Volume 7 Number 3
May 1968

by Mrs. Anita Pfeiffer, Assistant Director for Educational Services

BEFORE outlining the academic program at Rough Rock, a brief sketch of the home and school background of the children is in order.

Of an enrollment of 317 children, there are 266 boarding and 51 day students. The majority of the day students are dependents of staff people, although there are a few day students who walk to school from their hogans each morning. The following description typically represents the homes of the Rough Rock area.

The child lives with his immediate family, parents, and siblings—as well as his extended family—which may mean grandparents, and the married sisters and their husbands and children. There may be several married sisters. Most of our children come from three- and sometimes four- or five-generation households.

There are 60 family groups in the community, which is not a cluster of homes in a village, but the population which trades regularly with the Rough Rock Trading Post. There is an average of six or seven people in a family nucleus, with an average of 16 people in the extended family group. There are more than 1,000 people in our school district.

Before the Rough Rock Demonstration School existed, most of the children attended a Bureau of Indian Affairs school at Many Farms, 17 miles east of the Rough Rock Trading Post. The primary children (through second grade) attended a small, two-classroom school adjacent to the local trading post.

Following second grade, these children were placed in a boarding school where they rarely saw their parents. They did not hear their own language—other than when it was spoken softly on the playground, in the dormitories, or when they went home, which might be two or three times a year. Some schools punished the children if they spoke their own language—on the assumption that children who were forbidden to speak their own language would learn to speak English better.

Since the children were removed from their families during the winter months, they missed a great deal of rich, native culture, including the legends and myths which are taught to Navaho children only during the winter months. The children and parents could not talk with each other about school and its activities because the parents weren’t involved in the learning process of the children. With an atmosphere which rejected their culture, language and parents, many Navaho children did not make rapid academic progress.

At Rough Rock Demonstration School, teachers and staff are committed to the belief that the best school is a community school under the direct control of the local people, i.e., the control of a school board elected by the community.

They are further committed and concerned with curricula designed for Navaho students.

There is concern for the psychological, emotional, and social development of the children as well as achieving the optimum in intellectual development. Students should be prepared to function in a bicultural setting, if this should be their choice in the future. Education must enable our Navaho students to acquire positive feelings about themselves and to establish a pride in their own culture and heritage. This can be accomplished by incorporating (into the curriculum) the reading and writing of the Navaho language and studies in Navaho social living. Primarily, each child must be seen as a total and uniquely integrated personality—a child who is constantly developing according to his own individual pattern.

In order to accomplish these goals it is necessary to employ the best possible teachers. They must consider the special needs of Navaho youngsters and provide the most effective instruction. This demands continual evaluation of methods and materials used, as well as innovating and preparing new or special materials as required by the experiences with the children.

Working with Navaho children requires special alertness to the emotional and psychological needs of the youngsters. Involving parents in the activities of the classrooms, dormitories, cafeteria, playground and the many extra-curricular affairs helps both child and parent to become better acquainted with the process of education. Thus they can build together the understanding needed to participate in an educational system which will open and expand the horizons for them both.

During the first year of the Rough Rock Demonstration School, like most elementary schools in the United States, children were classified by grades. The organization for elementary education was viewed in a time span and structured into seven separate grade units (including beginners) of equal length.

Children on the Navaho reservation enter the first grade when they are seven to 12 years old, after completing a year as beginners.

Traditionally, both school administrators and teachers have viewed the development of reading skill as a phenomenon that will occur soon after the child crosses the school’s magic threshold. This expectation frequently turns to disillusionment. Other expectations are anticipated from grade to grade. Failure by many children to meet these expectations causes frustration for teachers, and for the child it can only result in a loss of self-respect.

For over a decade we have known that in an average first grade there is a span of four years in pupil readiness to learn as suggested by mental age data. As children progress through the grades the span in readiness widens. Furthermore, the individual child does not progress in all areas at the same pace, i.e., he tends to spurt ahead more rapidly in some areas than in others.

Goodlad and Anderson in their book, The Nongraded Elementary School, states that a difference of one grade between a child’s general reading attainment and his arithmetic attainment at the end of the second grade may be extended to a three- or four-grade difference by the end of his fifth year in school. The "graded structure" organization may disguise or distort such realities but it cannot remove them, e.g., a fifth grade teacher, in spite of the label by grade level, is not a teacher of fifth grade children. At a given time he teaches third, fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, as far as the learner realities are concerned, even though all the pupils in his room may be labeled fifth graders.

We may not find that the children at Rough Rock exhibit all the characteristics of Goodlad and Anderson’s sample. In certain subject areas there may be a larger span, but the significance of this research points out the varied needs of children who are lumped together under grade levels.

Last spring the primary teachers discussed the existing program and talked of the possibilities for a better arrangement for meeting the needs of the Rough Rock children. These discussions led to meetings with Dr. Charles F. Malone and Dr. Richard E. Bullington of Arizona State University, Tempe, who served as consultants. At this time Martin Hoffman prepared the proposal which he presented to the local school board, which in turn discussed the merits of the Continuous Progress Plan and expressed their desire to include all the children under this new approach. Realization of the situation facing them and failure to find the satisfactory solution in the graded school program brought the total teaching staff together to investigate the possibilities of restructuring the entire school system. Openness and permissiveness at the administrative level, evaluation and investigation of the problem by faculty, and the supporting interest of the school board culminated in the trial proposal of the Continuous Progress Plan.

This plan is in essence an administrative style of organization which removes the designation of grades and the stigma of non-promotion, focusing importance on individualized instruction. Personal attention to interests and abilities are the basis for continuous progress towards specific attainment, while profiting simultaneously from group presentation. The school staff has initiated a change—a special kind of opportunity depending largely on the energy and creativeness of the total staff.

Children in the school range from six through 16 years of age. The curriculum includes art, science, mathematics, reading, social studies, physical education, library, and English (as a second language), subjects which other elementary schools have, as well as subjects which School Board members have directed to be included, which are: Navaho social living, Navaho language, home economics and industrial arts.

More than academic mastery, the Rough Rock faculty wants its children to become proud of their heritage as Navahos, confident, independent, forthright, with a positive sense of identity, eager to participate in Navaho and Anglo culture.

The aim of the school is to prevent students having the following experience:

Although educators are most interested in covering subject matter within a certain period of time, they are all consciously or unconsciously involved with the personality development of each student. At Rough Rock, the primary involvement is in the development of a positive self-image. According to Haan (see Note 1):

Last year, in a community survey, the parents of Rough Rock were asked if they wished their children to learn to read and write their own language. All but one parent so desired and the children were thrilled to know they would be allowed to do so.

Next fall we will be experimenting and, hopefully, demonstrating that the process of reading and writing in Navaho, rather than in a foreign language (English) will enable children to read and write faster in English.

The English language program begins with children in the pre-first grade ("beginners"). A daily language lesson and appealing special activities providing opportunities for the children to use their new language, finds the majority able to communicate fluently with native English-speaking people at the end of a year.

They have learned, systematically, to ask and answer a variety of useful questions. For example:

Each new lesson is structurally related to the lessons previously learned, and is designed to provide high utility in content.

A total of 136 lessons during the first-year program provides oral activities with meaning for young students, and skill in creating original sentences containing past, present, present continuous, and future tense in verbs; responses to who, what, where, which, how many, and yes-no questions; a large fund of nouns and verbs which they can substitute in question and sentence context, and correct use of the forms of be.

The traditional problem in many reservation schools of youngsters who rarely ask questions, respond only reluctantly with a "yes" or "no" to questions, whose English reflects Navaho syntax and is meaningful only to teachers of long experience with Navaho children, is largely non-existent at Rough Rock.

The contrast in the fluency of children before and after the English program had been in use for a year can be seen in the following samples recorded at the school.

Sample one: During an informal conversation with a third-grade child before enrollment at Rough Rock, two pages of speech similar to the following wererecorded:

Sample two: This ad lib dialog, all their own, unprompted by the teacher, or practiced beforehand, was recorded while two first graders were "playacting" with two large masks at the beginning of their second year at Rough Rock:

Monkey: I’m hungry. Do you have something to eat?

Farmer: What do you want?

Monkey: I want some hay.

Farmer: My cow won’t give you any hay.

Monkey: Do you have any eggs?

Farmer: My chickens are out of eggs. Where did you come from?

Monkey: I came from the zoo. Do you have a banana?

Farmer: No, but go see my wife. She has some.

Each classroom teacher is provided daily lesson plans, including behavioral objectives, errors to be alert for, specific procedures, and activities to create interest and meaning. While these follow a syntactically sequential program as outlined by Dr. Robert D. Wilson, University of California, Los Angeles, and linguistic consultant to Rough Rock, the specific plans are written at Rough Rock by Mrs. Virginia Hoffman, ESL Specialist, and encourage the students to improvise or create their own ideas and substitute vocabulary used in the classroom, dormitories, cafeteria, home and school.

Mrs. Hoffman also prepares transfer lessons. These are activity plans designed to give the children more familiarity with lesson materials as they learn English. "Madison Avenue campaigns" involving the total staff in and out of class are useful in helping children overcome typical Navaho errors in English usage of gender, intonation, pluralizations, etc.

The major objective of this ESL program is to give students the ability in language necessary to function in, not necessarily to convert to, the dominant American culture. The objective states, "There will be no attempt to persuade the student to prefer English over Navaho nor Navaho over English, but rather to see both as useful tools."

1. Haan, Aubrey, Elementary School Curriculum: Theory and Research. Boston Allyn and Bacon, Inc., 1962