Volume 7 Number 2
New Teachers: From Surviving to Thriving
Demonstrating how to use traditional Yup'ik tools to make fish nets, Dorothy Epchook, an associate teacher in Kwethluk, teaches her students skills and values of village life.
Kwethluk, Alaska— "We don't want you there. Get out," the Saudi man told the Frontline TV reporter, referring to the American troops stationed in his homeland since Desert Storm. I'd never heard it stated so baldly before, and it made me feel defensive and a little dense, like an expansive guest who's just discovered that everyone at the party thinks she's a lout.
I watched this television interview shortly after visiting a Yup'ik village school in Alaska, near the Bering Sea. The urgency of cross-cultural relations, disastrously apparent to all of us after September 11, had preoccupied my thoughts the day I strode down the rutted road from Kwethluk's dirt airstrip to its community school. I was there to learn about the interplay of Western and Alaska Native knowledge in the education of village youth. But, that day, I was particularly conscious of being a kass'aq, a white person with good but, perhaps, uninvited intentions.
I grew up in Anchorage, but this in no way educated me about the state's first people. So I felt privileged to walk through Kwethluk, casting my eyes over the mottled tundra with its lacework of Kuskokwim River tributaries and having the chance to talk with students, teachers, and village elders. I particularly wanted to talk with Dorothy Epchook.
Epchook grew up in Kwethluk and has been an associate teacher at the school for 10 years. She teaches Yup'ik Studies, instructing students in traditional skills and crafts and coaching them in the use of their native language. I wanted to talk to Epchook about the benefit to village students of having teachers who share their heritage. I'd heard that Alaska's rural schools import up to 85 percent of their teachers — mostly white — from other states, and that many don't stay beyond their first year. While the Lower Kuskokwim School District, which includes Kwethluk, hires the greatest number of Alaska Native teachers in the state, there are never enough.
I found Epchook in the library. We sat at a table near a row of Macintosh computers and a wall display of handmade fishnets. As she talked, her ready laughter dispelled my worry about being an unwelcome outsider, and, wanting to grasp every nuance of her meaning, I barely took my eyes off her. She sat back a moment and reminded me, kindly, that it was customary to lower one's gaze when another speaks. I had a hard time remembering this, but, no matter, she cheerfully talked about what I'd come to learn.
"I was raised speaking Yup'ik, but when I was 10 we moved to Egegik, and we lost it somehow. We were teenagers and wanted to be like everyone else, and the others didn't speak Yup'ik," she told me.
About 250 air miles south of Kwethluk, Egegik is on Alaska's peninsula and has had a history of white influence since 1818, unlike many villages in the Lower Kuskokwim region where whites moved in a century later. English is commonly spoken there. Epchook finished elementary school in Egegik, but, when it came time for high school, her options were distressing.
At that time, Alaska typically funded village schools only through the lower grades. Village students were sent to boarding schools for their high school years. Like others, Epchook faced these prospects: Quit school and stay in her own community, or attend a boarding school on the other side of the state or a Bureau of Indian Affairs high school in the Lower 48. She chose to stay in school and was assigned to the Chilocco Indian School in Oklahoma. It was 1969.
"I learned the word hatred, bigotry," she said. "In our culture there was no such thing. I was taught never to pass judgment on anybody. Grandfather always said, if you're under the same sun, we're the same."
The civil rights movement of the 1960s fueled objections to the Indian boarding school system, but little changed for Alaska Natives until the 1976 "Molly Hootch" Alaska Supreme Court out-of-court settlement, in which the state agreed to provide a tax-supported high school in any village that wanted one — and nearly all did. This settlement, coupled with the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act that established influential Native corporations, empowered Native communities to shape the educational destinies of their own young people. Schools were then expected to help village youth build a firm foundation in their heritage and language as part of preparing them for adulthood.
"I think it helps the students to have a Native teacher because they understand more about their culture," said Epchook, who relearned the Yup'ik language when she returned to Kwethluk as an adult, "and learning how to make things for survival. If anything should happen, they'll know how to survive anywhere and by any means. The [attack on the World Trade Center] towers made me think that I need to teach the kids how to survive, maybe without electricity."
She'd invited a village elder to come to the classroom the next day to show students how to make a qalu, a dip net for catching small white fish from the nearby Kuskokwim River.
"Every one of us is capable of teaching," she continued. "By sharing [my teaching responsibility] with elders, students can learn from the elders how to stand on their own two feet. They will understand by teamwork, by working as one, they can accomplish anything."
Epchook herself will be learning to make dip nets along with her students — how to use traditional finger measurements and where among the stands of reeds and grasses on the tundra one can find the special roots needed for the bindings. Teachers should foster an exchange of teaching and learning with their students, she said.
"It's OK to have a student teach you, and that way you'll see how much they've learned, and you can help them advance. I think being an excellent teacher you have to be, personally, humble. By being humble, by being very meek, students learn more from you, you learn more. If you let them know that you are a student, no matter what age, then you can go from there. And that's how our elders taught us. That way, you have respect and trust. Even a non-Native teacher can do that — work hard to learn the culture — if you're willing to. A non-Native could be a teacher and a Native can help convey meaning to the students — it would be a working team."
Such teams are common in the Lower Kuskokwim School District, a 44,000-square-mile area encompassing about 23 villages. A quarter of the district's teaching staff is Alaska Native — about 65 teachers — and half of them are instructional aides who assist elementary teachers (requiring some college coursework) or teach Yup'ik culture and language (requiring village recognition of one's expertise and nomination by the local school board). While such partnering is valuable in these bilingual schools, the need to increase the number of fully certified Alaska Native teachers persists. Instructional aides can't teach core academic subjects such as mathematics and science, where the confluence of Western and Native knowledge is especially rich. While their classroom experience and cultural expertise help make them strong candidates for a teacher preparation program, living in rural Alaska presents formidable challenges to pursuing college degrees.
"Life here is very demanding," Epchook told me. It's easy to see what she means. A village lifestyle not only includes modern chores — jobs, bills, taxes, elections, and community meetings — it involves the traditional demands of subsistence fishing and hunting, extended family obligations, close living quarters, and geographic isolation and hardship. Phone and Internet service can be patchy, if available at all. There are no roads to these villages. All transportation is by small airplane or barge, skiff, or snowmobile up the Kuskokwim River from the Bering Sea.
These realities of village life make it difficult to leave to attend college in a city. While some Alaska colleges and universities offer distance-delivery courses leading to undergraduate degrees and teacher certification, an aide who is working full time in the classroom may need up to 10 to 15 years to complete her program.
"For me, I'm 50, I'm looking at maybe I should go back and get that degree," said Epchook, laughing wryly, "I keep taking [distance-delivery] courses, and I'm always at level 101. It's almost like a glitch in the computer: one-oh-one, one-oh-one, one-oh-one."
And so, the conundrum: To staff Alaska's schools with more Native teachers who are grounded in Western knowledge and Native tradition, prospective Native teachers frequently must leave their villages to get their college degrees. But this separates them from village life and the sources of tradition that help make them especially valuable as teachers.
Since the "Molly Hootch" settlement, the state of Alaska has tried to provide Alaska Native students with teachers who can teach the curriculum in the context of Alaska's indigenous heritages. One strategy has been to prepare all teachers to teach in village schools. To be certified in the state, all prospective teachers must complete coursework in Alaska studies and multicultural education. As part of its reform measures, the state also introduced voluntary Standards for Culturally Responsive Schools, a document prepared by the Alaska Native Knowledge Network and approved by the Assembly of Alaska Native Educators.
But the ideal, most agree, is to increase the number of Alaska Native teachers, especially in schools serving a majority of Native students. Studies validate this. A recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research demonstrated that students of color significantly improved in their math and reading achievement after having spent as little as one year with a same-race teacher.
The state has launched several programs over the years to help individuals from the villages earn teaching certificates. One of the latest is the Rural Educator Preparation Partnership (REPP), launched in 1996 by University of Alaska, Fairbanks, with funding from a half-million dollar federal grant. In the first year of the program, 11 of the 13 REPP interns who enrolled were Alaska Native. Today, very few of the 40 interns enrolled are Native. The reason for the reversal, said REPP Director John Weise, is the small number each year of Native students who complete undergraduate degrees, a requirement to qualify for the REPP program.
"We nearly depleted our qualified pool of Native applicants that first year," said Weise.
REPP is a "fifth-year," or post-baccalaureate, teacher preparation program that is aligned with the state's teaching standards. It enables students with undergraduate degrees in any major to earn their teaching certificates by working full time as interns in village schools, teaching side-by-side with regular classroom teachers who serve as their mentors. Both mentors and interns receive guidance from university faculty members. During the school year, interns teach, complete assigned readings, participate in audio seminars, write papers, and occasionally meet together at the university in Fairbanks. Their portfolios are expected to reflect their mastery of theory, practice, and academic content, as well as a deep understanding of multicultural contexts and how to involve families and communities in the schools.
REPP Director John Weise grew up in Bethel, across the river from Kwethluk in the district's largest community with 5,500 residents. He is a tall, soft-spoken man with a ready sense of humor. A professor of education at UAF, Weise also has been a classroom teacher and district superintendent in rural Alaska communities. He remembers being a college freshman at UAF and flipping through the pages of the course catalog. To him, it was "like a supermarket" of tantalizing discoveries, and he wanted to pluck a course from every shelf. One class, Orientation to Education, required him and his classmates to help out for a couple of weeks in classrooms at Lathrop High School and Joy Elementary. The experience was a decisive one for Weise. "Something clicked, I guess, and I wanted to become a teacher," he said.
At the time, UAF offered a field-based teacher education program, the Alaska Rural Teacher Training Corps (ARTTC), in which students could earn teaching degrees while assisting teachers in rural schools. Weise chose to earn his teaching certificate through this program, and, in his final year, he went to Metlakatla, on the southernmost tip of Alaska's Panhandle. Mornings, he and a few fellow ARTTC students would study and discuss their coursework, and afternoons they would teach in classrooms at the local school.
The program, later called the Cross-Cultural Education Development Program (X-CED), graduated more than 200 Alaska Native teachers through the 1970s and 1980s. Students followed the same curriculum as campus-based students — general education, teaching methods, and a teaching practicum — but their instructors were UAF faculty field coordinators who traveled a regional circuit. Videotapes featuring lectures by other UAF faculty arrived weekly.
"I learned to be a teacher by teaching, reading, and looking at these tapes. I could read Piaget and then go the next day into my sixth-grade classroom and ask my students if the clock on the wall was alive or dead — then I'd go back and read that book again!" said Weise, poking fun at his first attempts to blend theory and practice. But he's very serious about the value of learning to teach while teaching, believing it can be better preparation for the profession than traditional campus-based programs. He stresses, however, that any distance-delivery program must factor in human contact.
As a team, mentor teachers and interns work closely every day of a school year. This one-to-one relationship is an essential aspect of the program, said Weise. And if one of them is Alaska Native and the other non-Native, they have an opportunity to model for students how to work together and negotiate the intersection of Native and Western cultures, essential lessons for village youth. Even the most remote Alaska village has been deeply influenced by mainstream America, said Weise, whose own family includes Yup'ik and Norwegian ancestors.
"You tell me where I can live as only a one-race type person," Weise stated flatly. "You can't do it in Alaska." To help prepare students for productive and fulfilling adult lives — whether they choose to stay in their village communities or move elsewhere — they need role models, others who've successfully bridged the cultures, he said.
Sam Bailey and his wife Lana grew up in Unalakleet, on the shores of the Bering Sea. With an undergraduate degree in mathematics from University of Alaska, Anchorage, Sam earned his teaching certificate through the REPP program. Today, he teaches math and she is vice principal at Galena High School, on the Yukon River.
In some ways, Sam envies Lana, who received her teacher training from a traditional program at Pacific University in Oregon (although the REPP program supervised her student teaching practicum in Galena). He suspects he might have learned more about the nitty-gritty of teaching from formal coursework.
"You spend an entire year in the classroom" as a REPP intern, he said, "but I don't think you really understand all of it. You're at the mercy of your mentor teacher, and if they can't help with methods or how to present a lesson, you have to learn on your own. I never knew what to ask my mentor teacher."
Although the REPP program helped them earn their teaching certificates, Sam and Lana, who are Alaska Native, are ambivalent about creating special programs for prospective Native teachers. While the intent might be good, they worry about creating a two-tiered system in which Native teachers might receive inferior training.
"It's more important to have a good teacher than to have a lousy teacher who looks like you," said Sam.
But what if you have a good teacher who looks like you?
Willa Towarak Eckenweiler is a REPP intern in Unalakleet this year. For several weeks now, she's been working with a small group of first-graders on their reading skills at the same school she attended when she was a child. The youngsters are cute and eager, and they remind her of herself — at the very age when one of her teachers made a lasting impression.
"I had some Native teachers who were from the village, and I think about them, about how we were taught and how we used to enjoy listening to them," said Eckenweiler. "I have been thinking about my teacher I had in elementary school, who enjoyed telling us stories about hunting and Native games."
Today, Eckenweiler is married and the mother of two daughters. For the past 14 years, she's coached Unalakleet's Native Youth Olympics in which students compete for state championships in such contests as the Alaskan high kick and the seal hop. Now, she is training to be a classroom teacher. It's easy to trace the line of influence back to the teacher who captivated her students with stories of Native life.
"We need to have role models to let the kids see that there are jobs to be had if they go and get their education," she said. "One way to keep our culture, values, and traditions alive is for local people to stay here and work in the village."
In fact, as Sam Bailey pointed out, Unalakleet is a village where "the professionals look like the community," meaning that Native people are among the physician's assistants, dentists, economic developers, airline managers, and other college-educated specialists.
"I have 11 brothers and sisters and... six got degrees from the university in Fairbanks. Education was a big deal in our house," said Eckenweiler. "I even have a niece who will be graduating from MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology]."
The credit must go to the parents in the village for having high expectations for their children, she said.
"It was really stressed that you really needed to go to school. Once that standard was set, where students went to college, then they came back and had kids and they expect a little more from their own children," she said.
Eckenweiler expects her own two daughters to follow suit, but there's another part of their lives that she wants them to embrace, too.
"I would like to see them earn a college degree and be able to remember their Native heritage," she said. "I think it's important not to lose our identity. Nowadays, it's so easy to get caught up in mainstream society and be just like everybody else. It's important to keep our own culture alive, our own identity, and be proud of it. So they will not be afraid to accomplish their goals."
For many, teaching students about their heritage becomes a personal journey in which they, too, discover the richness of their ancestry. "Teaching in your own language builds your self-esteem," said Nita Rearden, a specialist in Yup'ik Studies for the Lower Kuskokwim School District and an alum of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, campus-based teacher preparation program. "You discover who you are, your ancestors, your values."
While much about village life has changed from the old ways, young people still need to nurture their roots, she said. "They adapt into another culture, but they still need their tools, their Yup'ik values. Those were already in existence before we ever had contact with white people."
In fact, ancestral ways of viewing and being in the world still exhibit a strong influence on village youth, and students are more apt to master Western knowledge if they also can apply their Native knowledge and skills and learn in the context of their environment and culture. "If we build where kids are, how much easier that would be," said Rearden.
Ray Barnhardt, education professor at University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and director of the Alaska Native Knowledge Network, agreed. "The extent to which instruction and curriculum are linked to students' language and cultural context, you reap all kinds of benefits," he said. Students' academic achievement rises — even on standardized tests — their motivation improves, and they're less likely to drop out of school, he said.
"If we accept that, then how do we do it? By developing curriculum and instructional strategies to engage students in the study of their place and their culture. But teachers need to know something about that place, its history, how they live their lives. So the next question is: Who's best equipped to do that?" he said.
A new non-Native teacher will need at least a couple of years to learn something about the village's culture and incorporate it effectively into classroom instruction, Barnhardt said. "And then they leave. But people who are from the villages, those people don't leave." Eighty-five percent of the 300 Alaska Native teachers who began teaching during the past 25 years are still out there teaching, he said.
"Those teachers are now senior staff, and they're beginning to influence their schools... leading the way for providing Native students with an education that's second to none. But we need the educational system to be supportive of what they have to offer," not only by developing curriculum and instructional models for integrating Native and Western knowledge, he said, but by recognizing the special attributes Alaska Native teachers bring to the classroom.
"There's often an expectation from principals that a quality teacher is bubbly and high-energy. Native teachers very seldom exhibit all of those qualities, yet their students outperform those who don't have a Native teacher," Barnhardt said.
Expecting those who live in the villages to leave their communities to attend campus-based teacher preparation programs, "like everyone else," is misguided, he said. Their cultural expertise is often inextricably linked with being a part of the fabric of that community.
"Coming to a university in Fairbanks or Anchorage or wherever, you can become detached from your own community. In the four or five years it takes to complete your degree program, you have other experiences, and it's sometimes hard to come back to the village," he said. Programs such as REPP allow village residents to do their studies in the context of their community and language.
However, Rearden said, "I feel that it is important to mention to those who choose to complete their college degree, it is OK to do so on campus, and they do not need to stay in a village. You can always regain any Native knowledge when you return to your village or in other villages, but I really think colleges should include Alaskan Studies to make the learning on campuses interesting, relevant, and to be aware of the importance of learning our own language."
But distance-delivery programs are neither easier nor a shortcut to a teaching career, said Barnhardt. "I find the students in the distance-education program more motivated, more mature, and less concerned about grades. They're grappling with real-world issues out there. They're going to be going into the classroom the next day and trying to put into use those ideas and strategies they're learning about."
In the Kwethluk school library that day, Dorothy Epchook taught me, just as she teaches her students every year, how to make a fishnet for catching salmon. She brought out a finished net, maybe 12 feet long. It was rolled neatly, and the layers of thin nylon cord gave it a silky sage-colored appearance, like a bound lock of hair from a beautiful giant. She showed me how she grades the students' handiwork, pointing to the tight knots of nylon cord that should align perfectly when the net is rolled up.
"They must line up, like this," she said, running her finger across each straight row. "Here, I will show you how to make a net."
I was nervous, afraid I'd prove to be a slow learner. She said, "Everyone can learn. This is how I teach my students."
From a large plastic bag she pulled out nylon cord, rope, hand-tooled wood blocks, and net-weaving tools.
"These are made by the students," she said, showing me a wooden square block measuring patneq, or a width of four fingers. We sat on the floor of the library. She tied one end of the nylon to the leg of a chair, let out a length of cord, and wrapped the other end around the wooden block, crossing over and under, and knotting it in such a way as to create the first square in the mesh.
"Do you see?" she asked me. "Here, I will do it again."
I watched intently, wanting to be able to replicate her movements exactly. She handed me the spool and said, "Now you do it." I tossed the cord around the wood block. "No," she said, "like this. Let me show you again." On my next try, I worked the nylon cord around the block of wood as she had, knotting it snugly. "Very tight," she said. "Make sure it is very tight. Good! You did it!" She praised me, and I laughed with her, proud of my little triumph.
"Now do another one," she said, firm in her desire to see me make perfect knots that would align in an elegant row. Afterward, we cleaned up — she, insisting that I keep my little net and keep practicing — and I noticed that I felt good, valuable, and worthy. And this, of course, must be how she makes her students feel.
That afternoon, Epchook walked with me back down the dirt road to the airstrip. She continued to teach me all along the way — the medicinal uses for the wormwood that grew beside the road, the historical value of an age-old sweat house. When we came to the end of the road, I asked her how to say goodbye in Yup'ik, and she said there is no such word. Instead, Yup'ik people say, tua-i-ngunrituq, it's not the end. I practiced the word, and she praised me loudly: "You've got it! You've got it!"
Then my plane taxied up, and we parted. I called back to her, "Tua-i-ngunrituq!" and, without thinking added, "Bye!"
"No!" she hollered back, "There's no goodbye!"
I hoped she was right. 
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