by Zack Rogow
This academic year, a select group of Native American leaders will begin their doctoral studies through an innovative project at the Graduate School of Education called the "Family, Community, and University Partnership." The objectives of the project, recently funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, are research and development aimed at strengthening educational and family services in the American Indian communities of the Southwest.
The project, unique in the UC system, developed from discussions between faculty members at the Graduate School of Education and a small group of New Mexico Indian leaders over the past two-and-a-half years. The Indian leaders, from several Pueblo communities (Zuni, Cochiti, Acoma, Tesuque, Santa Clara), were seeking an institution of higher education that could help train professionals to conduct research designed to address the unique linguistic, social, and educational needs in communities like theirs.
Currently the project supports the graduate training, research, and community development activities of eight Fellows, five of whom were recently admitted to the Ph.D. program in Education. The participants are distinguished professionals, and are recognized as leaders in their communities and in their fields of interest: Regis Pecos is the director of the New Mexico Office of Indian Affairs; Anthony Dorame, Lieutenant Governor of Tesuque Pueblo; Christine Sims, director of the Native American Linguistics Institute; Mary Eunice Romero, coordinator of the Gifted and Talented Program at the Santa Fe Indian School; and Cheryl Fairbanks, senior policy analyst with the New Mexico Office of Indian Affairs and a tribal judge.
Principal investigators of the project are Professor Lily Wong Fillmore and Professor William D. Rohwer Jr., dean of the Graduate School of Education. According to Professor Fillmore, the New Mexican leaders were drawn to Berkeley because they were looking for an institution that would provide them with rigorous preparation to conduct research, and where the faculty recognized that there was much for them to learn about the special conditions and circumstances that affect the lives and educational prospects of members of Indian tribal communities in the Southwest.
The research interests of the Fellows vary, although all of them are concerned ultimately with the question of how best to prepare young people to fulfill the roles and responsibilities they will eventually assume in their tribal communities. The pueblos the Fellows come from are small, but each has the status of a semi-sovereign state.
The citizens of such self-governing units have to take part in critical decisions that will shape the future of their communities for decades to come. Their schools must educate the young people to make choices about the environment, the management of resources, and economic development that have long-range implications for the land in these mostly rural and agricultural areas.
At present, the schools serving these Indian communities do not fully address the need to prepare their young people to make such decisions. A major question for the Fellows is what changes are required in schools to make them more responsive to the needs of the communities they serve.
Another issue the Kellogg Fellows will tackle concerns the apparent conflicts between the patterns of teaching and learning practiced in their communities and the ones followed in the schools. The schools that American Indian children attend seldom recognize that the apparent problems some of these children have at school may result from incongruencies between the expectations and approaches to learning at home and at school.
The Fellows will also examine the health and status of their Native American languages in their communities. In many of them, the youngest speakers are in their fifties and sixties. Unless children learn these languages early in life, the languages will become extinct within a few decades. The Fellows hope to find ways to revitalize the languages in their communities, thereby preserving these precious linguistic resources that are native to this continent. *
Zack Rogow is an editor in the Student Academic Services Office of the Graduate School of Education. He is also the author of three books of poetry, and translates French literature into English.