NORTHWEST
EDUCATION
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FAIRBANKS, Alaska—It’s the first week of March and spring is still a far-off dream. For now, it’s 10 below zero, snow is packed hard on the roads, and the air feels like it could crack teeth. Outside a local diner, those grabbing a quick breakfast have left their cars running, the exhaust fumes whipping in the wind like dry ice. “Warming up a little out there, eh?” says an old man as he enters the diner. He’s grinning at a group of fellow retirees already tucked into a corner booth, but he means it. It’s just a normal day in Fairbanks.
Later that morning on the north end of town students begin to arrive at the Effie Kokrine Charter School. Like teens everywhere, most of these middle and high school students have not dressed for the weather. Thin hoodies, jeans, basketball shoes, and T-shirts far outnumber winter coats and warm gloves. Mention the weather and they shrug. “This is nothing, bro,” says one young man, who at least had the sense to wear a thick crewneck sweatshirt.
Like most of the students here, as he passes down the hallway, you can imagine the stories trailing after him. Stories of weather—30 below zero at his home village on the Yukon River. Stories of moose hunting and sled dog racing. Tragic stories of alcoholism and suicide. Beautiful stories of grandmothers, laughter, and family picnics in the snow.
Everyone has stories, of course, but the students at Effie Kokrine seem to have life experiences far beyond their years. For many, home is a village in the northern interior—places such as Huslia, Tanana, Galena, and Nulato. The distance between Fairbanks and those villages is more than physical. It’s the distance between two cultures—the treacherous confluence of traditional and mainstream worlds that all indigenous people have to navigate.
In the current climate of public education, the psychological, social, and spiritual pitfalls of that journey are boiled down to a well-documented achievement gap between American Indian and Alaska Native students and their peers. Other indicators, such as a dropout rate that is double that of white students, or a suicide rate that is four times the national average tell more of the story. But the real story cannot be told by statistics. The real story is currently walking down the hallway, barely dressed for the weather.
The Effie Kokrine Charter School serves slightly more than 100 students in grades 7–12. Ninety-eight percent of those students are of Alaska Native heritage, the majority Athabascan. And while not all of them fit the profile of the Native student who has failed to thrive in the typical public school, all of them have deliberately chosen to be here.
Only a year and a half old, Effie Kokrine Charter School is an experiment in culturally responsive education, a place where Native people meet the world of public education on their own terms; a place that—although students of any race and ethnicity are welcome—is essentially of Native people, by Native people, and for Native people. It’s a place named for an Athabascan hero, “Grandma Effie,” a three-time winner of the Women’s North American Sled Dog Championship in the early 1950s. A woman who, for 82 years, cut her own trail—with grace, humor, and flair—between the Native and mainstream cultures. This is not her story, but you might sense her spirit, just behind that student walking down the hall.
The Effie Kokrine Charter School at the Howard Luke Campus, as it’s officially known, can be hard to find. Snow often covers the school sign and towering evergreen trees camouflage the single-story building from the road. Prior to being a charter school it was the site of the Howard Luke Academy, the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District’s alternative junior and senior high school. Howard Luke, an Athabascan elder who lives across the river just outside Fairbanks, is actively involved with area schools and has lived a life as colorful and free-spirited as Effie Kokrine’s. While the alternative school was dissolved shortly before the new school started, the district honored him by keeping his name for the campus.
Naming the school and campus after two respected and beloved elders is a sign that the district not only “gets” what the new school is about, but fully supports it. In fact, some credit for the creation of the school can be given to the school district and to Superintendent Ann Shortt in particular.
In November 2001, a coalition of organizations held the first Alaska Native Education Summit in Anchorage. By all accounts the summit was a huge success and had a ripple effect throughout the state. One of those ripples was Ann Shortt’s decision to hold a similar, local summit for the Fairbanks district.
Eleanor Laughlin, the current principal at Effie Kokrine was the district coordinator of Alaska Native Education at the time. “We held two different summits,” she says, “and out of those summits came the recommendation to try a Native-focused charter school. From the beginning Superintendent Shortt was one of the strongest supporters of that. She stood behind us all the way.”
The process of turning that recommendation into a reality would take another three years. “There were a lot of interested parties,” says Laughlin. “We formed a planning committee and we had a lot of discussions about what we wanted to see in such a school. It wasn’t something we just threw together. It was very deliberate, very carefully planned, and it involved representatives of the entire Native community.”
Ray Barnhardt was a key figure in that planning and continues to serve on the school’s governing board. Barnhardt is a long-time professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), and a pioneer in documenting Alaska Native knowledge systems and developing school curricula and teaching practices that incorporate that knowledge. Through programs such as the Alaska Rural Systemic Initiative (AKRSI) and its offshoot, the Alaska Native Knowledge Network (ANKN), Barnhardt has spent the last 12 years gathering evidence, conducting research, and developing programs that promote school reform based on a Native world view. That work—much of it funded and reviewed by the National Science Foundation—forms the foundation of Effie Kokrine’s curriculum and its unique structure.
“We based the curriculum on the S.P.I.R.A.L. Curriculum Framework that we developed at the Alaska Native Knowledge Network,” says Barnhardt. “It centers around 12 broad cultural themes that are essential to Alaska Native subsistence culture.”
In addition to the Native-focused curriculum, the school made several decisions based on research into Native ways of learning. The day begins at 10 a.m., for instance, and ends at 3:40 p.m. Mornings are reserved for core subject areas such as math, science, and language arts, taught much as they are in a typical public school, but with frequent references and examples drawn from Alaska Native culture. Afternoons put a more direct emphasis on Native cultural practices via hands-on projects and field trips.
Parent and community involvement is essential. A school based on Native cultural knowledge and values would be an empty enterprise without the inclusion of parents and elders, notes Barnhardt. “So much about how Native people learn has to do with the interaction between children and parents and between young people and elders. In Native culture, the idea of education is not really distinguished from normal interactions among children, parents, and the larger community.”
Accordingly, parent and community involvement is less structured at Effie Kokrine than at a typical public school. Yes, a Parent-Teacher Organization meets monthly, and official parent-teacher conferences are held at least once every six weeks, but the most meaningful involvement happens naturally—and frequently—in the course of a typical day. To see this in action and to see the philosophy of the school brought to life, you can follow another student down the hall and into Kathleen Meckel’s seventh-grade classroom.
At Effie Kokrine, seventh- and eighth-grade classrooms are self-contained. Except for math, during which students are grouped by their appropriate level, all subjects are taught by the same teacher. There are two eighth-grade teachers at the school and Meckel teaches the only seventh-grade class. Artwork, posters, plants, and learning materials cover nearly every surface of her room. Parents are such frequent visitors that you barely notice their presence. Students are focused, intent on their work, engaged.
On this afternoon, Meckel and her students have just returned from a field trip to the UAF campus, where they took part in an Internet teleconference on global warming. Students in Fairbanks and students at the opposite end of the earth, in Ushuaia, Argentina, had the opportunity to talk to scientists from UAF, Boulder, Colorado, Washington, D.C., and Argentina about the effects of global warming on polar regions. The field trip is typical of the kind of learning opportunity Meckel offers her students. Also typical is the presence of several parents who either went along for the ride or have come to meet their kids afterward.
“This kind of opportunity goes right to the heart of what we’re about here,” says Meckel. “We’re looking at how global warming is affecting the traditional food supply of our Native cultures. We try to teach in a way that’s place-based and that ties learning and knowledge to cultural values. At the same time, what you find is that many of those values are really global.”
Meckel, who is Athabascan, is both a passionate advocate for the experiment that is the Effie Kokrine Charter School, and also one of its most pointed critics. A master at using a learning styles approach to teaching, she is wary of having a packaged curriculum—even one with a Native focus.
“We’ve got a long way to go here,” she says, “but I do believe in what we’re doing. This school is about trying to help kids through the experience of being an Alaska Native in an urban setting, and we do a good job with that. Putting these kids with their peers and in a system that embraces their culture, I’ve seen them blossom unbelievably.”
At the heart of that, she says, are the families and the larger Native community. “We have more parent and community involvement here than I’ve ever seen in a school,” says Meckel. “Parents, grandparents, elders—they’re a major part of what we do. Without that open dialogue and collaboration this approach just wouldn’t work.”
Asked for an example, Meckel gets typically passionate. “A while back we were having students do research on a mammal that Native people use for subsistence,” she says, “and we had a grandparent fly in here from up in the Arctic to talk about winter trapping camp. Now that’s family involvement, wouldn’t you say?”
Near the end of the day, you can follow another student down the hall and into a classroom. This student is 17, a junior. He is thin, good-looking, with a wisp of facial hair, and soulful eyes. He stands near a window, watching other students get ready to board a bus. He acts a little bored, maybe a little shy. Playing it cool. On first glance he might seem like a typical American teen—passionate about basketball, music, movies. At home in the world of MySpace, blogs, and text messaging. But in his quiet voice you can hear another story. He is Athabascan. His home village is Huslia. He recently won a medal in the eight-dog class of the Junior North American Dog Sled Championships. His name is Curt Kokrine. “Grandma Effie” was his great aunt.
Ask him why he has come to this school, what he likes about it. “You don’t have to be here ’til 10,” he says with a hint of sarcasm. He glances at one of his fellow students, another young man, obviously a friend.
“We get to play basketball every day,” says the friend with a big smile. Curt laughs and looks back out the window. “Yeah,” he says, “basketball every day.”
There is something in his faraway look that hints at what he will not tell a stranger—tradition, the future, home, Fairbanks, family. The journey across two cultures.
“I’ve been to school other places,” he says, finally, “and
I didn’t like them. I like it here.”
Original URL: http://www.nwrel.org/nwedu/12-03/know/
This online version is based upon the print version of the magazine. The information contained in it was current at the time of printing/posting.
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Copyright © 2007, Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory.