Richard Fiordo

The Four Worlds Development Project was conceived in Lethbridge, Alberta in 1982 and born in 1984. Since then, it has received "considerable international attention and acclaim for its articulation of the dynamic role culture plays in human development." It is a research and development project of the University of Lethbridge aimed at eliminating alcohol and drug abuse in Canadian Native communities by the year 2000 (Bopp & Bopp, 1984a:105; Bopp, Bopp, & Lane, 1984e:10). The ultimate goal of the Four Worlds Development Project involves the rediscovery of traditional Native cultural values that preserve and enhance life. In order for Native people to direct their own healing and development, a great learning enterprise is required from the cradle to the grave that involves the integrative healing of individuals and community, through a wholistic curriculum (Bopp, Bopp, & Lane, 1984a:13-15). Scholarship on this project includes Bopp and Bopp’s (1984a & 1984b) overviews and Fiordo’s (In Press) semiotic study which treats The Four Worlds Development Project as a contemporary propagation of ancient and universal Native wisdom.

The Four Worlds Development Project (or simply, The Project or the FWDP) combines the concerted wisdom of Native elders, spiritual leaders, and professionals. It includes numerous contributors (Bopp & Bopp, 1984b:4). The Project endorses and promotes healing, health, and growth: that is, good medicine. Medicine which presumably "healing or other benign properties" is spoken of as good medicine and that which presumably has "evil influences on things" is spoken of as bad medicine (Stone, 1978:5-6). The Project focuses on the joys resulting from the use of good medicine or the traditional Native wholistic way (Bopp, Bopp, & Lane, 1984b) and the pains resulting from the use of bad medicine or alcohol and drug abuse (Bopp, Bopp, & Lane, 1984i). The wholistic perspective of the FWDP involves the physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, social, and cultural (Bopp et al., 1984a).

The wholistic curriculum of the FWDP endorses traditional Native values of survival and growth. The FWDP holds that students learn aversively in school in the hidden curriculum that "what is worth knowing is that which is taught in academic institutions." Traditional wisdom is "devalued as primitive." While traditional teachings (such as ceremonies, bush survival skills, stories, and legends) occur outside of school and should serve as a significant context and experience, they instead receive incidental and insignificant treatment (Bopp et al., 1984c:33-36).

In reviewing results from a study on differences in perceptions and assumptions between Native and non-Native people, Douglas (1987:181-183) notes that skimpy knowledge of Native people contributes to non-Native people having "a lack of sensitivity and respect for Native people." Non-Native educators spend time fruitlessly determining what is best for Native people rather than fruitfully dispelling their ignorance about Native people. Communication between Natives and non-Natives through educational and social service agencies is feeble. Native people develop their own most relevant programs. The majority of non-Natives have negative attitudes toward Native people. Such attitudes derive from ignorance, prejudice, and ethnocentrism—resulting in discrimination, intolerance, and disrespect toward Natives. On the uplifting side, while Native people are currently pursuing spiritual and cultural revitalization, non-Natives are showing supportive interests (182).

The FWDP encourages non-Natives to learn about traditional Native ways through participation, readings, lectures, seminars, and workshops (see Note 1). The FWDP strives to improve understanding within Native societies and between Natives and non-Natives (Bopp, Bopp, & Lane, 1984b & 1984c).

Coinciding with the aims of the FWDP, my focus is on teaching the great learning enterprise of the FWDP to non-Native elementary and secondary students as well as Native elementary and secondary students untutored in the higher heritage of Native traditions. To assume Native students have the wisdom propagated by the FWDP is unwarranted, especially in light of the fact that the Project is a response to the alcohol and drug problems on Reserves—evils the FWDP wishes to eradicate by the year 2000. While Native and non-Native students may benefit from a curriculum in Native studies from the FWDP, I dwell on the FWDP as a curriculum for non-Native students. The assumption will be that the Native studies curriculum derived from the FWDP would benefit students most in a wholistic setting but would still benefit students within the confines of a conventional classroom.

The great learning enterprise of the FWDP, given the known learning styles of Natives and non-Natives in classrooms, would benefit both. Each Native and non-Native class must be examined in order to gauge the relative differences between the groups. Even though the research demonstrates merely tentative conclusions, the research may serve useful hueristic purposes for constructing classroom curriculum in Native Studies for non-Native as well as Native students at the elementary and secondary school levels. Pepper and Henry (1986:54-56) endorse a wholistic approach to Native learning styles that is consistent with the FWDP (Bopp et al., 1984b; Bopp & Bopp, 1984b) and applies to differences in Native versus non-Native learning modes. Since there is "no absolute Indian behavioral learning style," teachers of Natives must "guard against stereotyping Indian learning style" (Pepper & Henry, 1986:58).

In order to avoid stereotyping of Native students as neuroanatomically or neuropsychologically different from non-Native, Native students should be given different learning styles (Pepper & Henry, 1986:59). Stereotyping Natives as having right-brain dominance must now be thought of as "myth rather than a scientifically valid fact" (Chrisjohn & Peters, 1986:62). Teachers of Native students should employ progressive changes in learning modes aiming ultimately at diversification of learning modes. Educators should teach Native students in a style in which they are accustomed, when presenting new information. Once the new information is familiar to the students, presentation may be given in a different way. For example, present lessons, exercises, and tests in the Native students’ learning style about 65% of the time and in a different manner about 35% of the time to encourage growth and adaptation while diversifying the teaching strategies for different subject areas (Pepper & Henry, 1986:60). The aim of the diversified teaching and learning modes is to enrich Native and non-Native students rather than penalize either for not being accustomed to the educational mode of the other.

Given the educational preferences of Native students, teachers may utilize the following principles. First, give Native students group projects over oral questions and answers. Second, give Native students the whole before analyzing it into parts. Third, base their learning exercises on experience. Fourth, use peer tutoring and cross-age teaching. Fifth, use role-playing and educational theatre. Sixth, deliver novel material to Native students in a visual and spatial mode over a verbal mode. Seventh, use metaphorical over lexical definitions to impart word meanings. And, eighth, whenever appropriate to the goal of the lesson, use instructional games, especially games that the Native students in the class design (58 & 59).

In short, these teaching principles avoid questioning strategies with Native students. Native elementary students may benefit most from group problem solving, while secondary students may benefit most from individual assignments. The question and answer learning format should be delayed with Native students (57). Fiordo (1986) found a dialogue form of the question and answer learning format had positive, although limited, instructional utility with university level students when compared with the traditional monologue method of lectures. His findings support the conclusion that Native children "consider question-asking as an interactive strategy found in and reserved for schools" (Pepper & Henry, 1986:57-58).

Curricular history in Canadian education, for the most part, punishes the Native student for not having the learning mode of the non-Native. The FWIDP, when applied to Native Studies for non-Natives, need not be guilty of the same offense of the schools of the dominant society. Johnson (1977) holds that curriculum prescribes and anticipates the "results of instruction." Once an intended learning outcome is chosen, some content and activities are favored over others. Relevant to the FWDP, Johnson claims the only possible source of the intended learning outcomes is "the total available culture" of organized as well as unorganized knowledge (1977:6-8). Admittedly, however, with culture as a source, some content is excluded because it cannot be taught, found, or acquired. Yet, what is teachable and available abounds. Since no single curriculum can encompass all that is available and teachable, based on appropriate criteria, selection is necessary. The evaluation of the curriculum may justly involve comparing "actual learning outcomes with the intended learning outcomes" (11). If the measures for the evaluation of the cognitive, affective, or psychomotor outcomes are highly reliable and valid, the evaluation of the curricular outcomes may be considered sound and trustworthy (Violato & Black, 1982).

The FWDP might be viewed as a Native instance of schooling in values, the schooling being "explicitly designed to inculcate community norms" (Tomkins, 1986:349): in this case, those norms of the Native community’s wisdom teachings as synthesized by elders, spiritual leaders, and professionals. Fears that schooling with a systematic and systemic bias may foster intolerance of others is offset by two important findings. Ericksons study in British Columbia of students in independent schools found students far less prejudiced toward others than their public school counterparts. Cooper’s study in Newfoundland of denominational schools found students were neither religiously intolerant nor socially divisive (351). The FWDP, as a Native bias in a Native studies curriculum, might serve likewise to contribute to multicultural tolerance. Although not conclusive, recent reports from communities employing the FWIDP perspective have been favorable. Also, a recent review of the success of the FWDP by elders, spiritual leaders, and professionals supports its headway to date (see Note 2).

Since FWDP presents the light and dark sides of the Native condition in Canada, with the light side being greater than the dark side, my application of the FWDP to a curriculum for elementary and secondary students will reflect similar ratios of hope to despair. The curriculum plan assumes troubled conditions for Native life in light of hopeful conditions. As the FWDP writers assert, "Native people are discovering that culture is a living thing and like all living things, it moves and changes and grows." Although in the past, change resulted largely from "influences from outside the Native communities," today "Native people from all over North America are realizing that they must step into the driver’s seat of their own cultural evolution." Human potential "must be unlocked from inside the Native communities by the Native people themselves." This great learning enterprise constitutes "the means by which a new vision of human possibility is being actualized in Native communities" (Bopp, Bopp, & Lane, 1984a:13 & 15).

Self-determination is replacing learned helplessness. A liberating vision is replacing a restrictive one (Bopp, Bopp, & Lane, 1984b) through core groups with unified visions and commitment to transforming Native life (Bopp, Bopp, & Lane, 1984h:iii) from fragmentation to integration (Bopp et al., 1984e:12). To reduce the error toward romanticizing Native people, the teacher’s guides available through the Project encourage the improvement of existing materials. Hastings and Vaillaincourt (1984), authors of one of the guides, welcome teachers to make "comments, suggestions and additions" because the Project’s "curriculum will only be useful as long as it lives and grows" (13).

The teaching guides for the Project offer the following strategic advice to teachers. To succeed in teaching students from the curricular perspective of the FWDP, teachers must be willing to transform themselves into role models. Before beginning with the materials of the FWDP, teachers would be wise to (1) "reflect seriously on their own lives," (2) "consider their own growing up years," (3) consider "their own mistakes," (4) consider "their own hopes for themselves," and (5) reflect on the "changes they have experienced" (Bopp et al., 1984b:7). Teachers must set the pace for their students: practice what they preach and practice teach. The wholistic lifestyle of teachers as models of "intelligence guided by wisdom" (22) will inspire students to "find the courage to feel deeply about what they will experience." Only if students see such courageous modeling on many levels—physical, social, psychological, and spiritual—by their teachers will students be brave enough to reach beyond their limits. Teachers must also know when to summon helpers in advancing this great learning enterprise: for example, other staff members, elders, Native leaders, and Native professionals (7).

The teaching strategies stress doing, observing, and imitating with discussion, questioning, and lecturing playing supporting rather than leading roles. Showing is the main strategic theme and telling the subordinate one. The strategies include teaching concepts and symbols through lecture and discussion in part: primarily, though, through arts, crafts, songs, music, poems, stories, paintings, colorings, drawings, dances, skits, prayers, videos, audios, movies, sayings, ceremonies, games, sports, field visits, elder visitations, and other experiential vehicles of instruction (5).

The rest of this paper will emphasize tactics for teaching Native students lacking wisdom in their higher heritage—and this group is sizable (see Note 3)--as well as non-Native students lacking wisdom in Native heritage generally. The instructional tactics are selected primarily from two FWDP sources: (1) The Sacred Tree: Teacher’s Guide (1984) and Walking with Grandfather and Great Wolf and Little Mouse Sister: Teacher’s Guide (1984). Hopefully, the teaching tactics suggested here will contribute to a long-range goal of the FWDP: namely, a "transformation of the context within which human beings live out their lives" (Bopp & Bopp, 1984b:26).

One pedagogical pattern the Project advances takes concepts pertinent to the FWDP, puts them into appropriate cultural symbols, and then graphically illustrates the concept through a symbol. A sample of such concept development will follow the long FWDP list. Only four will be used for illustration: the wheel, vision, wholeness, and spiritual path. Due to space limitations, only a picture of the Medicine Wheel will be presented.

The concept of the four worlds gets symbolized through the ancient medicine wheel and is graphically illustrated in a variety of ways. The medicine wheel serves as a "metaphoric tool for explaining the various dimensions of human processes and their relationships with each other." There are four points on the medicine wheel, and they represent a variety of components: North, South, East, and West; mineral, vegetable, animal, and human; physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual; and, "many more sets of four that fit within this analytical framework" (12-13).

Vision is another concept that stands for our potential derived from elders and the ancient teachings. It is graphically illustrated in a funnel graphic. The vision of "what we can become is like a strong magnet pulling us toward it" (Bopp et al., 1984b:31). This graphic also illustrates the concept of volition which is "a primary force in developing all of our human potentialities," since it helps us make and execute decisions. It is placed at the center of the medicine wheel and continues as a line leading to the attainment of the vision (Bopp et al., 1984a:15).

Wholeness is another concept referring to the interconnectedness and interrelatedness of all things as well as the principle that no one part is the center of the universe. To achieve harmony with the rest of the universe, "each part must give up considering itself the center" (Bopp et al., 1984b: 15). This concept is symbolized in a graphic of a medicine wheel containing a baby, otter, and owl. The final one is the spiritual path of moderation and balance symbolized as the Good Red Road (Bopp et al., 1984a:8) and graphically illustrated as a fork in the road—one leading to natural harmony and the other to dereliction and devastation.

The medicine wheel graphic can be discussed from the text The Sacred Tree. It can be drawn by the teacher or students on paper or on overhead projector, photocopied and colored, and made into a transparency (Bopp et al., 1984b: 15). It may even be made into a shield using canvas, willow, and cord as well as being painted and decorated to symbolize their favored concepts - e.g., the mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of human nature (Bopp et al., 1984b: 46-47). The teacher may also use a round mirror with a frame and some dark tape forming a cross on the mirror itself. This is a most appropriate way to instruct students that "just as a mirror can be used to see things not normally visible, the medicine wheel can be used to help us see or understand things we can’t quite see or understand because they are ideas and not physical objects" (15).

Teachers could use each quadrant of the medicine wheel to list various items they think are necessary to satisfy the mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of human nature. Questions may be used to suggest items when students fail to recognize them. Since the spiritual may be the most difficult to students, it should be treated last. Each area can utilize actual people or fictional ones who embody an imbalance—for instance, too much of the physical aspect and too little of the spiritual as well as any other imbalanced combination. A person or character embodying a wholistic balance of these aspects may then be elicited or suggested, analyzed according to each quadrant, and then a picture or sketch of this person placed inside the medicine wheel to remind the class of a real or fictional hero. Students can also be asked to insert their favorite television, toy, film, game, and advertisement characters into one or more of the quadrants to show which aspects the characters stress. Class discussion may be conducted with students seated in a circle symbolizing the medicine wheel.

Students might also be asked to consider the wholistic standard of the balanced medicine wheel in judging the values, people, institutions, practices, and policies of their communities. Teachers may ask students to consider how imbalances in the wheel contribute in their communities to solvent abuse and vice-versa. Students may be asked to paint a picture or create a play portraying problems resulting from imbalance. They can then be requested to paint a picture or create a play portraying an ideal community that is balanced (Bopp et al., 1984b:16-17).

The vision graphic points to a clear picture of what one can become. A vision gives potentiality a goal—personal or cultural (Bopp et al., 1984a: 15; 1984b: 19). Similar procedures for presenting the graphic can be followed here as with the medicine wheel. An elder’s story (or a teacher’s) about a vision pursued would be most beneficial here in educating the students about the nature and function of the vision. Some students may have had a vision already. If this is so, invite them to sketch or narrate a story about the experience. The video tape Great Wolf and Little Mouse Sister, available from the FWDP, would be an excellent instructional source as well.

The wholeness graphic, like the others, can be presented artistically. Then, it can be discussed in terms of ecology and integrity: that is, the farther we move from Mother Nature, the greater is our alienation. The video tape, Walking with Grandfather, can be viewed and discussed in relation to the ecological interconnectedness of all beings and things. Students may draw a web of nature. This would involve listing names such as lake, otter, river, snake, and showing how they connect. They can also play a game where the teacher passes four boxes around or a medicine wheel with depth as well as circumference with four compartments or concentric circles. Each quadrant or concentric circle will have a name for the four worlds of existence: mineral, plant, animal, and human. Students can be put in small groups to conjure up names for each category. Following this, they can put the names of various items relevant to each category in the proper place. For example, in the animal section would go names such as squirrels, bears, coyotes, buffaloes, and so on (25-26).

Students can be requested to tell or sketch a nature story as well. It should emphasize a respect learned or earned for nature. Advertisements or commercials could be produced to demonstrate this theme as well. A fine example of such an effort is a commercial opposing pollution that airs periodically. It is of a Native man canoeing down a clean river that turns into a dirty one. He sheds a tear at the contamination of this waterway of mother nature. When it can be made available to them, students can be asked to analyze such a commercial.

The final graphic applicable to a native studies curriculum is the Good Red Road or the traditional spiritual way of Native people. Students should definitely color this graphic and analyze its either/or value implication, given the context of Reserve life and Native life in general. Students must feel the personal danger rather than merely intellectualize it. Stories of members of their community or family can be told discretely and with a student’s permission from appropriate people as well as a student’s willingness and ability to handle such serious matters. The stories may be one of those who took the Good Red Path after taking the trail of solvent abuse, of those who died on the trail of solvent abuse, of the families affected by those on the solvent abuse trail, and of those who might have found and stayed on the Good Red Path without ever taking the other.

Because of the conflict and choice prevailing in the concept of this graphic, skits would serve the didactic purpose well. A room can be designed by forming aisles into a fork. One may lead outside to a refreshing natural setting, while the other leads to a boiler room or toilet. Several students can play the part of the Native person facing a crisis and having these two choices. Students can be put on both paths beckoning the bewildered sojourner, dressed and holding props and acting in a manner suitable to each calling. Several students take the Good Red Road and are shown being rewarded by the choice. At least one takes the solvent abuse trail and is shown being abused by that choice - abuse eventuating in death. One may start on either trail and reverse direction, thereby encountering the predicted joyous or painful consequences. For someone who hesitates at the fork in the road, drum music may be played live or on tape to focus the hesitant one on the Native spiritual way.

For those who do not succeed in the skit, the class can form a circle afterwards and offer a prayer in whatever manner is chosen. If elders are consulted and agree and if the students are willing, a symbolic object such as a feather or a pine branch may be passed around the circle to reunite its members with Mother Nature. Speeches may be given by members who so wish. A silent message should be equivalently respected (Bopp et al., 1984b:36-37). To emphasize the wisdom of the Good Red Road as the viable path for Native people to take in order to avoid devastation by solvent abuse, the video of Great Wolf and Little Mouse Sister should be shown or the script read aloud. The obstacles of Little Mouse Sister can be transformed into classroom obstacles (18) where students work toward turning into the Eagle as Little Mouse Sister finally does in the story. The transformation must occur only after overcoming classroom versions of playful distractions as the Otters, false promises like that of the Coyote, and egg-headedness and obstructionism like that of the Owl (Hastings & Vaillaincourt, 1984:13). Students can also use such media forms as a filmstrip, a slide-show, or a cartoon strip to portray their version of obstacles to be overcome on the Good Red Road (Bopp et al., 1984b: 12).

The graphic of the spiritual path symbolizes truths that have many Biblical parallels. One such passage is from The Psalms, Book 1, 1:1-6:

Bible passages may be utilized when appropriate.

Whether teachers present Four Worlds graphics to elementary or secondary students should determine the detail and severity of the content. Teachers are here advised to proceed with a care and wisdom born out of their understanding of local circumstances and people. When in doubt, teachers should consult Native elders or professionals before proceeding. Additional units can be taught from the FWDP materials. The affect of history on Native people today can serve as a source for several lessons (Bopp, Bopp, & Lane, 1984d). The vicious cycle of prejudice could function as another source of lessons (Bopp, Bopp, & Lane, 1984g). The Philosophy of the FWDP could operate as source for a multitude of lessons (Bopp & Bopp, 1984b). The role of the community in Native education and life would offer an abundance of content for additional lessons, especially on the connectedness of Native societies to the dominant society (Bopp, Bopp, & Lane, 1984b). Of course, a full unit on health education versus alcohol and drug abuse would be readily possible (Bopp, Bopp, & Lane, 1984i, 1984a, & 1984e). Another lesson would include the transforming power of a new vision and its impact on developing human potential (Bopp, Bopp, & Lane, 1984f & 1984h). An important unit on sharing beneficial innovations in Native communities could be easily designed (Bopp, Bopp, & Lane, 1984c). And, last, a methodology for evaluating the results of the FWDP as an educational program for Native studies would serve as a sound ground for several worthwhile lessons (Bopp et at., 1984c).

This paper has been an invitation to a great learning enterprise. Teachers of Native Studies have been invited to pass through the "doorway through which all must pass" to improve. For those interested, the doorway is always open and the path "will always be there" (Bopp et al., 1984a:30).

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