Culture and Language in

Native American

Education

by Lee Sherman

Professor William Demmert, Jr.

A national team of experts conducts exploratory work on a scientific study in culturally based education

Learning, remembering, imagining: All of them are made possible by participating in culture.
—Jerome Bruner, The Culture of Education, 1996

For the past three decades, Indian education experts and advocates have stressed the critical role of Native culture and language in the success of Native students. Since the early 1970s, prominent Native scholars and researchers have argued that Native students—American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian—thrive at school when instruction is congruent with their culture, connected to their history, and consistent with their community’s worldview.

Now, some of those same scholars and researchers are delving into the science of the issue. A national coalition of experts, led by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, is looking for scientific evidence that culturally based education (CBE) boosts achievement among Native students. "The interest in finding a relationship between improved academic perfor-mance and programs that include culturally based education activities," says Professor William Demmert, Jr., of Western Washington University, "is the result of a firm belief within the Native American professional community that high achievement in academics and motivation are dependent upon the spiritual well-being of Native students, early attention to cognitive development, sense of identity, and social/cultural maturity."

With support from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, the NWREL-led coalition has been examining the research base on Native education, as well as reviewing past and present Native education projects from across the country. The team is looking for studies that show a causal link between CBE and academic achievement. It is also looking for existing projects that might lend themselves to rigorous scientific study down the road.

Findings to date show a serious shortage of clear-cut studies. The research review recently completed by Demmert, principal investigator, and John Towner, also of Western Washington University, revealed only a handful of "experimental" and "quasi-experimental" studies—essentially, those that used scientific methods to compare students who received CBE in school against students who didn’t. But, the authors argue in the report, A Review of the Research Literature on the Influences of Culturally Based Education on the Academic Performance of Native American Students, there are strong indications among the less-rigorous studies to suggest that a causal link between CBE and academic performance could well turn up in future experiments.

In searching the research base, Demmert and Towner defined CBE as having six critical elements:

Recognition and use of Native languages
Pedagogy that stresses traditional cultural characteristics and adult-child interactions
Pedagogy in which teaching strategies are congruent with the traditional culture and ways of knowing and learning
Curriculum that is based on traditional culture and that recognizes the importance of Native spirituality
Strong Native community participation in educating children and in the planning and operation of school activities
Knowledge and use of the social and political mores of the community

Demmert and Towner report that their review yielded only six studies on CBE that could be called experimental or quasi-experimental (the difference is in the degree of rigor used, especially in how the students are assigned to groups). "Obviously," the authors write, "there is a strong need to design and implement research studies that will yield valid and reliable information about the impact of culturally based education programs on student achievement."

In looking at a number of "non-experimental" studies, however, the authors gleaned a promising list of what they call "working hypotheses"—that is, ideas that are compelling enough to warrant testing under strict, scientific conditions. Those hypotheses are:

Native children who are instructed in their Native language in a school setting learn that language better than children who are taught in a dominant second language.
Children who are taught in their Native language with culturally relevant pedagogy will do at least as well and may do better on standardized tests than children who receive instruction in a dominant second language.
Children who are more proficient with their Native language are also more proficient with a second language.
Programs that include Native language and cultural elements serve to strengthen home-school relationships. This connection may be an intervening variable explaining student achievement.

Overall, the gleanings from the research review are "suggestive" rather than definitive, says NWREL’s Kim Yap, director of the CBE study. "The evidence from a lot of the non-experimental studies—those that are narrative, anecdotal, or descriptive—seems to suggest that CBE is beneficial to academic achievement," Yap notes. "But at this point, we have to say that we don’t know yet."

If the coalition decides that an experimental study on CBE is feasible, it will set out to design a major study, working closely with additional experts in Native American education throughout the process.

In addition to Demmert, other partners working with NWREL on the project are Roland Tharp and the Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence, which Tharp directs; David Grissmer of the RAND Corporation; the National Congress of American Indians; the National Indian Education Association; the National Indian School Boards Association; David Beaulieu of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; John Tippeconnic of Penn State University; Joseph Trimble of Western Washington University; and Karen Swisher of Haskell Indian Nations University.

The research review is available online. For more information, contact Ann Rader at NWREL, 503-275-9558 or 1-800-547-6339, ext. 558.

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