Group 6 Questions for 4/11

1. While reading this article I kept thinking back to the film we viewed in class Precious Knowledge. This film placed a high importance on an education the incorporated the belief systems of those being taught. There were extremely positive outcomes that arose from that program. In class a couple statistics were posted that 51% of Hispanic and African-American males will drop out. There was also a statistic that read 91% of all teachers are white females. After reading the article, Toward a Tribal Critical Race Theory in Education I couldn’t help but think this was all stemming from the same dilemma. I personally think it comes back to the same point; we have too many teachers who don’t know WHO they’re teaching. Think back to the story the narrator told between his “stories” and the colleagues “theories”.  College prepares educators on HOW to teach; not for WHO they will be teaching. How can we as future educators change this? Look at the impact this change had in Precious Knowledge and the personal stories told in this week’s readings. What should our first steps be?

2. “In this way, the goal, sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, of interactions between the dominant U.S. society and American Indians has been to change (‘‘colonize’’ or ‘‘civilize’’) us to be more like those who hold power in the dominant society.”

            This particular section of the reading really struck me, specifically the language used. I think the implications of using words like civilize and colonize are huge. This implies that the difference between the two cultures makes the minority culture inferior to the dominant culture in society; therefore, they must change in order to be “equal”.  

            Another example, “The colonization has been so completely that even many American Indians fail to recognize that we are taking up colonialist ideas when we fail to express ourselves in ways that may challenge dominant society’s ideas about who and what we are supposed to be, how we are supposed to behave, and what we are supposed to be within the larger population”