Page 474 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

37 Indigenous Stories: Knowledge Is Sometimes Where You Least Expect to Find It 449

(Phillips 1972). Warm Springs Reservation children, as a rule, did not verbally
participate in their classes; and the teachers wondered why the children did not
feel comfortable talking in their classes. There was no simple answer to that
question or the problems of academic failure. Phillips (1972) found that Warm
Springs children were taught differently in their homes. That is, they interacted
with adults differently, and they were given many more responsibilities at a
young age in comparison to white middle class children. Because of these dif-
ferences between the home and school, children would not verbally participate
in classroom interactions.
• Teachers cannot assume that because Native American children have assimilated
all the sociolinguistic rules underlying interactions in the classroom, they are
fluent and comfortable in non-Indian social situations where English is spoken.
Native children, especially those born and raised on reservations, are from a dif-
ferent cultural background than that which is implicit in the American class-
room. In other words, just because children are speaking English doesn’t mean
they understand what their teacher says to them in Standard English.
• Leap (1993) studied languages on American Indian reservations in the western
United States. In his research, he emphasized the idea that many Native
Americans do not speak Standard English; rather, they speak a combination of
their native language and English. Leap called this combination American
Indian English (AIE). He defined AIE as an aggregate of varieties, which differ,
as a group, from Standard English and from varieties of English spoken by non-
Indians in American society.
• Leap (1993) believes that there are at least 200 different varieties of Indian
English in the United States today. Consequently, in today’s world, more than
two-thirds of Native American young people speak AIE, and it is the only
Indian-related language they know. Furthermore, Leap (1993) postulates that
they learn their rules of grammar and speech from their ancestral language
traditions.
• Leap’s (1993) study has implications for the teacher of Native American children
today and probably Aboriginal children as well. Leap’s work suggests that
educators should not view Indian English as an example of language deficiency.
Rather, children should be allowed to be proficient in all language domains.
They should not be forced to forsake Indian English-related proficiency before
they can develop Standard English.
As we make a final point about the language differences of Native American and
Aboriginal children, we must emphasize our belief that there is power in lan-
guage and in the spoken word. The oral traditions of many cultures should be
valued and respected, and education should not rely solely on print-based mediums
that dominate eurowestern societies. For the most part, western-based societies
have been dominated by Eurocentric conceptions of literacy (Malott et al.,
2009). Likewise, James Paul Gee (2008) notes that Eurocentric learning stan-
dards and their corresponding goals, pedagogy, and curricula can marginalize
and blur different knowledge and discourse styles within Native American and
Aboriginal communities.