Forever Changed: Boarding School Narratives of American Indian Identity in the U.S. and Canada
This essay examines personal narratives to identify experiences at boarding schools. These collective experiences forged new American Indian identities due to a white educational system forced upon these Indian students. While stories remain part of tradition, they convey that Indian youth had changed permanently. An Ojibwa man, Ted Mato, who attended an Indian school, explained about the system established to educate American Indian students. He stated, "...the government set up an extensive system of boarding schools to bleach the red out of Indian children, to make us into white people. American Indians are forever changed." 1 As this Native man so eloquently stated, the intent of the Western educational system was to purposefully eliminate the cultural identity of American Indian people. But as the narratives will show, the students were not passive recipients of the process. One purpose of this paper is to give voice to the American Indian people who survived the Western educational system. The Native perspective of this cultural assault and the ensuing opposition to this aggression, as well as the existence and tenacity of this people, as demonstrated by the narratives of the participants, form the significance of this paper.
Radical Love, (R)evolutionary Becoming: Creating an Ethic of Love in the Realm of Education Through Buddhism and Ubuntu
Revolutions spring forth and are guided by love. Education, like love, is immersed in the political. It can be argued within the American educational landscape, textbook selections and school policies are acts of ideological evangelization, which serves not to democratize, but to indoctrinate the citizenry and reinforce capitalist ideologies; namely, hierarchical power relations and atomistic individualism (Pinar in What is curriculum theory?, Routledge, New York, 2012; Slattery in Curriculum development in the postmodern era: teaching and learning in an age of accountability, Routledge, New York, 2013). In this socio-political moment, we are struck dumb by the violence and oppression wrought by asymmetrical power relations, and the failure of the American compulsory education system to teach and practice an ethic of love. If Dewey’s (Democracy and education, Macmillan, New York, 1916) assertion is indeed true that education is the means through which we grow and sustain a democracy then our educational system(s) warrant a deep re-evaluation—a revolutionary re-imagining, a transformation—guided by/through/with love. This paper through a privileging of onto-epistemologies antecedent to Western thought—the South African philosophy of Ubuntu and the Eastern philosophy of Buddhism—reconceptualizes the Western subject and education as a witness to love. Understanding research as a rendezvous with thinking, this inquiry utilizes (re)Thinking as (non)method and rids itself of the positivist need for prescriptive conclusions. This imagining within the realm of urban education calls us to live out a radical love, which necessitates a revolutionary becoming and opens the possibility of an ethical, more humane future free of the epistemic violence of dominance guided by love and mediated through a pedagogical ethic of love.
How Does the Keyword Method Affect Vocabulary Comprehension and Usage? Report from the project on Studies in Language: Reading and Communication. Working Paper No. 278.
THE KEYWORD METHOD of vocabulary learning involves forming a linkage between a to-be-learned vocabulary word and a familiar English word that sounds like part of the to-be-learned item (the keyword). Then the learner forms an interactive image between the keyword and definition referents. In previous research, the keyword method has been found to facilitate students' recall of definitions, given vocabulary items. In this study, use of the method was also shown to increase comprehension of English vocabulary in context, as well as usage of that vocabulary in a novel context.