the lesson structure to be used, and the key points of the lesson to note (see Note 1). After the demonstration lesson, the trainer reviewed the lesson with the students, emphasizing the structure and key points in this form of language teaching.

The students were observers at this point. Immediately afterward, they became active participants. The language was changed to Swahili and a group of students were taught using the same method and lesson structure. A similar review and analysis followed this lesson. There were subsequent lessons in Swahili to demonstrate how to organize lessons over a period of days, construct reviews, and involve a class in speaking the new language, using the audio-lingual method.

Three days after the first demonstration lesson, the Indian students prepared and presented demonstration lessons to a class of senior staff members. All of the lessons were videotaped and analyzed with the course trainer. This critique enabled the student teachers to review presentation techniques and identify ways that they could help each other.

While all of the students were extremely nervous, their excellent preparation of material and excitement over using the technique accounted for impressive first performances. This positive experience helped to reduce the tension among many of the students, as they contemplated the arrival of the workshop participants.

Language training activity also set a tone for the development of presentations on Indian culture. Prior to the workshop, each student had been asked to select eight or nine topics which could be developed into short 20-minute scenarios on contemporary Indian life and culture, viewed from the perspective of Indian youth.

Topics chosen by the students were a composite of traditional legends, home experiences and discussions of boarding school life. About half of the students had taken pains to develop their topics before arrival; most of the rest had random thoughts about what they would do.

Every afternoon during the training week, the students met in small discussion groups, with one senior staff member present as an advisor. At the initial sessions, talk wandered as the students got to know each other, and collectively explored subjects they felt the participants should be exposed to. These discussions brought out additional student fears besides the dissatisfaction with some of the senior staff’s preconceptions: as they described tribal histories and legends, some were at first ashamed of the presence of white people. There was student feeling that white teachers would not listen to their presentations or would listen and laugh (see Note 2).

At these first discussions, as the students became more comfortable with senior staff people, strains of anger, frustration and hostility toward whites began to emerge. Very little, if any of this appeared during the workshop, between junior staff members and the participants.

As individual student presentations took shape, the discussion groups shifted to practice sessions. Each student was given an opportunity to completely present one of his topics. Each presentation was followed by a group critique—the senior staff role in the critique was sizably reduced as the week progressed.

Unlike the Indian language portion of the course, the structure was more flexible. Students were given suggestions on topic presentation, but not the same strict guidelines that were necessary in language teaching. This difference was responsible for divergent reactions to the Indian students’ performance, in each portion of the course; individual motivations, preparedness, and personalities assumed greater importance in the less structured Indian culture presentations.

The training week was an intensive training experience for all of the students. There were keys to the success of the week, elements which could be replicated in a multiplicity of settings, with a variety of high school student groups. First, the senior staff worked with the junior staff to create an atmosphere where student opinions were heard and honestly listened to. An exchange resulted, leading students to feel more confident in their own abilities as neophyte teachers. Secondly, the training provided the students with guides and a structure into which they could fit their unique knowledge and prepare material for the adult workshop participants.

All workshop participants were required to take the course on Indian language and culture. The tension level for participants was highest during the Indian language classes; student teachers, using the audio-lingual method, exercised very firm control over the direction each lesson took. The following poem is an example of how one participant felt, as she attempted to learn elements of Hopi from her instructor.

There was less student control during the second half of the course. The objective of this portion was to provide an overview of the Indian tribal, family and school life that educators of Indians know little about. A survey conducted prior to the workshop indicated that there was an information gap in this area. Despite this research evidence, participants were far less involved in this half of the course.

Many of the educators, with years of service in Indian schools, felt they already knew what teenagers had to say, unlike the language classes where the student teacher’s superiority was readily apparent. Some Indian adults were displeased because the younger generation was critically viewing tribal life and their elders. Most participants were courteous but silent in class. The less than excited response made some of the students uncomfortable, and some reacted to this by retreating in the face of adult criticism. The more articulate and well-prepared students were able to hold their ground and confront participants. All student teachers intimated that the adults were so convinced of their wealth of knowledge about Indian life and education that they were unable to hear out Indian teenagers.

Despite ambivalent participant reactions, the majority of the participants were far more receptive to the use of students as teachers than they had been at the workshop’s outset. They left the workshop feeling much more positive about Indian students. A stereotypical Indian student is not too bright, very quiet, passive and not at all independent in his actions in a group. A semantic differential test administered to the participants at the beginning and end of the workshop indicated that there was a significant shift in the educators’ opinions of Indian students. At the end of the workshop, they felt Indian students were faster (which could be interpreted as more intelligent), more active and more independent than they had previously thought.

A negative stereotype was broken with the help of a group of Indian students, above average verbally and intellectually, but not a wholly atypical group of teenagers. They provided a new student model for the educators. Despite the tension and inadequacy that students often felt, and some negative participant reactions, the students lived up to the confidence shown in them.

On a questionnaire administered at the end of the workshop, nearly 79 percent of the participants felt "that using Indian students as teachers was the most effective way to learn about staff student roles and relationships." Included in this group of positive respondees are a large number of Indian adults who reacted negatively to discussions of tribal and home life by the students.

A greater feeling of empathy for Indian children learning English developed among many participants, and accounted for part of the positive reaction to the students. Respect for young people operating maturely in an adult situation accounts for other warm feelings toward the junior staff. Subjective explorations of Indian life produced most negative feelings, because they seemed to attack what the participants felt were already areas of their competence.

The Indian student group that performed so effectively at the workshop had unique resources to offer a largely non-Indian group of educators. Most of the students could speak a tribal language, with varying degrees of skill. All had home and school experiences which underlined the difficulties of reconciling Indian traditions with the demands of the white man’s world. With training, they were able to make unique inputs to an in-service course that emphasized cross-cultural communication.

Similar courses could be developed with student populations selected from other minority groups, particularly Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans. The language learning exercises could help teachers experience student problems, rather than talk about them.

There is a slightly exotic element to this course when applied to minority groups. This should not be the sole reason for using it in teacher education. Young people are an articulate and critical group today, often anxious for an opportunity to honestly communicate with their elders. Those who drop out mentally and physically from education sometimes express frustration over the inability of teachers to talk with and listen to students.

Educators at workshops could listen when disciplined by the demands of learning esoteric Indian languages. They were momentarily spellbound by a dynamic, emotionally consuming technique the students had mastered. Through that experience, participants did generate more empathy for the problems of Indian students.

The role reversal was weakest in the less structured portion of the course dealing with Indian culture. Here the students’ presentations did not produce any meaningful level of involvement and allowed far too much room for participant apathy. This suggests that future programs should deal with the same material in more tightly structured frames and be more directly challenging to the participants. Role playing, simulation and game exercises could be used to obtain greater participant involvement.

Educators find it very difficult to hear and exchange ideas with young people. The workshop experience underlined this fact. The older workshop staff made a conscious effort to create an environment where two generations began to communicate and interact. No such effort was really made by the majority of the workshop participants.

At a time when much student protest leads to violence, it seems important for educators to develop a more sensitive listening faculty. With supportive adult guidance, high school students can easily learn to teach teachers. Thirty Indian high school students demonstrated this by their work. What is needed next is a better method for training their teachers to listen.

1. The training emphasized by example the limited amount of material that the students could expect to present in their six language lessons. Traditional greetings, methods for correctly introducing self, leave taking, forming simple questions and identifying objects were suggested parts of these lessons. Emphasis was also placed on pronunciation, intonation and generally correct imitation of the language instructor. The course trainer also introduced humor in the form of songs and jokes which the students could use in their own lesson, to ease participant tension. Of particular importance was the physical behavior of the instructor which became a model for all the language teachers. The trainer’s effective use of his hands, his stance and his movement in front of the class were all in evidence in most of the Indian language classes during the workshop.

2. While there was some skepticism about the presentations during the workshop, most participants were respectful listeners. Only a few contentious educators made life difficult for teachers.