NAVAJO READING. Roughly half the students are Native speakers who learned English as a second language; others got it from family members who may not have acquired it willingly or well.

(Editor’s note: “Talking Circle” is a new department in Tribal College Journal. It will feature the voices of tribal college faculty and administrators discussing their lessons learned and best practices for teaching and operating tribal colleges. We invite submissions.)

Teaching composition at Diné College for the past 17 years has brought me both joy and frustration. I suspect that other tribal college composition teachers have had much the same experience. Over the years, however, I have discovered an approach that has improved the situation for me and my students.

A recent frustration occurred in a developmental course when I assigned a reading on Canyon de Chelly from Laura Gilpin’s The Enduring Navaho. The piece identifies the canyon, reviews its prehistory, describes its typography, and explains its name.

I expected the students to answer five questions by reading the text and then crafting a response. For example, I asked, “What misunderstanding accompanies the names of the canyon’s two main branches?”

To me the answers seem evident. De Chelly, the author explains, “is a Spanish corruption of the Navajo word Tseghi, meaning “between the rocks,” while the name for its tributary, Canyon del Muerto, was mistakenly thought to derive from an 1804 Spanish attack.

The results were characteristic of how the students handle quizzes. Only one of nine provided an adequate answer; others responded with unsatisfactory answers; and three failed to answer at all.

English in a Navajo Culture

The students are mostly adults, intelligent people rich with experience. I see considerable improvement in how they read and write. Much of the pleasure in teaching here, in fact, comes from those who strive to improve.

Still, outcomes are not uniformly satisfying. Roughly half the students are Native speakers who learned English as a second language; others got it from family members who may not have acquired it willingly or well.

In this still largely oral culture, learning has traditionally occurred hands-on or by silent modeling. Thus, the dominant culture’s lecture-demonstration methods seem authoritarian and even alienating.

Accordingly, students have not taken easily to print in their early education, and they carry that awkward transition on to the college level. They tend to read passively and to presume that the teacher will tell them what they’ve read. Or they recite from memory.

Likewise, many fail to appreciate the effort that writing demands. Often family and work obligations interfere.

I like to think that with time, students in developmental English can overcome the deficit they bring as readers and writers. But four semesters of developmental English and composition cannot compensate for 12 years of language arts instruction where a cultural divide went unnoticed.

Literacy lacks glamour

Adults who enroll to become employable see courses only as credentials for jobs. Few recognize the time required to read an assignment or put into print what Navajos identify as nitsáhákees–rendered loosely in English as “thinking” but more accurately designating the process of reaching some awareness. Indeed, it is difficult to translate between the two languages.

As a former student (now herself a teacher) reminded me, literacy is not a survival skill for them. Nevertheless, print is something students need to master. To read effectively, they must also learn to write. The two activities affect virtually all they must navigate in college.

The students I teach attend college to study nursing and medicine or to get other degrees in science, engineering, law, and education. They do not consciously come to learn to read and write for the sake of their careers.

The issue is compounded by the overall educational culture, not only within tribal colleges but across the higher education spectrum. Literacy lacks the glamour enjoyed by science and technology or business and government.

College is viewed more as a means to a job. Somehow reading alertly and writing clearly are too quotidian—too ordinary to bother mastering.

In the educational arena, we see dumbed-down textbooks, growing reliance on videos and DVD’s as teaching tools, and spreadsheets substituted for discursive instruction. Numbered headings and dotted bullets have replaced formal outlines.

Learning in the Diné way

Each tribal community has its unique identity—its own story to tell, its own tradition worthy of a proper place in the world’s tapestry of cultures. And within each worldview lies a way of meeting the challenge that students face in adapting to the written word.

For example, the mission statement of the Navajo Nation’s Diné College acknowledges an underlying educational philosophy identified as Sa’ah Naaghaí Bik’eh Hózhóón, based on an aggregate of fine narratives and an enduring ceremonial system.

Typical of other tribal worldviews, this system displays a remarkable capacity for observing celestial movement and terrestrial phenomena. It envisions all learning as a tightly related process that governs tasking and understanding alike, beginning with the aforementioned nitsáhákees. It is applicable in any educational setting, whether in the home or the corral.

I have learned to apply that approach to the Diné College classroom with good results. I have become a better composition teacher, and I believe I could apply this approach effectively even in the non-Indian college where I formerly taught.

I believe that each culture served by a tribal college has a means to help students meet the challenge of becoming better readers and writers on their own terms. In the past, such tribal tools have been overlooked. Some of the failures of education today result from the Anglo-European dominance over tribal North America and the subjugation of such alternative approaches to learning.

If that trend can be reversed at last, perhaps the tribal college movement can lead the way to heightened literacy everywhere instead of a spiraling downward trend.

Dr. Paul G. Zolbrod taught for 30 years at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania before retiring and moving to New Mexico. He has taught at Diné College’s two New Mexico campuses, seven summers at Shiprock and 10 years at Crownpoint. He learned the Navajo language to research his book, Diné Bahané: Navajo Creation Story. He earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pittsburgh in 1967.