Volume 33 Number 3
May 1994

Daniel McLaughlin

Listen to one Navajo parent explain what her first experiences were like in school some 40 years ago. She is being interviewed by an Anglo teacher of first-grade Navajo children. Later, this teacher will transcribe the interview, analyze it with two dozen other Navajo and Anglo teachers in terms of what the parent said and how she said it, write fictional stories on the basis of this analysis, and publish all of the texts as a book for students and fellow teachers (see Note 1). In the interview, the Navajo woman describes how she had never left the reservation before attending boarding school at the age of seven. Her mother left her at the front of the school building in the care of dorm attendants. The young girl spoke no English.

The woman continued, describing in detail how those first years at boarding school were lived as if in a blurred dream, how she participated in a foster care program during her upper elementary school years, how she was enrolled in the Mormon Church's home placement program during junior and senior high, but how, when she was about to enter Brigham Young University, her parents demanded that she return home to the reservation, saying that if she went away this next time they feared that she would never come back, that they would never see her again (see Note 2). Toward the end of the interview, the Anglo teacher asked the Navajo woman what she learned from schooling off the reservation and from her parents' decision to cut off a career in higher education before it even began.

What does this text tell us about teaching Navajo and other American Indian and language minority children? I suggest it provides a window that looks onto the diagnostic and prescriptive categories that we have available for conceptualizing language minority schooling. I will argue that the methods employed by the Anglo teacher in conducting, analyzing, and producing the interview both operationalize critical notions of language and literacy instruction, as well as represent important possibilities for minority student empowerment. To develop this line of thinking, I will first distinguish critical theory from deficit, effectiveness, and cultural differences theories in terms of the diagnostic and prescriptive categories each set of notions provides. I will argue that critical theory offers the best possibilities of schooling for Navajo and other American Indian students. Next I will highlight curriculum structures that operationalize critical theory and critical literacy instruction. These structures come directly from the literature on experiential learning, process writing, and project-oriented teaching approaches. Finally, I will describe the kind of work that needs to be done with reservation-based teachers in order to make critical literacy program development possible on a classroom-by-classroom basis.

Any curriculum and program development involving Navajos and other American Indian students must begin with an analysis of the challenges that confront K-12 reservation-based teachers. These challenges are formidable. Of 30 ninth-grade American Indian students, for instance, 18 tend to graduate from high school, 11 go on to attend some form of higher education, and only 1 tends to emerge eventually with a four-year degree. Students who do graduate from high school tend to do so with academic skills on an eighth-grade level, far short of national norms and significantly below the tenth-grade benchmark deemed necessary for competing successfully in the job market. Beyond school, staggering rates of joblessness set minimal ceilings of opportunity. Alcoholism and other social pathologies follow, figuring prominently in the lives of many young people on Indian reservations.

Four main bodies of educational theory seek to explain this situation and direct policy and program development. Collectively, they constitute the world of theory from which teachers, administrators, school board members, parents, and tribal officials must choose in creating and implementing school programs. Table 1 provides an overview of the four trains of thought–deficit, effectiveness, cultural differences, and critical theories. Each outlines different diagnoses of minority student failure, focuses on different units of analysis, begins with different philosophical starting points, is grounded in different disciplines, comes with different assumptions about learning, and specifies different implications for policy and program development. Before turning to the specifics of critical literacy program development, I will elaborate the understandings summarized in the table.

Deficit theory locates the problem of school failure within the mind and background situation of the individual learner (see e.g., Bennett, 1986). Language minority children who do not fare well in school fail because of the impoverishing circumstances from which they come (Rodriquez, 1982). Take the example of the young child dropped off at the Indian boarding school in the interview we have just read. If this child were to fail at school, deficit thinking would view this person's lack of English and lack of mainstream cultural literacy as deficits that account in large part for her inabilities to read, write, and count. Other possible deficits include, hypothetically, the low socioeconomic status of the family, the high rates of joblessness, alcoholism, and abuse in this child's community, plus the lack of electricity, running water, and reading and writing material at home. All along, the focus of the analysis is on the individual. Categories for developing it derive from the presumably objective sorts of knowledge that we have available for organizing children in schools: concepts such as intelligence quotients, standardized test scores, grade levels, academic grades, special education labels, and so forth (see, e.g., Bennett, 1986; Finn, 1991; Hirsch, 1987; Ravitch, 1985; and Rodriquez, 1982, 1985).

The discipline that provides a framework for this line of thinking is educational psychology. In its late 1950's thinking–still predominate in present-day curriculum and teaching--educational psychology views learning as a mentalist, behaviorist process that occurs within the mind of the individual that allows one to sort, compare, contrast, and synthesize external experiences. Given these notions, the implications for policy and program development are to intervene with standard forms of language, literacy, and cultural knowledge–the earlier the better. From a deficit perspective, teachers should stress the acquisition of skills that are best organized according to cognitive complexity, mastered singly before moving ahead, and taught as lessons in and of themselves, with few if any references to the learner's direct experience. All along, the focus is on the individual, not on his or her world.

Under the guise of currently popular school restructuring approaches such as Effective Schools, Site-Based Management, Mastery Learning, Outcomes-Driven Decision Making, Outcomes-Based Education, and Total Quality Management, effectiveness theory focuses on school organization. Children not learning in school are not "broken" but appear that way due to poorly run schools, faulty organizational alignment with misguided bureaucratic mandates, or both. Drawn from organizational theory, the answer to the problem of academic failure is to restructure the school so that all of the children can learn. Common-sense categories that we use to organize everyday life in and out of the classroom, such as "what the world will look like in the future," "what skills we want our children to have," "best research knowledge about teaching and learning," and "what we want our students to be able to accomplish" serve to accomplish this end.

Key to effectiveness logic is the idea that all children can learn if given the proper organizational constraints and enough time to do so. Learning is seen as an independent variable, time as a dependent variable. Another key is that schools work best when the main actors in them–students, teachers, administrators, board members, parents, and community members–have meaningful say in what and how the students will learn, such that a unitary vision for individual and program success is developed, shared, and employed by all. In this way, effectiveness theory represents an explicit critique of vertical organizational strategies that employ top-down decision-making strategies. The idea is to develop horizontal organizational structures that allow all of the stakeholders in schools to ensure that all of the students attain collaboratively designed learning outcomes (see, e.g., Bloom, 1976; Darling-Hammond, 1992; Hunter & Russell, 1981; Lezotte & Levine, 1990; Slavin & Madden, 1989; Spady, 1988; Vickery, 1990).

Keeping in mind the 7-year-old Navajo child who enters school significantly behind her peers, effectiveness theory says that we need to employ the most up-to-date research about how to teach this child. For example, we should use cooperative learning, integrated thematic instruction, and experiential teaching approaches. At the same time we need to ensure that the school is designed to give her all of the time necessary to attain learning outcomes that have been engineered with input from teachers, parents, and community members.

Although the units of analysis for deficit and effectiveness theories are the individual and the organization respectively, the unit of analysis for cultural differences theory is the speaker-listener dyad. The focus is on what people say and do with one another. Theorists of this perspective claim that children not learning in school are not necessarily broken or inadequate as much as they appear that way because of constant miscommunication organized by different cultural and linguistic preferences for interaction (see, e.g., Barnhardt, 1977, 1982; Cazden, John, & Hymes, 1972; Dumont, 1972; Dumont & Wax, 1976; Erickson & Mohatt, 1982; Philips, 1983; van Ness, 1981; Wax, 1976).

For instance, the Navajo child of our interview who has never been to school may have very different preferences for interaction than ones held by an Anglo first-grade teacher. The child may have become accustomed at home to learn by patient observation, not to talk to adults in new situations unless spoken to, and to assume that people in positions of power and authority are meant to anticipate the needs of individuals in positions of dependence, like students. Such preferences conflict with norms for teacher-student interactions, in which it is more important to put one's best foot forward and be talkative for talk's sake than it is to let the teacher talk first, let her figure out the needs of the students, and control the topic and flow of conversation accordingly. When the teacher measures the child's home-like speech behaviors against classroom norms, figuring that intelligence equates with assertiveness, quickness, and volubility, possibilities for miscommunication develop and multiply.

Drawing from the study of language in culture and society, cultural differences theorists argue that learning happens in culturally dependent ways and manifests specific sets of competencies that may or may not overlap with ones expected by teachers and schools. Their answer to the problem of language minority student failure is to become knowledgeable of the different interactional preferences of the children, and to adjust curriculum and teaching methods accordingly.

Critical theorists approach language minority schooling in quite different ways than do deficit, effectiveness, and cultural differences adherents. They utilize a much larger frame of reference in analyzing what happens in schools. Rather than focus on the individual, the organization, or the speaker-listener dyad, they see school and classroom life as shaped by powerful economic and political structures that weave across all aspects of society, produce multiple versions of truth, delineate partial and provisional forms of agreement, and create arrangements in and out of schools that systematically give voice to some and deny it to others. They assume that, in teaching Navajo and other minority language students, we must take into account key aspects of culture and social structure as we create instructional programs and enact daily lessons. They also assume that key elements of culture and society–such as domination, social stratification, resistance, and empowerment–constitute, and are shaped by, everything that goes on in schools. In so doing, they politicize all aspects of language and culture (see, e.g., Apple, 1979, 1982, 1988; Bowles & Gintes, 1976; Dewey, 1938, 1963; Freire, 1973; Giroux, 1983, 1988; Shor, 1992; Tierney, 1992). Their struggle is to make the pedagogical more political, and the political more pedagogical (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1985).

Critical theorists recognize that minority language students succeed educationally to the extent that political processes in schools reverse those that legitimize the domination and disablement of members of the minority group as a whole. These processes are four-fold. First, the minority student's language must be incorporated into the process and content of schooling; second, community members must be involved collaboratively in making curricular and administrative decisions at school; third, instructional practices should encourage student-student dialogue in collaborative learning contexts that foster intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, motivation; and last, assessment should consist of procedures that locate the pathologies of minority student failure not within the mind of the individual learner, thereby legitimizing transmission models of instruction, but within larger contexts of unequal power relations between dominated and dominating groups in society (Cummins, 1986).

With these starting places, notions about teaching, learning, and curriculum become fundamentally different from those which derive from deficit, effectiveness, or cultural differences teaching approaches. Teaching becomes more than the impartation of pre-sequenced, disembedded knowledge. Teaching instead is designed to reinforce the cultural identities of the students and to integrate standard and vernacular varieties of cognitively complex language into all aspects of classroom life. Learning becomes more than a collection of concepts inside the learner's head. Learning instead is designed to happen between people. As a function of dialogue, learning consists of reciprocal-interactive-critical strategies that aim to build the learner up, not probe the student until requisite deficiencies are found. Curriculum changes, too. It becomes more than a sequence of decontextualized skills. Rather, it is designed to help the learner connect academic concepts to a problemized world.

As the classroom focus shifts from curriculum that is arbitrary to curriculum that scrutinizes problems immediate to the lives of the students, the teacher's role changes. The teacher becomes coach, an expert who can help the student solve problems. In the process, pedagogy becomes problem-solving, and curriculum becomes cultural politics, structured according to themes immediate to the lives of classroom participants. When explored as a medium that decodes what is powerful and problematic, language and literacy assume new meaning. With the power of understanding, students can use what they know not only to make gains in school but also to understand and act upon the world.

The need for understanding the complexities of reservation life in critical terms, I believe, is demonstrated in the portion of the interview text that we read at the beginning of this article. Throughout her dealings in Anglo-American schools, from her earliest experiences onward, the young learner in the interview is taken from, imposed upon, restricted, and denied. School and church authorities assume that they know what is best for her, as must her parents, who decide to "give their daughter up for herself" only because they see that if they want to provide opportunities for her then they have no other choice.

If we ask, "What's going on here?," and the unit of analysis is the individual, the organization, or the speaker-listener dyad, we locate the need for "giving up one's child" within the child and her family, and we seek curricular accommodations and remedies that aim to replace what the child brings to school with knowledge and skills valued by the dominant society. If, however, we ask the same question, "What's going on?," and our unit of analysis is the social scene–the cultural context–in which actions and beliefs take place, then an understanding of the act of giving up one's child is quite different, as are understandings of language, literacy, learning, and curriculum. If we assume that the pathology of giving up one's child is as much the world's as it is any one individual's, then the approach to remediating the difficulty must go beyond blaming individuals for their apparent inadequacies. It must include more than skills. It will include more than a set of objectives and standard forms taught in isolation from the kind of politically charged contexts in which children not only are expected to respond, but to act; in which they not only solve problems, but pose them; and in which they have cognitively complex opportunities to use their language and culture resources to generate new knowledge.

The need, then, is to understand language and literacy as sets of concepts and practices that operate within a cultural context. Rather than view culture apolitically, as a functional expression of society or as a set of mentalist imperatives, the need is to see culture–indeed, the Navajo parent's and child's situation–in terms of the individual's interactions with dominant truths and power relations in society. Consequently, the meanings of language and literacy depend upon social institutions and ideologies that structure forms, functions, and topics of communication. It also follows that curricula constitute, and are constrained by, key aspects of social structure, such as domination, stratification, and empowerment. This brings us to developing school programs that seek to transform historical power relations by placing students in new contexts in which they are able to use their voice and their choice, their agency, to question, critique, engage in dialogue, create, and take meaningful action.

The difficulty with critical instructional approaches is that creating an entire school program that incorporates the students' home language, structures meaningful parental and community involvement, institutes reciprocal-interactive teaching, and assesses the children in advocacy-oriented ways is very difficult. Any single facet of this work, much less several or all of them, can and will be appropriated at every turn by all manner of colonizing forms of power and legitimacy. The good news, however, is that teachers, even working individually and alone as they often must, can institute change. They can do so by utilizing important curriculum and instructional structures that process literacy and project-oriented approaches provide.

From these approaches comes the formulation C=P+A, short for "curriculum consisting of products for meaningful audiences." The idea here is to have the children do, make, create, publish, and perform for audiences whom the students truly aim to serve. From critical theory comes the added notion of having the children follow the basic steps of the writing process–that is, to draft, conference, revise, and publish narratives–all the while measuring these texts against themes that are generic to critical understandings of the world. Culture, race, class, and gender have meaning as they are interpreted and acted upon by others. Those actions can create unfairnesses in the world that we must scrutinize and struggle to transform.

Having teachers follow these same curriculum and teaching strategies was the logic behind the development of a bilingual language arts program for a K-6 school in an isolated reservation community. There, some two dozen Anglo and Navajo educators utilized the curriculum structures just discussed to produce a book that included: (1) an in-class interview on "What Teachers Need to Know About Navajo Kids to Teach Them Well," (2) out-of-class interviews on "My Most Powerful Experience in Schools," and (3) fictional texts linked thematically to the in-class and out-of-class interviews (from which the interview with the Navajo woman about her first days at boarding school derives). By analyzing this particular teacher-produced text and other personal narratives like them, Anglo and Navajo teachers began seeing how the organization of cultural beliefs and social structures that generalize across the interviews and stories filter into the content and process of schooling in present-day Navajo settings. They asked, "Are my assumptions about teaching, learning, and curriculum contributing to the domination and subordination of the students and their local communities? Am I replicating the impositions of the Navajo woman's dorm aides, teachers, or foster parents?"

As a result, some of the teachers took meaningful steps toward the development of instructional practices that work from critical notions of knowledge, culture, power, and voice. Some employed the methods used to produce their interviews and stories to have their students produce personal histories and critically oriented fictional and non-fictional texts. Several began outlining a comprehensive K-6 language arts program that builds onto, rather than "fixes" the native language and Indian English-speaking abilities of the Navajo children, and that proceeds from a sociolinguistic analysis of the forms and functions for speaking, reading, and writing in the community. Others completely revised normative skills-oriented, basal-bound teaching approaches to weave storytelling, interviewing, story-writing, and publishing across integrated portions of the K-6 curriculum. Related projects also occurred with other groups of Navajo teachers from across the Navajo Nation, who have read selections from the teachers' book, analyzed the instructional methods used to produce the personal narratives, and begun to create alternate curriculum and teaching materials in the Navajo language for their own K-12 Navajo learners (see Note 3).

Table 2

Curriculum Structures that Operationalize the Logic of Critical Theory

(Adapted from Graves, 1989a and 1989b; Harste, Short, & Burke, 1988).

Often, the calls of critical theorists amount to obfuscating rhetoric which, in theorizing what is wrong with mainstream school practices without identifying what teachers and school administrators of subordinated groups can actually do, simply add to the problem. One important way to move beyond critique is for teachers and their students to produce school knowledge, to have them tell their own stories–to create school and personal histories that will be valued by others at the level of school and community. Such narratives need to be more than simply taped and transcribed. They must be collected, produced, and measured against themes generic to critical studies of schooling: culture, race, class, gender, power, and voice. They must also be measured in ways that make sense to those with most to win and lose from their production, so that we weave the texts into what the children already know and need to understand; so that schooling enables teachers and their students to contest and change, rather than serve and perpetuate, systems of silencing, exploitation, and harm; and so that we never must "give the children up for them."