Volume 7 Number 1
October 1967

Lynn R. Osborn

Lynn R. Osborn, Ed.D., is now Assistant Dean of Faculties for Research, The University of Kansas.
He formerly served as Director of Speech Education Research for the U of K’s Communication Research Center.
Dean Osborn served as director of the institute described in this article.

JUNE 13, 1966, marked the opening day of a new and unique educational experience for 24 junior high school and high school speech teachers on the campus of the University of Kansas, at Lawrence. The teachers comprised a unique group as each was from a school where the enrollment was composed of 50 percent or more pupils of American Indian ancestry. They had been selected from applicants across the country as participants in the first NDEA Institute for Advanced Study for Secondary Teachers of Speech to American Indian Pupils, and came from Alaska, Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Wyoming.

The institute was indeed a "cooperative experiment"—sponsored jointly by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the University of Kansas and funded by a grant from the U.S. Office of Education under Title XI of the National Defense Education Act, as amended. The director and instructional staff were drawn from the graduate faculty of the Speech and Drama Department of the University of Kansas, while those responsible for the conduct of the demonstration class were provided by the BIA’s Division of Education. The 25 Indian pupils who made up the demonstration class were housed and fed at Haskell Institute in Lawrence during the time the institute was in session.

To be eligible for participation in the institute, an applicant had to:

Those teachers finally selected as participants represented 16 federal (BIA), four public, and two parochial (Catholic and Church of the Nazerene) schools in the nine states already mentioned. Sixteen men and eight women were in the group of 24 chosen to attend the institute.

The first week was given over primarily to the orientation of the participants to the program of the institute and to acquainting them with the campus and community. A series of lectures and discussions during this time dealt with three major areas: learning problems of the disadvantaged American Indian child, peculiar difficulties faced in the teaching of spoken English to the Indian, and the nature of graduate study in speech communication. Several guided tours helped familiarize the teachers with the facilities available to them on the campuses of the University of Kansas and Haskell Institute and in the community of Lawrence.

The focus of the second, third, fourth, and fifth weeks of the institute was the course "Problems in Speech Instruction for Secondary Teachers of American Indians." One week was devoted to each of four major topics—Interpersonal Communication, Group and Organizational Communication, Public Address, and Argumentation. Following a daily lecture, the participants were transported to Haskell Institute by bus for work with the demonstration class and a workshop session led by the BIA specialists instructing the Indian pupils in the class. Content and method were well-coordinated due to the close cooperation and liaison between the lecturers and those conducting the demonstration periods with the Indian children.

During the course of the institute, each participant, under the guidance of a member of the instructional staff, selected and carried out a special project related to some phase of his or her responsibility as a teacher of speech to the Indian. The following titles are representative of the subjects selected for investigation by the teachers:

A series of guest lecturers spoke at special dinner meetings of the group and provided valuable additional insights and perspectives on various problems experienced by the Indian in his efforts to communicate effectively in spoken English.

The sixth and final week of the institute consisted of final examinations, a series of colloquia wherein each participant presented a report to the group on his or her special project, evaluation of the program by both participants and staff, and a final banquet at which certificates were presented to each teacher. The honored guest and featured speaker at the closing session was the Deputy Assistant Commissioner of Indian Affairs for Education, Mr. Madison Coombs.

Morale was excellent throughout the six-week session, as was the rapport between staff and participants. An unexpected, but highly beneficial, "fringe benefit" of the institute was the greater degree of understanding which developed among the representatives of the federal schools for the programs and problems of their colleagues in public and parochial schools—and vice versa.

Judging from all available reactions, the "cooperative experiment" was a success. Plans presently are under way for a similar joint effort during the summer of 1968.

Lynn R. Osborn

American Indian High School students display varying degrees of fluency in spoken American English. While the Indian student may have no difficulty communicating with other members of his native community, he usually is unable to communicate effectively with members of the non-Indian world. Whether bilingual or not, when compared with his non-Indian peers, he is likely to display communication deficiencies. Members of the dominant society perceive these deficiencies to be: shyness, lack of fluency, and inability to speak directly and forcefully.

These handicaps are seen as obstacles which the American Indian student must surmount if he is to take his rightful place in the mainstream of American society. If we, act on the premise that the American Indian student wishes to enter the dominant culture—that his school attendance at the secondary level represents a commitment to participate in the affairs of the larger society—then it is the educator’s responsibility to provide those skills, particularly in the area of language and communication, which will help the student to assume a productive role in today’s world.

The communication problems which the Indian student displays are symptomatic of a larger problem—that of cultural dislocation. The teacher of speech communication to Indians must know from whence his students have come, if he is to help them to decide where they are going. He must recognize that structural and functional language habits firmly established in childhood are not easily changed.

A student who comes from a culture which is cooperative rather than competitive, which discourages dissent, and which reinforces reticence, cannot quickly adapt to a competitive, argumentative, and highly verbal world without running the risk of severe personality disorientation. The Indian student in transition is likely to experience profound feelings of guilt as each additional year of education further estranges him from his home and heritage. Compounding these guilt feelings are those of inadequacy and inferiority reinforced by real or imagined discrimination by members of the society which he is entering. Sadly, the Indian student often comes to feel that be must choose to be either "white" or "Indian." The recognition that one need not "sell out" in order to succeed can be built only by affording the student a deeper appreciation of his original culture and a better understanding of his adopted one.

Whereas the task of the typical American high school is that of enculturation—helping the younger members of the dominant society to become mature, responsible, and productive members of their culture—the high school in the predominantly Indian community has the additional task of acculturation: assisting the youth of a traditional, conservative culture to adapt to and become a viable part of the larger society, while still retaining the valuable features of the original one. Although high schools of both types teach basically the same subject matter, their methods and procedures must, necessarily, be different.

As an educator with the special task of acculturation, each Indian teacher must deal with the special problems his students display, regardless of his subject matter area. The teacher of speech communication, however, because his concern cuts across all subject matter boundaries, is in an ideal position to aid the Indian student in his problems of adjustment. Since he recognizes that speech reflects personality-that effective communication cannot exist without mutual understanding and self-respect—he can assess more easily the effectiveness of the student’s educational development. As a speech communication teacher, there are special skills and concepts which he can best teach in a class (or classes) devoted to speaking and listening in a manner such as that generally outlined below.

Communication and the causes of breakdown (Speaking and listening)

Differences and similarities between the student’s original language and English in structure and function.

Representative uses of spoken language: to inform, describe, persuade, convince, actuate and entertain, etc.

Representative forms of the speaking-listening process: conversation discussion, symposium, debate, platform performance, etc.

Levels of spoken language: formal, informal, colloquial.

Approaches to spoken language: semantic, phonetic, aesthetic.

The first concern of the speech communication teacher should be to broaden the Indian student’s conceptual knowledge of English by affording him a wide variety of enriching experiences:

If carefully planned, these direct experiences can provide the student with valuable insights into the larger society in addition to providing source materials for classroom discussion and (ultimately) argument. Classroom speech activities should begin with the simple and work toward the complex. Group discussion, the least threatening form, should precede those activities which require more individual poise and fluency (debate and platform address).

Because the Indian student comes from a culture in which argument and controversy are not socially acceptable behavior, he must gradually, but systematically, be shown that many problems in life require choices between conflicting alternatives—that healthy disagreement is not hostility and that acknowledging a mistake is not failure.

The Indian student then may be ready to defend a point of view. By carefully structuring the symposium form of discussion, the teacher can cause the argument to be joined in a manner not threatening to the participants. They may then be eased into the debate form—if the question is real and contains opposing arguments of equal weight.

The teacher must recognize that his students’ ultimate success as communicators will be measured in large part by their ability to communicate with members of the non-Indian culture. In the isolated reservation school, opportunities to meet and interact with members of this "mainstream" culture are not always possible. However, opportunities to visit non-Indian communities should be sought. The resource potential of the Indian student as an interpreter of Indian life and thought to interested members of the larger community should not be overlooked.

If the Indian student is successfully to make the cultural transition which history seems to tell us is inevitable, certain educational goals must be achieved. Development of sorely-needed communication skills in the Indian student cannot be the sole responsibility of the speech communication teacher. Opportunities for oral expression in all subject matter areas must be discovered and fully utilized. The speech communication specialist can render valuable assistance to the rest of a teaching staff by identifying these opportunities and, if necessary, demonstrating their language development potentials.

It is a certainty that if the Indian student is able to develop and grow in an atmosphere of mutual trust and respect where his dreams are encouraged, his opinions welcomed, and his mistakes forgiven, he will have, at least, a running start toward becoming an autonomous self-respecting individual capable of functioning productively in today’s world.