Multiliteracies Pedagogy and Language Teaching: Stories of Praxis from Indigenous Communities 3031318110, 9783031318115

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Educational Linguistics

Sabine Siekmann Joan Parker Webster

Multiliteracies Pedagogy and Language Teaching Stories of Praxis from Indigenous Communities

Educational Linguistics Volume 60

Series Editor Francis M. Hult, Department of Education, Sherman Hall A Wing, University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD, USA Editorial Board Members Marilda C. Cavalcanti, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas, Brazil Jasone Cenoz, University of the Basque Country, Leioa, Spain Angela Creese, University of Stirling, Stirling, UK Ingrid Gogolin, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany Christine Hélot, Université de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France Hilary Janks, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa Claire Kramsch, University of California, Berkeley, USA Constant Leung, King’s College London, London, UK Angel Lin, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada Alastair Pennycook, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

Educational Linguistics is dedicated to innovative studies of language use and language learning. The series is based on the idea that there is a need for studies that break barriers. Accordingly, it provides a space for research that crosses traditional disciplinary, theoretical, and/or methodological boundaries in ways that advance knowledge about language (in) education. The series focuses on critical and contextualized work that offers alternatives to current approaches as well as practical, substantive ways forward. Contributions explore the dynamic and multi-­ layered nature of theory-practice relationships, creative applications of linguistic and symbolic resources, individual and societal considerations, and diverse social spaces related to language learning. The series publishes in-depth studies of educational innovation in contexts throughout the world: issues of linguistic equity and diversity; educational language policy; revalorization of indigenous languages; socially responsible (additional) language teaching; language assessment; first- and additional language literacy; language teacher education; language development and socialization in non-­ traditional settings; the integration of language across academic subjects; language and technology; and other relevant topics. The Educational Linguistics series invites authors to contact the general editor with suggestions and/or proposals for new monographs or edited volumes. For more information, please contact the Editor: Marianna Georgouli, Van Godewijckstraat 30, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. All proposals and manuscripts submitted to the Series will undergo at least two rounds of external peer review. This series is indexed in Scopus and the Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers (NSD).

Sabine Siekmann • Joan Parker Webster

Multiliteracies Pedagogy and Language Teaching Stories of Praxis from Indigenous Communities

Sabine Siekmann Linguistics Program University of Alaska Fairbanks Fairbanks, AK, USA

Joan Parker Webster Center for Cross-Cultural Studies University of Alaska Fairbanks Fairbanks, AK, USA

ISSN 1572-0292     ISSN 2215-1656 (electronic) Educational Linguistics ISBN 978-3-031-31811-5    ISBN 978-3-031-31812-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31812-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Sabine: Eric, thank you for always being there for me. I could not have done it without your support. I love you. Axton, who was there with me when it all began over lunch with Joan and Patrick. Zia, the SLATE baby, who wanted to go to Bethel when she grew up, because Mama spent so much time there. Ich hab euch lieb! Joan: For my husband Jim, who always encouraged and supported me in realizing my dreams, desires and goals. He was, and will continue to be, the patient and kind voice in my head that helps me keep a sense of balance in this life.

Foreword: Entangling Language, Culture, and Lifeworld in Indigenous Language Education

The authors of this book, Drs. Sabine Siekmann and Joan Parker Webster, have long histories showing deep commitment to Native Alaskan youth, innovative approaches to culturally responsive and culturally sustaining teacher professional development, and specifically, cooperatively working with educators and communities to establish and improve Indigenous language education opportunities in the state of Alaska. Their book begins with the important acknowledgment that many educational disparities that exist between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students in the state, for example on measures of academic achievement and graduation rates, are rooted in the settler-colonial history of Alaska (and the Americas more broadly), which involve decades of actions that have oppressed Indigenous peoples, and by extension, forcibly assaulted their languages, cultures, epistemologies, and traditional ways of life. As the authors note, this issue is particularly relevant to the topic of their book – Indigenous Alaskan language revitalization efforts located in schools – since the state apparatus of formal schooling has historically served as a catalyst for Indigenous language and culture loss and language shift to English. The work in Alaska that Siekmann and Parker Webster describe seeks to reverse the precarity of Indigenous Alaskan languages and promote their continued use and transmission to future generations. This includes a range of activities such as language education and language immersion programs that are closely coupled with community-led initiatives to support the use of Indigenous languages in daily life. A thread that runs through the text is the framework of multiliteracies pedagogy. The term multiliteracies encompasses three important arguments: (1) the acknowledgement of sustaining cultural and linguistic diversity at the global level, (2) the increasing importance of multimodal forms of meaning and expression, and (3) the notion of design. The element of design is especially powerful and is understood not as adherence to pre-established rules and epistemologies, but as a heuristic that encourages a diversity of emergent forms of meaning-making in relation to communities’ maintenance and creative transformation of social practices. The notion of design places agency at the local level, in the situated actions of educators, students, and the communities of which they are a part (e.g., New London Group, 1996). Of course, there are preexisting (and often exogenously imposed) available vii

viii Foreword: Entangling Language, Culture, and Lifeworld in Indigenous Language Education

designs that inform the social-material conditions of the present, but these are non-­ binding. A design approach is future-facing and encourages bringing forward valued cultural dynamics, contesting constraints and prescriptivist epistemologies, and is encouraging of exploration and creativity in the ongoing construction of individual and community flourishing. In essence, moment-to-moment human activity is the perennial and agentive process of redesign. A multiliteracies design-based approach is one that promotes communicative practices, for which language is a central resource, as ecologically entangled with practical and everyday life experience. The term entanglement is used often in this book; the term evokes the relational constitution of people, culture, language, and aspects of material world. This is perhaps my favorite conceptual framing in the book – that ‘language’ is not treated as a separable ‘thing’ from the histories, peoples, and practices of which it is an intrinsic part. This is important because in educational contexts, treatments of ‘language’ often emphasize and naturalize an understanding of communicative activity as primarily the use of a set of semiotic units governed by co-occurrence patterns and grammatical relations; in essence, language understood as a code independent of human action. This is an erroneous and deeply problematic construct that separates language from its organic enmeshment with the lifeworlds of people (for diverse treatments of this issue, see Harris, 1987; Thibault, 2021; Thorne & Lantolf, 2007). This is especially, though not uniquely, the case in some contexts associated with Indigenous language maintenance, revitalization, and reclamation. As described by the anthropologist and citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, Jenny L. Davis, discussion of Indigenous languages in both academic and public contexts often exhibit what she terms ‘linguistic extraction,’ or the construction of ‘language’ (specifically Indigenous languages and language revitalization efforts) as an isolatable entity removed from the communicative and embodied practices of the people and communities it is most closely associated with (Davis, 2017). In every chapter of the book, Siekmann, Parker Webster, and their numerous Alaska Native language educators whose voices are vibrant throughout the text contest the removal of language from its primordial location, as an adaptive and emergent resource that through everyday communicative practice enables forms of experience that empower individual and community resilience and growth. At the start of life, children may grow up surrounded by one or multiple languages, and through daily interaction with caregivers, siblings and peers, and community members, they are exposed to thousands of hours of contextualized language-full activity. Learning a language in an institutional context, such as a classroom, school, or university, is a different experience. This is another area in which Siekmann, Parker Webster, and their Alaska Native colleagues provide extraordinary insights and practical approaches to the difficult work of Indigenous language-culture education in institutional contexts. Examples include drawing on funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992) of the student-participants, adapting digital technologies to foster locally relevant and place-based language learning opportunities, and incorporating broader community resources into educational settings. As the authors note, through the use of cultural-historical activity theory, inter-activity

Foreword: Entangling Language, Culture, and Lifeworld in Indigenous Language Education

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system dynamics can help participants to recognize contradictions, which then makes possible opportunities for transformative action. Language is the master tool of our species. Through language and its conjoined social and embodied practices, we share ideas and mental states, coordinate with one another and our environment, cooperatively do things that we wouldn’t be able to accomplish alone, and pass forward technical expertise, knowledge, cultural practices, and wisdom. These activities involve many aspects of the human experience, such as expression and construction of emotions, play and pleasure, curiosity and inquiry, and fulfillment of social and material needs. In essence, language is our species’ super power, one that is central to what it means to be a human being. The multimodal and redesign-inspiring projects in this book provide actionable heuristics and repurposable examples of ‘being-knowing-doing’ (as the authors describe it) that I hope will inspire Indigenous language-culture projects for decades to come. Portland State University & University of Groningen  December 16, 2022

Steven L. Thorne

References Davis, J. L. (2017). Resisting rhetorics of language endangerment: Reclamation through Indigenous language survivance. In W. Y. Leonard & H. De Korne (Eds.), Language documentation and description (pp. 37–58), Vol. 14. EL Publishing. Harris, R. (1987). The language machine. Cornell University Press. Moll, L. C., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & González, N. (1992). Funds of knowledge for teaching: a qualitative approach to connect households and classrooms. Theory into Practice, 31(2), 132–141. New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60–92. Thorne, S.  L., & Lantolf, J. (2007). A linguistics of communicative activity. In S.  Makoni & A. Pennycook (Eds.), Disinventing and reconstituting languages (pp. 170–195). Multilingual Matters. Thibault, P. J. (2021). Distributed languaging, affective dynamics, and the human ecology. Volume 1: The sense-making body. Routledge.

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge all graduate students, faculty, and community partners that have contributed to ongoing efforts to improve (language) education in Alaska’s schools serving Indigenous students. Special thanks to our 42 master’s students, whose work contributed to the field of (language) education for Alaska Native students and whose inquiries fostered new learning for all stakeholders involved in these grant-supported programs. Funding through a series of US Department of Education Alaska Native Education Program grants afforded us and the teacher-educators whose work is presented in Part II of this volume the opportunity to engage in collaborative inquiry, contributing to ongoing efforts to support language and cultural maintenance and revitalization efforts and to build capacity for local control of (language) programming particularly in rural Alaska: • Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education (SLATE, #S35A060055) • Improving Alaska Native Education through Computer Assisted Language Learning (ANE CALL, #S356A120055) • Literacy for Emergent Bilinguals: Communities of Practice for Teacher Action Research (LEB #S356A150055) These grants represent long-term collaborations with a number of university, school, and community partners, each making significant contributions to the success of participating teacher-researchers in all of the grant-funded programs. • • • • • • • •

UAF Linguistics Program UAF School of Education UAF Alaska Native Language Center Lower Kuskokwim School District Association of Village Council Presidents (AVCP) UAF Kuskokwim Campus Lower Yukon School District Kuspuk School District

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank a few individuals, who deserve special recognition for their long-term commitment and involvement in this work, spanning the last 15 years: Vivian Korthuis (AVCP), who represented the interests of the people and communities under the auspices of AVCP and whose knowledge, commitment, and critical insights helped shape programmatic decisions on all levels. Sophie and Oscar Alexie (KuC Yup’ik Language and Culture Program), who, as language and culture bearers, patiently guided program faculty and students in becoming aware of Indigenous ways of being-knowing-doing. Mary Pete (KuC Campus Director) and Martha Glore (KuC Executive Assistant), who opened up their campus facilities to us and supported us in a millions ways big and small, always making us feel like Bethel was our second home. Gayle Miller and Carlton Kuhn (LKSD), long-term supporters of Yup’ik medium instruction, who acted as liaison between the district office, the university, and the local schools, which contributed to the teacher-researchers’ ability to participate in the graduate programs and conduct inquiry in their classrooms. Patrick Marlow, whose fateful invitation for Joan to meet Sabine for lunch in Philadelphia was the starting point of our journey together. Patrick’s history of work supporting language maintenance and revitalization provided the foundation for the grant-funded programs represented in this volume. It was through his guidance and vision that the partnerships came together at the inception of the first project and led to a sustainable collaboration for over 15 years. Finally, we would like to specifically acknowledge the Alaska Native PhD students who acted as near-peer mentors to master’s students and as linguistic and cultural consultants to the faculty, and who, over time, took on leadership positions in the grants, their communities, the state, and nationally. Thanks to our graduates, Drs. Theresa John, Hishinlai’ Peter, April Laktonen Counceller, Walkie Charles, Agatha John-Shields, and PhD candidates, Sally Samson, Catherine Moses, and Sheila Wallace.

Contents

Part I Entangling Indigenous-Western Onto-­Epistemological-­­Methodological Frameworks 1

 Entering the Field: Teachers Doing Research in Indigenous Classrooms������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    3 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   10

2

 Tracing the Development of an Indigenous-­Western Pedagogy����������   13 2.1 The Entanglement of Indigenous and Western Ways of Being-Knowing-­Doing ����������������������������������������������������������������   13 2.2 The Entanglement of Languages Literacies Pedagogies������������������   17 2.3 The Entanglement of Multilingualism and Multimodalities Within the Pedagogy of Multiliteracies��������������������������������������������   19 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   23

3

 Participatory Teacher Action Research as Design Process������������������   25 3.1 Participatory Teacher Action Research ��������������������������������������������   25 3.2 Participatory Teacher Action Research as Design Process ��������������   29 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   32

Part II Stories of Praxis 4

Multimodalities in Yup’ik Immersion����������������������������������������������������   37 4.1 Wonderings ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   38 4.2 Available Designs ����������������������������������������������������������������������������   39 4.2.1 Yup’ik Ways of Being-Knowing-Doing��������������������������������   40 4.2.2 Multiliteracies-Multimodalities��������������������������������������������   42 4.2.3 Emerging Literacies��������������������������������������������������������������   43 4.3 Designing������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   47 4.3.1 Sarah Designing��������������������������������������������������������������������   47 4.3.2 Sally Designing��������������������������������������������������������������������   49

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4.4 Re-Designed��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   51 4.5 Summary ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   54 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   54 5

Affordances of Visual Images in Dual Language Classrooms: Teachers and Students as Designers������������������������������������������������������   57 5.1 Wonderings ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   58 5.2 Available Designs ����������������������������������������������������������������������������   59 5.2.1 Multiliteracies: Diversity and Multilinguality����������������������   59 5.2.2 Multimodalities as Integral to a Multiliteracies Pedagogy������������������������������������������������������������������������������   60 5.3 Designing������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   63 5.3.1 Kayla Designing�������������������������������������������������������������������   63 5.3.2 Audra Designing ������������������������������������������������������������������   69 5.4 Redesigned����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   73 5.5 Summary ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   75 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   75

6

Designing Past-Present-Future: Traditional Funds of Knowledge Through Modern Technology ����������������������������������������   77 6.1 Wonderings ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   77 6.2 Available Designs ����������������������������������������������������������������������������   79 6.2.1 Indigenous Ways of Being-Knowing-Doing������������������������   79 6.2.2 Multiliteracies: Multimodalities and Multilinguality ����������   80 6.2.3 Technology as a Tool������������������������������������������������������������   82 6.2.4 Place Based Education����������������������������������������������������������   83 6.3 Designing������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   83 6.3.1 Natalie Designing�����������������������������������������������������������������   84 6.3.2 Sheila Designing ������������������������������������������������������������������   86 6.4 Redesigned����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   88 6.5 Summary ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   90 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   91

7

 Reclaiming and Reinventing Indigenous Ways of Being-Knowing-­Doing ������������������������������������������������������������������������   93 7.1 Wonderings, Rationale, Purpose ������������������������������������������������������   94 7.2 Available Designs ����������������������������������������������������������������������������   95 7.2.1 Indigenous Ways of Being, Knowing and Doing������������������   96 7.2.2 Western Pedagogical Frameworks: Multiliteracies, PACE Model, and Task Based Language Teaching��������������   97 7.3 Designing������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   99 7.3.1 Sondra Designing������������������������������������������������������������������   99 7.3.2 Candace Designing ��������������������������������������������������������������  101 7.4 The Redesigned��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  104 7.5 Summary ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  106 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  107

Contents

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Part III Ciuliamta Uyangtakut as Praxis 8

Toward Indigenizing Pedagogies in Western Schooling: A Conversation ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  111 8.1 Introducing Who We Are������������������������������������������������������������������  112 8.1.1 Who We Are as Collaborators����������������������������������������������  115 8.2 Indigenous Ways of Being Knowing and Doing: Qasgiq and Yugtun Knowledge Systems ������������������������������������������������������  116 8.3 Language and Literacy Teaching and Learning: A Dialogue Between Yup’ik Pedagogy and the Pedagogy of Multiliteracies������������������������������������������������������������������������������  118 8.4 Implications and Next Steps: Engaging in Praxis����������������������������  124 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  129

About the Authors

Sabine  Siekmann is a Professor of Linguistics and Foreign Languages at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. An interdisciplinary applied linguist specializing in language pedagogy, she conducts largely collaborative research in the areas of bilingualism, Indigenous language maintenance and revitalization, second language teaching, computer-assisted language learning, and critical intercultural education. Siekmann’s research is informed by cultural historical activity theory, teacher action research, and other critical approaches to language pedagogy and theory. She has directed a series of large-scale federally funded grant projects supporting Alaska Native (language) education through graduate education and materials development. Her previous publications include the co-edited volumes: Task-Based Language Teaching and Learning: Theoretical, Methodological, and Pedagogical Perspective (with Johannes Eckerth) and Communities of Practice: An Alaska Native Model for Language Teaching and Learning (with Patrick Marlow) as well as journal articles and book chapters.  

Joan Parker Webster is a retired Associate Professor of Education at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). Specializing in multiliteracies, critical pedagogy, and cross-cultural education, she has worked with Alaska Native storytellers and educators on documenting traditional oral stories, as well as producing heritage language storybooks and bilingual materials for children. Currently she is affiliated faculty in the UAF College of Rural and Community Development, primarily working within the Indigenous Studies PhD program. She also works as an educational research consultant, primarily as an evaluator for federally funded grant programs. Parker Webster has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on critical ethnography, teacher action research, multiliteracies, multimodal analysis, and critical intercultural education. She continues to work with teacher action research collaboratives in STEAM education and to conduct critical ethnographic research with Alaska Native communities and schools.  

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Abbreviations

ANE CALL Improving Alaska Native Language Education Through ComputerAssisted Language Learning AR Augmented Reality ARIS Augmented Reality for Interactive Storytelling CHAT Cultural Historical Activity Theory LEB Literacies for Emergent Bilinguals LKSD Lower Kuskokwim School District LYSD Lower Yukon School District PTAR Participatory Teacher Action Research PACE Presentation, Attention, Co-construction, Extension SLATE Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education TBLT Task-Based Language Teaching

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Map of Alaska Native Languages. (Krauss et al., 2011)������������������    4 Fig. 1.2 Timeline depicting a series of grants supporting graduate programming supporting Alaska Native and English language instruction������������������������������������������������������    7 Fig. 3.1 Participatory Teacher Action Research Spiral (Siekmann et al., 2019, p. 133) ��������������������������������������������������������   29 Fig. 3.2 PTAR as design process��������������������������������������������������������������������   31 Fig. 4.1 Writing Stages. https://babybulldogsprek.weebly.com/ developmental-­writing.html as cited in Bass, 2010, p. 31����������������   46 Fig. 5.1 Excerpt 1.1 “High beams” (Ashe, 2019, pp. 64–65; Kibuishi, 2008, p. 4)�������������������������������������������������������������������������   65 Fig. 5.2 Excerpt 3.5: “Prepare the cannon”. (Ashe, 2019, p. 94; Kibuishi, 2008)���������������������������������������������������������������������������������   68 Fig. 7.1 Illustration from Qateryuk (see Branson, 2015b) ����������������������������  103 Fig. 8.1 Symbols used in yaaruiq (storyknifing). During our conversation, Arevgaq is drawing this image, while she is introducing each symbol in the story (Source: John, personal communication, January 2023)������������������  123

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List of Tables

Table 3.1 The “What” of multiliteracies—designs of meaning (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009, p. 176)��������������������������������������������������   30 Table 4.1 Description of 6 + 1 Traits for primary grades. (Samson, 2010, p. 21, based on Education Northwest)������������������   45 Table 4.2 List of 6 + 1 Traits in Yuraq (Samson, 2010, p. 22) ����������������������   53 Table 4.3 6 + 1 Traits for primary grades translated into Yugtun (Samson, 2010, p. 72)��������������������������������������������������������������������   53 Table 5.1 Excerpt 4.1 Task 1: “Choose a game, then they start playing”������   71 Table 5.2 The four images used in Task 4 (Surman, 2019, p. 100; Moses & Moses, 2013b)����������������������������������������������������������������   72 Table 5.3 Excerpt 4.6: Task 4: “Have to harpoon it before it drown”������������   73 Table 6.1 Language focus, culture focus and multimedia integration by unit��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   87 Table 7.1 Overview of the PACE Model��������������������������������������������������������   98

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Part I

Entangling Indigenous-Western Onto-­Epistemological-­Methodological Frameworks

Chapter 1

Entering the Field: Teachers Doing Research in Indigenous Classrooms

Alaska Native students consistently perform significantly lower on measures of academic achievement and have higher high school drop-out rates than their non Native peers (Alaska Department of Education & Early Development, 2021; National Center for Educational Statistics, 2021). In fact, only 64% graduate from high school after 4 years (Alaska Department of Education & Early Development, 2016). This situation can be attributed, at least in part, to colonial educational practices that are not culturally appropriate to Alaska Native students (Barnhardt & Kawagley, 1999; Kawagley, 1995; Siekmann et al., 2017). In addition, many Alaska Native students are classified by the state of Alaska as Limited English Proficient (LEP), because they come from a family/community where an Alaska Native language is still used and/or because they speak one of the regional varieties of English. Alaska has a rich linguistic and cultural landscape, including 20 Alaska Native languages (see Fig. 1.1), all in various stages of language shift. Eyak, on one end of the scale, is considered dormant since the last native speaker passed away in 2008; Yup’ik, on the other end, is still spoken by approximately 10,000 Yupiit in southwest Alaska (Krauss, 1997). Language and culture maintenance and revitalization efforts are underway for all of Alaska’s Native languages. However, despite significant political advances, such as the 2014 resolution to add all 20 Alaska Native languages as co-official languages for the State of Alaska (Adding the Inupiaq, Siberian Yupik, Central Alaskan Yup’ik, Alutiiq, Unangax, Dena’ina, Deg Xinag, Holikachuk, Koyukon, Upper Kuskokwim, Gwich’in, Tanana, Upper Tanana, Tanacross, Hän, Ahtna, Eyak, Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian languages as official languages of the state, 2014), the continued language shift has interrupted intergenerational transmission, raising the stakes for school based language and culture programs. The University of Alaska has historically provided institutional support for Alaska Native Language documentation, materials, and teaching and learning. In 1972, the State legislature established the Alaska Native Language Center (ANLC) © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Siekmann, J. Parker Webster, Multiliteracies Pedagogy and Language Teaching, Educational Linguistics 60, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31812-2_1

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Fig. 1.1  Map of Alaska Native Languages. (Krauss et al., 2011)

at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) to document and research all Alaska Native languages with the mission “to cultivate and promote Alaska’s twenty Native languages” (ANLC, 2022). In addition, the Alaska Native Language Program and its faculty and staff “provide materials for bilingual teachers and other language workers throughout the state, assist social scientists and others who work with Native languages, and provide consulting and training services to teachers, school districts, and state agencies involved in bilingual education” (ANLC). UAF is also home to the Alaska Native Knowledge Network (ANKN), which serves as a resource for compiling and exchanging information related to Alaska Native knowledge systems and ways of knowing. It has been established to assist Native people, government agencies, educators and the general public in gaining access to the knowledge base that Alaska Natives have acquired through cumulative experience over millennia. (ANKN)

Statewide, through its various regional campuses, the University of Alaska system offers language classes for several Alaska Native languages, including, Yup’ik, Inupiaq, Gwich’in, Dena’ina, Ahtna, Koyukon, Alutiiq, Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian.1 In addition, several degree programs focusing on developing Alaska Native language proficiency and educating teachers of Alaska Native languages  There are regional variations to how speakers prefer to refer to their own languages. Since we are writing for a broad audience, we are using the names of the languages as stated on the ANLC map for clarity and consistency. In the praxis chapters, we are referring to the relevant languages in the 1

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existed at the start of our collaborative work. UAF offered the following undergraduate degrees: • • • •

Certificate in Yup’ik Language and Culture, Certificate in Native Language Education (Yup’ik Option) Associates degree in Native Language Education; a B.A. in Central Yup’ik offered on UAF’s Fairbanks campus (Yupiit Nakmiin Qaneryaraat Picaryaraat-llu) • B.A. in Yup’ik Language and Culture (Yupiit Nakmiin Qaneryaraat Picaryaraat-­ llu) delivered through the regional Kuskokwim Campus located in Bethel, the hub of the Yup’ik Region. (Marlow & Siekmann, 2013) At that time (2005), there were no stand alone graduate programs specifically focused on Alaska Native languages, cultures and knowledge systems.2 The work presented in this volume coincides with other university initiatives being developed, all of which contributed to the establishment of the Indigenous PhD in 2009. Located in the Center for Cross-Cultural Studies at University of Alaska Fairbanks, the Indigenous Studies PhD program, offers coursework in advanced graduate study.There are six concentrations areas from which students can choose to focus their dissertation research: Indigenous sustainability, Indigenous studies and research, Indigenous leadership, Indigenous languages, Indigenous knowledge systems and Indigenous education/pedagogy. In addition,starting in 2008 the Mellon Foundation provided fellowships to support Alaska Native scholars towards completing doctoral degrees at UAF. Schools are often cited as a key factor in language and cultural loss through language and culture suppression and pressure to assimilate to using the English language and “western” ways of knowing and doing (Marlow & Siekmann, 2013). To this day, most schools perpetuate a monolingual “standard academic” English ideology resulting in teaching practices that are not linguistically and culturally sustaining. At the same time, schools are also viewed by many as having the potential to support language maintenance and revitalization efforts by teaching Alaska native languages through a variety of program types. Some communities, (especially in the Yup’ik region) have established programs that deliver instruction through the medium of the local Alaska Native language at the elementary school level (for example Yup’ik immersion or Yup’ik/English dual language programs). As explained below, the choice of program is influenced by the children’s language proficiency, community linguistic resources and community goals: • Early-exit bilingual programs are prevalent in communities in the Yup’ik area, where a significant number of children still enter school speaking Yup’ik at home.

way preferred by the teacher-researchers’ themselves. For example, yugtun is used to refer to what is listed as Central Yup’ik on the map. 2  UAF does offer a PhD in Anthropology as well as interdisciplinary master’s and doctoral program options.

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• One-way K-6 dual language education programs are chosen by communities on both ends of the language shift continuum, because they offer instruction both in English and the local Alaska Native language. • Second language instruction of Alaska Native languages are most common in communities where language shift to English has occurred to a greater extent, so that schools are often the only opportunity for children to encounter their ancestral language. • K-2 and K-6 immersion programs target children who speak English at home, because they emphasize not only instruction through the medium of the Alaska Native language, but also integrate Alaska Native culture and values into the curriculum. All of the Indigenous language programs listed above face many challenges, such as a lack of certified teachers who are highly proficient in the target language and who are trained in language pedagogy as well as a lack of language teaching materials. (Siekmann et al., 2019) This situation is amplified for immersion and dual language programs, because target language proficiency is centrally important to delivering instruction through the medium of the local Alaska Native language. In addition, many school officials tend to assume that any certified teacher who is proficient in the target language can provide meaningful immersion education. This leads to a lack of teacher training opportunities that specifically address the unique challenges and strategies of immersion pedagogy. Furthermore, especially in the context of Indigenous immersion and dual language programs, there is a need to develop materials in content areas such as science, social studies and language arts. Finally, compared to the relative wealth of literature on World Language immersion program, there are a limited yet growing number of empirical studies specific to Indigenous language immersion (see for example, Fortune et al., 2008; Hermes, 2007; Iokepa-­ Guerrero, 2016; Lyster, 2007; Met, 2008; Siekmann et  al., 2017; Wilson & Kamanā, 2011). Despite the many benefits of bilingualism, and at least partially due to the recent climate of high-stakes testing in English, many schools serving Alaska Native communities heavily favor strictly monolinguals program types, such as English Only, sheltered English or English pull-out programs. The linguistic ecology is further complicated by the widespread use of non-standard varieties of English, sometimes called Village English. Throughout Alaska, but especially in remote villages, the local English is widely used in the community in most linguistic domains, with the notable exception of the schools. However, while the student body in village schools is often between 97% and 100% of Alaska Native descent (the only white kids often being the children of the teachers or store owners), the vast majority of certified teachers are non Native. In addition, teacher turnover in rural schools is very high, with many teachers leaving their school district and the state of Alaska after only a few years of teaching. Furthermore, the majority of educators working in Alaska do not hold an ESL certification and in fact, may not have received much, if any, preparation for supporting emerging bilingual/bidialectal students.

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Recognizing that state standards are written for general use throughout Alaska and they don’t always address some of the special issues that are of critical importance to schools in rural Alaska, particularly those serving Alaska Native communities and students, a series of regional and statewide meetings were convened to address this issue. The meetings resulted in the development of Alaska Standards for Culturally-Responsive Schools, which are predicated on the belief that a firm grounding in the heritage language and culture indigenous to a particular place is a fundamental prerequisite for the development of culturally-healthy students and communities associated with that place, and thus is an essential ingredient for identifying the appropriate qualities and practices associated with culturally-responsive educators, curriculum and schools (ANKN). Starting in 2005, grant partners assembled stakeholders to try to address the interrelated needs of teachers in Alaska Native language programs and those in English medium programs. At that time, the state of Alaska did not offer endorsements in ESL or bilingual education. However, as described above, stakeholders at the University of Alaska Fairbanks were able to build on a number of existing university programs, such as a Reading Endorsement, a B.A. in Yup’ik Language and Culture, a Certificate in Native Education and the newly established M.A. in Applied Linguistics. This was the beginning of a 14 year collaboration, encompassing three major US Department of Education grants (see Fig. 1.2). Each effort involved a different set of stakeholders representing university faculty, school district personnel, tribal organizations, and community members. However, the core faculty and key grant partner representatives remained constant throughout, and so did our commitment to critical, participatory, action oriented, sociocultural and multimodal approaches to (language) teaching, learning and researching. As core faculty were all nonNative, teaching and doing research with-in Indigenous communities presented additional ethical, epistemological and methodological issues (Battiste, 2008; Brayboy, 2000; Smith, 1999; Swisher, 1998). In Alaska, these issues are based in ethical concerns brought about by a history of exploitive research conducted by ‘outsiders’ (Deyhle & Swisher 1997). Recognizing our positionalities, we (Sabine and Joan), as white, women western academics teaching and researching in Indigenous educational contexts and with Indigenous and non-indigenous teachers, were aware of these ethical concerns about power relationships that might serve to subordinate Indigenous/Yup’ik epistemology, methodology and representations of knowledge to the established

Fig. 1.2  Timeline depicting a series of grants supporting graduate programming supporting Alaska Native and English language instruction

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1  Entering the Field: Teachers Doing Research in Indigenous Classrooms

western academic traditions. Therefore, utilizing both Indigenous and western theoretical and methodological frameworks were critical for our work (see Chap. 2). Each grant built on the previous effort, but each was shaped by the needs of the participating educators; each foregrounding and backgrounding different facets of teaching, learning and researching. The Second Language Acquisition Teacher Education (SLATE) grant supported four Alaska Native Ph.D. students and 18 master’s students, all of whom conducted classroom-based research focusing on improving Yup’ik and English Language instruction in Southwest Alaska (Marlow & Siekmann, 2013). As a result of this grant, 18 educators from three school districts in the Yukon Kuskokwim Delta earned master’s degrees. In addition, four Alaska Native scholars earned a Ph.D.3 The Improving Alaska Native Education through Computer Assisted Language Learning (ANE CALL) grant supported a second cohort of four Alaska Native Ph.D. students and additional master’s students conducting teacher action research with a focus on technology applications in language teaching. Thirteen M.A. students (eight focusing on teaching Alaska Native languages, and five focusing on teaching English Language Learners) graduated in 2016. One Alaska Native Ph.D. student graduated in 2018, and an additional two Alaska Native Ph.D. candidates are expected to graduate in 2023. The Literacy for Emergent Bilinguals: Communities of Practice for Teacher Action Research (LEB) grant supported an additional cohort of 12 master’s students. Building on the research trajectory of previous projects, grant-funded teachers conducted teacher action research in their classrooms to support language and literacy instruction for emergent bilingual students. All projects supported teachers and communities involved in language and culture maintenance and revitalization and by building capacity for local leadership in (language) education programming through classroom research. As we were inviting participating teachers to explore concepts and strategies that would improve Alaska Native language and English language instruction, a primary goal was to build on pedagogies that includes both Indigenous and Western ways of being, knowing and doing. This book tells the stories of teachers working to improve (language both English and Alaska Native) education for Alaska native students through participatory teacher action research. This work was supported through a series of grants (see Fig. 1.2). The efforts also supported building capacity for local leadership in educational decision making. The volume is divided into three parts. Part I provides the onto-epistemological-methodological framework underpinning pedagogy and research. In Chap. 2, we trace the development of the following

 After 3 years of funding through the SLATE grant, all Ph.D. candidates were successful in applying for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, which was created for Alaska Native and Pacific Islander scholars and others committed to the advancement of Indigenous Alaskan and Pacific Islander history and culture. https://www.uaf.edu/gradsch/grants-and-­ fellowships/mellon/index.xml. Three of the Ph.D. students earned degrees with an emphasis on Applied Linguistics within the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. program, the fourth Ph.D. student earned a Ph.D. in Indigenous Studies. 3

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related pedagogical frameworks underpinning our grant programs: Indigenous and western ways of being knowing and doing, language and literacy teaching and learning, and the pedagogy of multiliteracies. Chapter 3, explains our approach to inquiry as participatory action research and relates it to the multiliteracies design cycle. All of the chapters in Part II of the book present teacher-researcher inquiries conducted in classrooms serving Indigenous students. Each chapter brings the work of two teacher-researchers together into conversation based on the focus of their inquiries. Chapter 4, discusses two studies conducted in elementary Yup’ik immersion classrooms. Samson investigated how to support Yup’ik writing development with kindergarten students through yuraq, a form of story dance. Yuraq embodies multimodal sign systems through Yup’ik ways of knowing and teaching. In her investigation regarding her kindergarten students’ multiliteracies development, Bass analyzed home and school multilingual and multimodal literacy practices such as drawings, writings, singing and chanting. All studies focus on children who were native speakers of English and were learning Yup’ik as a second language in immersion settings. Each foregrounds the connection between orality, literacy and non-linguisic sign systems. The two studies included in Chap. 5, were conducted in intermediate grade English medium classrooms in Yup’ik/English dual language schools. Both educators integrated opportunities for multimodal meaning making with their bilingual students. Through analyzing her fourth grade students’ discussions of the graphic novel Amulet: The Stonekeeper’s Curse (Kibuishi, 2008, 2009), Ashe found that students, previously classified as struggling readers, excelled at designing complex meanings of the multimodal text. Surman, designed tasks around culturally appropriate images for her sixth through eighths grade Special Education students. She also found that activities engaging students in multimodal designing, resulted in complex meaning construction. As a result of their research, both educators were able to recognize and started to question the deficiency views so often prevalent in schools serving emergent bilingual students. Furthermore, they showed the power of multimodal, collaborative, and open-ended tasks to stimulate creative expressions of learning. Chapter 6, brings together two studies focusing on counteracting language and culture attrition through technology-based projects, which were based in Yup’ik cultural knowledge and addressed the western academic content standards. Cowley’s fifth/sixth grade students were immersed in a post-apocalyptic world by reading the book Raven’s Gift (Rearden, 2013), based on the premise that people in the Yup’ik region were wiped out by a strand of Avian Flu. Through playing a mobile augmented reality game, her students learned how to survive by developing skills, such as making shelter and clothing, hunting and using medicinal plants. The game required students to interact with Elders in their community to gain the necessary skills and knowledge. Wallace designed a semester-long Yup’ik as an additional language class around traditional story genres, including qanruyutet (words of wisdom) and qulirat (instruction on the traditional knowledge system, as well as songs, chants and dance. Throughout the class, Wallace’s students created several

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multimodal, technology mediated projects, including a public service announcement and a poster. The two studies in Chap. 7, use the Indigenous pedagogical tools of storytelling and cultural activities as a way to both preserve and teach cultural, linguistic and epistemological meanings. While a large number of Yup’ik stories have been collected and recorded, traditional Alutiiq stories, unigkuat, have largely been lost. As a result, Branson went through a complex process of reclaiming the story of Grouse Girl - Qateryuk (Golder, 1907; Branson, 2015) that included translating the story from English to Alutiiq and reintroducing the cultural content lost in the English version. Her lessons included Alutiiq illustrations created to support the storytelling event as well as classroom activities. Shaginoff-Stuart recognized that her student’s hesitancy to speak their ancestral language of Ahtna in the classroom was influenced by the historical trauma of not being allowed to use the language in schools. For her inquiry, she developed an Indigenous pedagogy for language teaching that emphasized healing and well-being. Sondra created a series of lessons grounded in the connectedness of being-knowing-doing through the cultural activity of beading. In Part III, Chap. 8, brings into conversation the western and the Indigenous perspectives of the work over the past 14 years. Presented in a dialogic format, this chapter summarizes the book’s core themes and concepts and proposes next steps for carrying on and further developing the work. The themes emerged from a series of conversations Sabine and Joan had with Dr. Theresa Arevgaq John.

References Adding the Inupiaq, Siberian Yupik, Central Alaskan Yup’ik, Alutiiq, Unangax, Dena’ina, Deg Xinag, Holikachuk, Koyukon, Upper Kuskokwim, Gwich’in, Tanana, Upper Tanana, Tanacross,Hän, Ahtna, Eyak, Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian languages as official languages of the state 2014. HB216, Alaska Legislature. (2014). https://www.akleg.gov/basis/Bill/ Text/28?Hsid=HB0216Z Alaska Department of Education & Early Development. (2016). Alaska’s Public Schools: A Report Card to the Public: 2015–2016. https://education.alaska.gov/compass/report-­card Alaska Department of Education & Early Development. (2021). Alaska’s Public Schools: A Report Card to the Public: 2015–2016. https://education.alaska.gov/compass/report-­card Alaska Native Knowledge Network Alaska Standards for Culturally Responsive Schools. https:// uaf.edu/ankn/publications/guides/alaska-­standards-­for-­cult/ Alaska Native Language Center. (2022). About ANLC. https://www.uaf.edu/anlc/about-­anlc/ about-­anlc.php Barnhardt, R., & Kawagley, O. (1999). Education indigenous to place: Western science meets indigenous reality. In G. A. Smith & D. R. Williams (Eds.), Ecological education in action (pp. 117–140). SUNY Press. Battiste, M. (2008). Research ethics for protecting indigenous knowledge and heritage: Institutional and research responsibilities. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies (pp. 497–509). Sage. Branson, C. (2015). Qulianguanek litnauwilita: Let’s teach through stories. Retrieved 10 March 2022 from https://letsteachfromstories.weebly.com/

References

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Brayboy, B. M. (2000). The Indian and the researcher: Tales from the field. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 13, 415–426. Deyhle, D., & Swisher, K. (1997). Research in American Indian and Alaskan Native education: From assimilation to self-determination. Review of Research in Education, 22, 113–194. Fortune, T., Tedick, D., & Walker, C. L. (2008). Integrated language and content teaching: Insights from the immersion classroom. In T. Fortune & D. Tedick (Eds.), Pathways to multilingualism: Evolving perspectives on immersion education (pp. 71–96). Multilingual Matters. Golder, F. (1907). Aleutian stories. Alaska Native Language Archive. https://www.uaf.edu/anla/ record.php?identifier=AL950B(B076)1907 Hermes, M. (2007). Moving towards the language: Reflections on teaching in an indigenous-­ immersion school. Journal of American Indian Education, 43, 54–71. Iokepa-Guerrero, N. (2016). Revitalization programs and impacts in the USA and Canada. In M. Serafini, M. Coronel-Molina, & T. L. McCarty (Eds.), Indigenous language revitalization in the Americas (pp. 227–246). Routledge. Kawagley, A.  O. (1995). A Yupiaq worldview: A pathway to ecology and spirit. Alaska Native Knowledge Network. Kibuishi, K. (2008). Amulet, book 1: The stonekeeper. Graphix. Kibuishi, K. (2009). Amulet, book 2: The stonekeeper’s curse. Graphix. Krauss, M. E. (1997). Indigenous languages of the north: A report on their present state. In H. Shoji & J. Janhunen (Eds.), Northern minority languages: Problems of survival (pp. 1–34). National Museum of Ethnology. Krauss, M., Holton, G., Kerr, J., & West, C. T. (2011). Indigenous peoples and languages of Alaska. Fairbanks and Anchorage. Alaska Native Language Center and UAA Institute of Social and Economic Research. https://www.uaf.edu/anla/collections/map/ Lyster, R. (2007). Learning and teaching languages through content: A counterbalanced approach. John Benjamins. Marlow, P., & Siekmann, S. (2013). Communities of practice: An Alaska native model for language teaching and learning. University of Arizona Press. Met, M. (2008). Paying attention to language: Literacy, language and academic achievement. In T. Fortune & D. Tedick (Eds.), Pathways to multilingualism: Evolving perspectives on immersion education (pp. 49–70). Multilingual Matters. National Center for Educational Statistics. (2021). National assessment of educational progress. https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ Rearden, D. (2013). The Raven’s gift. Penguin Books. Siekmann, S., Parker Webster, J., Samson, S., & Moses, C. (2017). Teaching our way of life through our language: Materials development for indigenous immersion education. Cogent Education, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/2331186X.2017.1362887. Siekmann, S., Parker Webster, J., Samson, S., Moses, C., John-Shields, A., & Wallace, S. (2019). Pugtallgutkellriit: Developing researcher identities in a participatory action research collaborative. Journal of American Indian Education, 58(1–2), 124–145. Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Zed. Swisher, K. G. (1998). Why Indian people should be the ones to write about Indian education. In D. A. Mihesuah (Ed.), Natives and academics: Researching and writing about American Indians (pp. 190–199). University of Nebraska Press. Wilson, W., & Kamanā, K. (2011). Insights from indigenous language immersion in Hawai’i. In D. Tedick, D. Christian, & T. Williams Fortune (Eds.), Immersion education: Practices, policies, possibilities (pp. 36–57). Multilingual Matters.

Chapter 2

Tracing the Development of an Indigenous-­Western Pedagogy

In this chapter, we trace our conceptualization of pedagogy as a complex system of entangled theories-practices that grounds the teaching-learning, which has emerged over the course of our 14 year collaboration in engaging with teachers of Alaska Native students. We have come to understand that the notion of pedagogy is not an a priori concept existing outside of a theory-practice relationship. Rather, it is an entanglement of theories-practices that intra-act with-in nested systems. In the context of our work, we have discovered critical entanglements that have led us to an expanded conceptualization of pedagogy, which are discussed below.

2.1 The Entanglement of Indigenous and Western Ways of Being-Knowing-Doing Beginning with the Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education (SLATE) grant, a primary goal for creating program curricula and pedagogy was to bring together diverse cultural perspectives, theories and methodologies in order to gain greater understanding of the commonalities and differences across diverse knowledge systems. This goal was important because we believed the inclusion of methodological and theoretical perspectives other than the traditional western view could help alleviate the tension often expressed by Indigenous communities that western onto-epistemologies-methodologies were privileged over Indigenous ways of being-knowing-doing in many university academic programs and research projects. This “bringing together” was also critical because as Hermes (2007) points out, too often, in much educational curricula there seems to be a distinction (be it explicit or tacit) between the cultural curriculum and its goals on the one hand, and the more general academic curriculum on the other hand. This distinction often results in a new set of problems, such as in the Ojibwe context, where students interpret the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Siekmann, J. Parker Webster, Multiliteracies Pedagogy and Language Teaching, Educational Linguistics 60, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31812-2_2

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split in curriculum (i.e., culture based curriculum versus academically or discipline based curriculum) as an identity choice or dichotomy. Similarly, in our own university culture, this dualism of western/Indigenous academic traditions that was often framed in terms of hierarchical positioning, posed an ethical dilemma engendered in the notion that there are many diverse “academic cultures” grounded in onto-epistemologies-methodologies other than those privileged and accepted by the western academy (Parker Webster & John, 2010). Therefore, it became an imperative to conceptualize and create a curriculum and pedagogy for each of the grant funded programs that included both Indigenous and western academic perspectives. It must be noted that when we use the term “bringing together” the Indigenous and western academic cultures, we are doing so in the sense of ‘working the hyphen’, a term used by Fine (1994) to describe working across cultures. For Fine, the hyphen is an intensely complex space that evokes our shared past and that brings to the forefront the name of each—Indigene and colonizer—which are each produced by the other. In other words, the hyphen indicates a relationship with collaborating peoples and also their respective relationship to difference (Parker Webster & John, 2010). As such, the hyphen can be a space of learning through discovery of differences that make a difference rather than learning about the Other. This learning from difference can lead towards understandings that go beyond and extend our own cultural perspectives (Jones & Jenkins, 2008). In order to put these goals and principles into practice, we sought to conceptualize and implement the curriculum and pedagogy through two interrelated pathways: • incorporating Yup’ik/Alaska Native ontology, epistemology, traditional pedagogy, cultural activities, and languages in tandem with western pedagogical theories and practices to develop course content and methods • collaborating with Alaska Native Ph.D. students as language-culture bearers and consultants, as (co-)instructors and student advisors. Beginning with the SLATE grant and continuing throughout Improving Alaska Native Education through Computer Assisted Language Learning (ANE-CALL) and Literacies for Emergent Bilinguals (LEB), the goal of developing an Indigenous-­ western based design for curriculum and instruction followed an emerging trajectory of development influenced by the diverse expertise, experiences and needs of Indigenous Ph.D. students and faculty, the contexts and needs of the teachers-­graduate students in the programs, the specific focus of the grants (e.g. ANE-CALL emphasized technology in language teaching), and the continual programmatic and curricular adaptations and revisions that resulted from the ongoing participatory teacher action research conducted as part of the program evaluation (for descriptions of these grants, see Chap. 1). While each program contributed uniquely to this trajectory, the following core principles formed the basis of our praxis throughout the 14 years of program development: • students as active agents in program/course development • task-based group work patterned after Indigenous ways of knowing-doing • use of Alaska Native languages as medium of instruction

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• dialogic/dialectic approach to Indigenous-western theories-practices • the emergence of ellangluni-praxis Beginning with the SLATE program, the Indigenous-western approach underscored all course content and methods of instruction. For example, in the class, Multiliteracies in the Second Language Classroom, the concept of multiliteraciesmultiple semiotic sign systems, multiple modalities and multilingualism—was presented and demonstrated through collaborative and dialogic conversations exploring storytelling, dance, movement, gesture, visual art and drama from Indigenous and western theories and methodologies (Parker Webster & John, 2013). Similarly, an Indigenous-western approach was used in the Assessment for the Second Language Classroom. This course was based on a rationale addressing real issues for K–12 teachers teaching in Indigenous communities in the era of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). The course content focused on development and implementation of authentic assessments based on Indigenous community resources and funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 2001). In the Curriculum and Materials Development course, the question of how to bring technology and Indigenous knowledge and pedagogy together in culturally appropriate ways became critical to the development of the content and delivery of the course. This was underscored by tensions associated with technology in Indigenous communities. Technology had historically been considered an agent in language shift; and teachers viewed it as a hegemonic tool to monitor and control teachers and students (Siekmann & Sikorski, 2013). Much in the same way as in the Assessment and Multiliteracies classes, the Curriculum and Materials Development class sought to co-create a collaborative learning environment that engaged all participants—teachers and instructors—in bringing together Indigenous onto-­ epistemologies, values and methodologies with western technologies through dialoguing, often in Yugtun. The result was teacher-created technologically-based curriculum and materials that were culturally appropriate and in the target language. Together, the teachers discovered how to “make technology Yup’ik” (Siekmann & Sikorski, 2013, p. 72). The Policy and Planning course centered on how building an awareness of educational and linguistic policies can be used to “empower participants as change-­ agents in addressing local language goals set by the communities themselves” (Marlow & Counceller, 2013, p. 119). At the outset, the course was grounded in TribalCrit (Brayboy, 2005), an Indigenous research orientation based on western critical theory, and influenced by Indigenous research ethics (Tuhuwai-Smith, 1999). The instructors conceptualized the course as an action research project involving the class members in the process, and course content and activities were designed to bring about positive change in awareness and action within the class community. A critical turn took place within in class discussions where the key word ellangluni (becoming aware) recurred frequently. As one teacher-student explained: Becoming aware, ellangluni, can be defined as gaining an enlightened understanding of why and how things are or are not. To become aware is to have an ‘ah-ha!’ moment to make

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2  Tracing the Development of an Indigenous-Western Pedagogy a connection and see things in a new way. These moments allow individuals to make positive changes in their lives to become better people. (Angiak-Bond, 2010, p. 2)

The emergence of this Indigenous concept contributed to a deeper and more critical understanding of many of the western concepts related to language policy and planning and language revitalization and maintenance and opened up new considerations and potentials for action. The Indigenous concept of ellangluni emerged with-in many of the students’ experiences in all the courses throughout the programs. This relationship between awareness and action seems related to Freire’s (1977) (western) notion of praxis. Freire describes praxis as a transformative process of reflexive action. Engaging in praxis can help us question, challenge and build on our understandings of the relationship and entanglement of theory-practice. While similar to the Freire’s concept of praxis, Counceller (2010) reminds us that ellangluni is a unique Indigenous concept that derives from a local epistemology and emphasizes individual responsibility and communal reciprocity in action. As such an entangled relationship of ellangluni-praxis can better be explained and understood in terms of Fine’s notion of working the hyphen. The complex space where we can learn from difference and move us towards insights, which can extend our own cultural perspectives. With ANE-CALL, program development took another significant Indigenous turn particularly in terms of program instructors and faculty. Two of the SLATE Ph.D. students having earned their Ph.D.s and now assistant professors at the university, co-developed and co-taught the master’s level Yup’ik Language and Culture course. This marked a significant change in focus that emphasized Indigenous content and utilized Yugtun as the language of instruction that allowed students to write and present assignments in Yugtun. Because there were students from language groups other than Yup’ik in ANE-CALL, another SLATE Ph.D. candidate developed and taught Teaching Alaska Native Languages, a course that focused on Athabaskan and Alutiiq language and culture. This highly innovative class was co-­developed with those Athabaskan and Alutiiq students, who collaboratively created the class syllabus. Hishinlai’ designed her multilingual-multicultural approach, using the Indigenous master-apprentice method of teaching. Because each student was a “learner” of their respective language—all were learning their own language while at the same time teaching it—and at different places in their language fluency, the class assignments were individualized to meet each student’s individual language learning goals, needs and abilities. In addition, a course which focused on Indigenous Knowledge Systems, was developed and conducted entirely in Yugtun as the language of instruction and taught by Yup’ik Ph.D. candidates. In the LEB grant, the new cohort of Yup’ik Ph.D. students were primarily involved in completing their research, analysis and writing up their dissertations. Because they were still employed as full-time teachers in their schools, they were hired by the grant as consultants and participated in planning sessions for the

2.2  The Entanglement of Languages Literacies Pedagogies

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program—developing courses, contributing language-culture content—and served as advisors/members on individual master’s committees.

2.2 The Entanglement of Languages Literacies Pedagogies Another entanglement that we recognized over time was the relationship between language pedagogy and literacy pedagogy. Educators participating in the SLATE grant were almost exclusively certified teachers in either Yup’ik immersion programs or in English Only programs situated in Yup’ik communities. The vast majority of students were Yupiit, deeply steeped in traditional Yup’ik cultural knowledge, but with varying Yup’ik language proficiency, ranging from Native speaker proficiency in oral and written language to novice abilities in listening comprehension. In terms of language pedagogy, the project focused on the view that learners are active meaning makers, emphasizing the role of meaningful output and authenticity in language and literacy development. In addition, course work highlighted theories and pedagogies of (language) learning as involving multiple socially constructed sign systems, such as dance, singing, gesture and movement, all as part of the Yup’ik linguaculture. Participating teachers explored technology applications to engage their students in project and story based tasks grounded in Yup’ik culture. In particular, the multiliteracies framework, emphasizing active and multimodal meaning making drawing on Yup’ik funds of knowledge emerged as a powerful theoretical and pedagogical framework for both Yup’ik immersion and English teachers. The Improving Alaska Native Education through Computer Assisted Language (ANE CALL) grant served a slightly different demographic of educators. While about half of the participants were teachers of Yup’ik (in a variety of program types, not just immersion and with relatively lower proficiency in Yup’ik), a quarter of participants taught other Alaska Native languages (this group consisted of language learners who were also language teachers), and another quarter were non Alaska Native teachers of English. As discussed above, one way the ANE CALL grant could build on the SLATE grant was that the Alaska Native Ph.D. students were in a position to teach classes in the program, resulting in the addition of a Yup’ik Language and Culture class to the program. While the core theoretical and pedagogical concepts underlying the course work remained largely unchanged, the explicit focus of the ANE CALL grant was to integrate technology into language education by putting technology (such as i-Pads) in the hands of the students. The focus was on students, not teachers, as content creators. As such, teachers were expected to make pedagogical decisions based on the view that students are active and agentive meaning makers, and to engage them in authentic and culturally appropriate projects. This emphasis resulted in the inclusion of a course specifically focusing on Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). It was during this class that the multiliteracies concept became more explicitly articulated as a theoretical and pedagogical framework, as participants were introduced to digital storytelling, gaming, and computer mediated

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communication. Discussing the affordances of technology applications such as digital storytelling brought to the fore issues of multimodalities and meaning potential afforded by different modes. In addition, as participants grappled with how to use technology in ways that are innovative and at the same time honor traditional knowledge, the design cycle emerged as a central concept guiding pedagogical decisions. As discussed in the previous section, our program also became more strongly influenced by Alaska Native ways of being-knowing-doing, resulting in deeper exploration of the role of storytelling in traditional Alaska Native pedagogy which privileged hands-on approaches over verbal instructions and Alaska Native genres such as yuraq (dancing), yaaruiq (story knifing) and airraq (string stories), all of which are highly multimodal rather than relying primarily on the linguistic mode. In collaboration with the participating educators and our Alaska Native consultants, we identified the PACE model (Adair-Hauck & Donato, 2002a, b; Glisan & Donato, 2017) as well as project and task based approaches to language teaching as most congruent with Alaska Native cultures, values and pedagogy. ANE CALL marked a turn in our view of the linguistic landscape in rural schools serving Alaska native students, foregrounding the multilingual aspect of the multiliteracies framework. Partially due to the teacher demographics, during the SLATE grant, the emphasis was on a view of bilingualism focusing on the two named languages Yup’ik and English. While we focused on positive views of bilingualism, in hindsight, much of the course work was based on the two-monolinguals-in-onebody view of bilingualism, as both immersion and English-only programs are traditionally based on the idea that languages should be separated in the curriculum. In addition, neither program type typically takes into consideration the role of language variation, assuming a standard variety of each language as the goal. Because the ANE CALL grant served a group of teachers representing a broader variety of programs, including one cohort consisting entirely of English language arts teachers who were wondering about the applicability of Second Language Acquisition Theories to their context, and who were frequently expressing a deficit view regarding Village English, issues relating to language attitudes and dialect variation took on greater importance. Finally, Literacies for Emergent Bilinguals: Communities of Practice for Teacher Action Research (LEB), continued the trajectory towards foregrounding multiliteracies and broadening the target population of our graduate program. Because of several factors, including continued language shift to English and limited numbers of certified Yup’ik language teachers, the majority of participating teachers were non Native educators teaching in English-Only programs. In fact, only about a quarter of participating teachers were Yup’ik, of those only two were highly proficient in their language and only one taught Yup’ik. While most participating teachers taught in English medium classrooms, story based methodologies continued to be central to engaging Alaska Native students. Committed to drawing on learners’ full linguistic and cultural repertoires, we continued to emphasize bringing students’ cultural funds of knowledge into the classroom and introduced the concept of translanguaging (Garcia et  al., 2016; Garcia & Kleyn, 2016) in relation to the languages and language varieties, teachers encounter in their classrooms and communities. In

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addition, we offered Indigenous story genres as one way to allow students to also draw on their full multimodal repertoires and to engage them in the design cycle as proposed within the multiliteracies framework.

2.3 The Entanglement of Multilingualism and Multimodalities Within the Pedagogy of Multiliteracies Multiliteracies has been a core piece of the conceptual framework supporting our grant funded projects. Beginning with the Second Language Acquisition Teacher Education (SLATE) program, the organizational structure of the grant, which initiated the Graduate Research Collaborative (GRC) model, identified Literacy as one of the GRC groups. At the outset, the approach to identifying the theories and practices of literacy in the context of the SLATE program in general and the Literacy GRC in particular was situated within the concept of multiliteracies. Drawing on the work of the New London group, we grounded the concept of multiliteracies in theories of literacy and literacy practices that are always socially situated and ideologically formed (Gee, 1996; Luke, 2000; New London Group, 1996). As such, being citizens in today’s social, cultural, political, and economic worlds requires negotiation of a variety of multimodal “texts” (Jewitt & Kress, 2008) that utilize a multiplicity of socially situated Discourses/discourses (see Gee, 1996, 2014). From this perspective then, the concept of multiliteracies is situated within a socio-semiotic approach through which meaning is constructed using multiple sign systems (e.g. images, gestures, music, mathematical symbols, etc.); not relying solely on the linguistic sign system to construct meaning (see Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Street, 1995). This concept of multiliteracies reflects an ever-expanding notion of what a text is and what form it takes. When the faculty began thinking about the rationale, content and instructional strategies for the Multiliteracies summer course, specific theoretical and methodological topics that emerged from the discussions in the GRC meetings coalesced around four broad areas: (a) sociocultural theory, (b) multiliteracies and transmediation, (c) yuuyaraq, quliraq/qanemciq and yuraq, and (d) critical pedagogy. These four interrelated and overlapping theoretical and pedagogical perspectives provided a natural starting point for developing the content and format/procedures for the 2008 Summer Session class titled, Multiliteracies in Second Language Classrooms taught by Parker Webster and John (see Parker Webster & John, 2013). We created the theoretical framework for our course with the primary goal of presenting the concept of multiliteracies as inherent in all of our social and cultural practices and therefore integral to the language and literacy pedagogies of the teachers (both Yugtun and English) in the SLATE program. Supporting our concept of multiliteracies was the notion of transmediation—the process of how meaning is constructed and reconstructed as it moves from one sign system to another (Siegel, 1995). In our

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view then, multiliteracies, when conceptualized through semiotic representation and transmediation, allows for meaning making across multiple sign systems. Thus, rather than ask what a child knows, we can ask how many ways are available for this child to know (Halliday, 1973). Another key element underlying the class was the incorporation of Yup’ik epistemology, traditional Yup’ik pedagogy and cultural activities, and using Yugtun as a medium for instruction alongside western pedagogical theories and instructional practices taught in English. Our approach to teaching the content of the class included both Yup’ik and western theories and methodologies, such that we would present each perspective through a collaborative dialogue. For example, Joan would present the western literary genre categories (fiction, nonfiction, traditional, etc.) and their characteristics and Arevgaq would present the Yup’ik storytelling “genre” represented by qanemciq and quliraq both in Yugtun and English. This was followed by a group discussion about the similarities and differences across both Yup’ik and western notions of genre. In this way, our rationale and intent to present Yup’ik and western knowledge systems and pedagogical approaches in a dialogic (and sometimes dialectic) format seemed a good fit for developing the conceptualization of multiliteracies underlying the class and the SLATE program as a whole. Multiliteracies as described above continued to be a key piece of the conceptual framework supporting The Improving Alaska Native Education through Computer Assisted Language Learning (ANE-CALL) program. However, the aspect of multiliteracies as encompassing the two dimensions of ‘literacies’—the multilingual and the multimodal—took on a more central role. According to Cope and Kalantzis (2000), because multilingualism was becoming an increasingly significant global phenomenon it required an educational response, particularly in the case of minority languages (Ismail & Cadzen, 2005). Therefore, given the heritage language focus of ANE-CALL, the multilingual dimension was an important aspect to develop further. Within this context, Lincoln (2016) described multilingual in this way: Multilingual is described as having several languages and several dialects of the same language. In my context, students are emergent bilinguals of their ancestral language (Yugtun), and the language of school (English), and a non-standard variety of English called Village English. (p. 21)

As noted by Lincoln, this notion of discourse differences within a language, also had to be taken into account when discussing multilingual(ism), particularly for a teacher education program in the Alaska context. According to Cope and Kalantzis (2009): For all the signs that English was becoming a world language, it was also diverging into multiple Englishes. Whereas traditional literacy curriculum taught to a singular standard (grammar, the literary canon, standard national forms of the language), the everyday experience of meaning making was increasingly one of negotiating discourse differences. A pedagogy of Multiliteracies would need to address this as a fundamental aspect of contemporary teaching and learning. (pp. 2–3)

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The second dimension, multimodality, and its relationship as a western construct to Indigenous ways of knowing and doing was central to our conceptual framework from the beginning in SLATE. This trend was carried forward in ANE-CALL. For example, ANE-CALL student, Lincoln (2016), describes multimodal as follows: The other dimension of multiliteracies is multimodal. There are different styles of meaning making modes that help learning. Healy confirms that western learning has gone beyond just written literacy: “Texts are no longer restricted to print technology as multimodality stretches its wings; they rather morph themselves in ways that neither have a standard format nor are bound to genre as we have thought of it in the past” (2008, p. 5)…These [multimodal ways] are the kinds of meaning-making learning skills that relate to traditional Yup’ik activities such as yaaruiq (storytelling with story-knife), yuraq (eskimo-dancing), inuguat (miniature dolls), and airraq (using story-string). (p. 22)

It is important to note here that another development in understanding multimodalities occurred in ANE-CALL because of the emphasis on technology as a medium for language instruction and learning. With an increased use of technological tools to produce multimodal ‘texts’ (e.g. virtual reality games, online websites, podcasts, etc.), the concept of multimodalities and multiliteracies was brought forward into the realm of technology in the service of Indigenous language revitalization (Cazden, 2003; Ismail & Cadzen, 2005), The second aspect of multiliteracies that gained more attention in ANE-CALL was the design process. As stated by Cope and Kalantzis (2009): A multiliteracies view of design has three aspects: (1) available designs (found representational forms); (2) the designing one does (the work you do when you make meaning, how you appropriate, revoice and transform available designs); and, (3) the redesigned (how, through the act of designing, the world and the person are transformed). (p. 10)

While the design process was discussed in a general way in SLATE by virtue of being part of multiliteracies, it was not as foregrounded as in ANE-CALL, where it was re-visited and expanded upon in Materials Development course taught by Siekmann and Thorne in Summer 2014. However, it seems important to mention that the notion of transmediation, which was embedded in our initial conceptual framework for multiliteracies in the SLATE program and Summer Sessions class (2008), could be seen as a trace carried forward within the more expanded focus on the design process. One of the most significant turns in student learning occurred in the last Summer Sessions (2015), with the reading ‘The Intersection of Aboriginal Knowledges, Aboriginal Literacies, and New Learning Pedagogy for Aboriginal Students’ (Martin, 2008), a chapter in Healy’s edited volume, Multiliteracies and Diversity in Education (2008). After reading and discussing this chapter, students began to make stronger connections to the idea of available designs; and they began to recognize school-based content, literacies and modalities were among the wide array available designs that included Indigenous ways of being-knowing-being and doing. This deeper understanding contributed to the creation of many of the students’ master’s projects and helped frame the literature reviews. Multiliteracies and its two dimensions of ‘literacies’—the multilingual and the multimodal—and the expanded use of the design cycle were concepts brought

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forward into the planning and design of the conceptual framework for Literacy for Emergent Bilinguals (LEB). In this iteration, the design cycle also played a central role, particularly in building an understanding of available designs and how these could help teachers assemble resources that drew from students’ funds of knowledge, Indigenous epistemologies, Yup’ik storytelling, etc., as well as western pedagogical theories and practices. What also became foregrounded, particularly as the teachers moved into developing and implementing their research projects, was the concept of multimodality and multimodal analysis. We primarily drew on the descriptions and explanations of multimodality and multimodal analysis put forward by Jewitt (2011), Kress, 2010), O’Halloran (2005), and Van Leeuwen (2005). O’Halloran (2005) and O’Toole (1994) follow Halliday’s (1978) notion of sign systems (e.g. linguistic, mathematical symbolism, visual images/art, music, gesture/ movement, etc.) being understood as semiotic resources. Semiotic resources consist of systems of meaning that realize different functions. Constructing meaning involves choosing from systems of meaning or semiotic resources and realizing these resources through modes or multimodal phenomena. For Example: • Language (linguistic semiotic resource) can be realized through a written text (visual mode) and spoken language (oral mode). • Music can be realized through a written musical score consisting of musical symbols/notation (visual mode) and performed/played on an instrument (sound/ aural mode). In addition, from a literacy perspective, modes can also be realized in an expressive or receptive way. For example, visual art, such as a two-dimensional drawing, can be realized through use of line, shape, form, value, space, color, texture (visual mode—expressed/produced by the artist) and viewed (received and interpreted by the viewer). This seems to suggest that the positionalities of the actors involved in multimodal communicative, meaning-making acts have direct influence on the expressive-receptive action in play. Kress (2010) views modes in a somewhat different way. He does follow Halliday’s concept of meta-functions of language (ideational, interpersonal, textual)1 and applies these to a socio-semiotic construct of mode. Within this concept of social semiotics, a mode is ‘a culturally given semiotic resource for making meaning’ (p. 79) and is understood as the outcome of cultural shaping of a material. As such, ‘image, writing, layout, music, gesture, speech, moving image, soundtrack, 3D objects’ are examples of modes (p. 79). Social interactions have an effect on

 Ideational resources of a mode, sometimes called experiential meaning or presentational meaning, refer to how experiences in the world are represented. For example, in language, this could be ‘word choice’ or in an image, the placement of a figure in the field of positive and negative space. Social relations between the person/actor who makes a sign, the person who engages with it and the thing that is represented are realized in a sign and these relations are termed interpersonal resources. These relations are organized into texts and this is termed textual resources, or organizational meaning. 1

References

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choices of mode in specific instances of communication. In this conceptualization, modes offer different potentials for meaning making and these have an effect on choice of mode for specific instances of communication, e.g. writing vs. speech (p. 55). These critical pedagogical entanglements formed the basis for the pedagogy of our programs which in turn grounded and guided our students in their pedagogical approaches in their teaching. This new conceptualization of pedagogy which is situated on one side of the hyphen (teacher) is connected to the concept of research with-in a teacher-researcher relationship (see Chap. 3).

References Adair-Hauck, B., & Donato, R. (2002a). The PACE model: A story-based approach to meaning and form for standards-based language learning. The French Review, 76(2), 265–276. Adair-Hauck, B., & Donato, R. (2002b). The PACE model-actualizing the standards through storytelling: "Le bras, la jambe et le ventre". The French Review, 76(2), 278–296. Angiak-Bond, A. (2010). Becoming aware as a parent, schoolteacher, and community member. (Publication No. 1486000) [Master’s thesis, University of Alaska Fairbanks]. UMI Dissertation Publishing. Brayboy, B. M. (2005). Transformational resistance and social justice: American. Indians in Ivy League Universities. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 36(3), 193–211. Cazden. (2003). Sustaining indigenous languages in cyberspace. In J.  Reyhner, O.  Trujillo, R.  L. Carrasco, & L.  Lockard (Eds.), Nurturing native languages (pp.  53–57). Northern Arizona University Press. Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2000). Designs for social futures. In B. Cope & M. Kalantzis (Eds.), Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures (pp. 203–234). Routledge. Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2009). “Multiliteracies”: New literacies, new learning. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 4(3), 164–195. https://doi.org/10.1080/15544800903076044 Counceller, A. (2010). Niugneliyukut (we are making new words): A community philosophy of language revitalization. (Publication No. 3451167) [Doctoral dissertation, University of Alaska Fairbanks]. UMI Dissertation Publishing. Fine, M. (1994). Working the hyphens: Reinventing self and other in qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 70–82). Sage. Freire, P. (1977). Cultural action for freedom. Penguin. Garcia, O., & Kleyn, T. (2016). Translanguaging with multilingual students: Learning from classroom moments. Routledge. Garcia, O., Ibarra Johnson, S, & Seltzer, K. (2016). The translanguaging classroom: Leveraging student bilingualism for learning. Caslon. Gee, J. P. (1996). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourse. Taylor and Francis. Gee, J. P. (2014). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method (4th ed). Routledge. Glisan, E.  W., & Donato, R. (2017). Enacting the work of language instruction: High-leverage teaching practices. American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Halliday, M.A.K. (1973). Language as social perspective: Explorations in the functions of language. Edward Arnold. Halliday, M.A.K. (1978). Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of language and meaning.. Edward Arnold. Healy, A. (2008). Expanding student capacities: Learning by design pedagogy. In A.  Healy (Ed.), Multiliteracies and diversity in education: New pedagogies for expanding landscapes (pp. 2–29). Oxford University Press.

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Hermes, M. (2007). Moving towards the language: Reflections on teaching in an indigenous-­ immersion school. Journal of American Indian Education, 43, 54–71. Ismail, S. M., & Cadzen, C. B. (2005). Struggles for indigenous education and self-determination: Culture, context, and collaboration. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 36, 88–92. Jewitt, C. (2011). An introduction to multimodality. In C. Jewitt (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of multimodal analysis (pp. 14–27). Routledge. Jewitt, C., & Kress, G. (2008). Multimodal literacy. Peter Lang. Jones, A., & Jenkins, K. (2008). Rethinking collaboration: Working the indigene-colonizer hyphen. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies (pp. 471–86). Sage. Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. Routledge. Lincoln, R. (2016). Elitnauryarait qaneryaramta quliratgun: Teachings of our language through storytelling. Unpublished master’s project (University of Alaska Fairbanks). Luke, A. (2000). Critical literacy in Australia. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 43, 448–461. Marlow, P., & Counceller, A. (2013). Ellangluni: Power, awareness, and agency in language planning. In P. Marlow & S. Siekmann (Eds.), Communities of practice: An Alaska native model for language teaching and learning (pp. 119–135). University of Arizona Press. Martin, K. (2008). The intersection of aboriginal knowledges, aboriginal literacies, and new learning pedagogy for aboriginal students. In A. Healy (Ed.), Multiliteracies and diversity in education: New pedagogies for expanding landscapes (pp. 58–81). Oxford University Press. Moll, L. C., Saez, R., & Dworin, J. (2001). Exploring biliteracy: Two student case examples of writing as a social practice. The Elementary School Journal, 101, 435–445. New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60–92. O’Halloran, K. (2005). Multimodal discourse: Language, symbolism and visual images. Continuum. O’Toole, M. (1994). The language of displayed art. Leicester University Press. Parker Webster, J., & John, T. (2010). Preserving a space for cross-cultural collaborations: An account of insider/outsider issues. Ethnography and Education, 5(2), 175–291. https://doi. org/10.1080/17457823.2010.493404 Parker Webster, J., & John, T. (2013). On becoming a “Literate” person: Meaning making with multiliteracies and multimodal tools. In P.  Marlow & S.  Siekmann (Eds.), Communities of practice: An Alaska native model for language teaching and learning (pp. 73–100). University of Arizona Press. Siegel, M. (1995). More than words: The generative power of transmediation for learning. Canadian Journal of Education, 20(4), 455–475. Siekmann, S., & Sikorski, K. (2013). Reinventing technology: Computers as tools for co-­ constructing the local voice in materials development. In P.  Marlow & S.  Siekmann (Eds.), Communities of practice: An Alaska native model for language teaching and learning (pp. 77–105). University of Arizona Press. Street, B. (1995). Social literacies: Critical approaches to literacy in development, ethnography and education. Pearson. Tuhuwai-Smith. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. ZED Books. Van Leeuwen, T. (2005). Introducing social semiotics. Routledge.

Chapter 3

Participatory Teacher Action Research as Design Process

What I thought would be a routine presentation of the IRB proposal for research and the signing of consent forms, turned into a discussion that brought to the forefront the very real tensions that exist in Indigenous communities involving the dualisms of ‘researcher’ and ‘researched’. One student opened the discussion with the question: Are you going to be researching us . . . are we the subjects? This question opened the floodgates for comments from others about the damage that had been done to communities by researchers from the university. (Parker Webster & John, 2010, p. 179)

3.1 Participatory Teacher Action Research Conducting research in Indigenous contexts has been an ongoing topic of ethical, epistemological and methodological discussions in the literature from the perspective of both university-based researchers and the peoples and communities being researched (Battiste, 2008; Brayboy, 2000; Deyhle & Swisher, 1997; Lipka, 1998; Parker Webster & John, 2010; Swisher, 1996; Thorne et al., 2015; Tuhuwai-Smith, 1999). Other conversations center around onto-epistemological-methodological dilemmas faced due to an often incongruous fit between western methods of collecting, analyzing and presenting data and those more culturally appropriate to Indigenous ways of being-knowing-doing (Brayboy & Deyhle, 2000; Foley, 2003; Gegeo & Watson-Gegeo, 2001; John, 2010; Tuhuwai-Smith, 1999; Wilson, 2008). As illustrated in the opening excerpt to the chapter, while many Indigenous communities in Alaska have continued to allow ‘collaborations’ with outsider

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Siekmann, J. Parker Webster, Multiliteracies Pedagogy and Language Teaching, Educational Linguistics 60, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31812-2_3

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institutions such as the university, a historical memory of often exploitative research, privileging western methods that contributed little to no benefit to the community still lingers and can be met with distrust and resistance to once again becoming the ‘researched’. Because of this history, at the outset of our series of grant-related work, high priority was given to the selection of an appropriate research methodology to use for ongoing project evaluations as well as one that could also be a good fit for the graduate students to use in their classroom-based inquiries. The idea was that through this nested relationship of faculty and students involved in classroom-based research— faculty in the university classroom and graduate students in K-12 classrooms—both could inform one another (Siekmann et al., 2019). We knew that the approach to research had to allow for the involvement of all participants within these nested communities in an ongoing process of collaborative learning through inquiry. This also meant that in order to counter the historical dualism of a western/Indigenous relationship of academic theories and research often shaped by hierarchical positioning, the approach would have the potential to re-conceptualize the use of established theories and methodologies sanctioned by western onto-epistemologies and methodologies of the university academic tradition alongside those of Indigenous ways of being-knowing-doing that privilege a ‘methodology’ of storytelling and the ‘doing’ of cultural activities (Brayboy, 2000). Grande (2004) further explains such a notion of methodology as a space of engagement where both Indigenous and non-­ Indigenous scholars can come together in ways that can redefine the colonialist encounter. This is much the same way as Pratt (1991) describes the potentials for the coming together of the colonized and colonizer within the ‘contact zone’, which can be a space for collaboration, creativity, mutual understanding and learning. For us, the most ethical and appropriate choice of approach for our nested inquiries was Participatory Teacher Action Research (PTAR). Participatory Teacher Action research stems from Action Research (AR) which is attributed to the work of Kurt Lewin (1946). While Lewin was not the first to utilize or advocate the model of AR, he was the first to develop a theory of AR that legitimized it as a systematic and theoretically based form of social science research. Over the decades similar research approaches that have their roots in AR, such as Participatory Action Research (PAR) and Teacher Action Research (TAR), have developed and been put into practice by various practitioners in diverse fields. AR and PAR have been utilized with Indigenous and Aboriginal peoples in Australia, New Zealand and Canada focusing on issues involving sovereignty, community health, and social justice (see for example Kemmis & McTaggart, 2000). AR is commonly referred to as a cycle involving planning, acting, observing and reflecting (Herr & Anderson, 2005), and draws on the work of Freire in the 1970s in which he created a type of research that utilizes issues of importance to community members—in the case of Freire (1977), literacy issues—and these issues are studied collaboratively with the community involved. In terms of an approach to our program evaluation, PTAR involved all stakeholders representing a variety of perspectives by providing input on specific needs: tribal council assessment of needs of communities; school district needs for professional

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development for teachers to enhance student learning; teachers’ needs for professional development; university faculty needs to build capacity for Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars-researchers to work with Indigenous schools and communities. This input was critical not only to determine how and why the specific program of curriculum and instruction should be developed in the initial planning phase, but also to actively involve stakeholders in the ongoing process as new needs arose. We also looked to teacher action research (TAR) as an approach for teachers to use in their own research with Indigenous student populations and in the school-­ communities where they lived and taught. Action research seemed very appropriate as a research approach for the teachers because of its history as a tool for inquiry with Indigenous populations. Additionally, TAR, was a good fit because the process mirrored the cyclic nature of teaching. Teachers—both university faculty and K-12 classroom carry out similar processes of planning, observing and analyzing in their practice, both in an intentional way—lesson planning, assessing student work—and in intuitive, “in the moment” ways, where they adjust and revise the course of the lesson according to the needs of the students. Beginning with SLATE and continuing with ANE-CALL and LEB, all stakeholders (teachers, faculty, grant-evaluator, community partners) were all engaged in participatory action research (PAR) AND teacher action research, what we call participatory teacher action research (PTAR). In order to facilitate PTAR as a process involving all stakeholders, we established the graduate research collaborative (GRC) model (Marlow & Siekmann, 2013). Our conceptualization of the GRCs began with the goal of establishing relationships within a collaborative community of research and practice composed of both graduate students and faculty. A primary concern in building our conceptual framework for the GRC model of mentoring was focused on how to create a space where all stakeholders could participate in a truly collaborative and equitable conversation that brought together their cultural perspectives and life experiences. Our understanding of the history of apprehension and mistrust by Indigenous communities for university-based researchers and academic programs that privileged the established Western academic knowledge system, led us toward a mentoring model that was more inclusive of Indigenous onto-epistemologies and methodologies—ways of being-knowing-doing—that supported equity and trust between members of diverse cultural groups with-in such heterogeneous communities (Parker Webster & Siekmann, 2013). This became the core principle of the GRCs and guided our design of a space (both physical and virtual) where collaborative and reciprocal conversations about teaching and researching could take place. In all of the programs, one faculty member headed each GRC, and each GRC consisted of one Alaska Native doctoral candidate and up to six MA candidates. In addition to cohort meetings during summer sessions, regular GRC meetings were held. These regular meetings provided support for the development of individual and group research agendas and provided a space for ongoing conversations about actual researching-teaching events and experiences among student peers, doctoral students, and faculty members. In an effort to connect course content directly to

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research, the MA candidates were also encouraged to adapt individual course assignments directly to their intended research. This further supported, in a very authentic way, the cyclic and iterative processes of PTAR in a sustained and dynamic way, which was in contrast to many graduate programs where the common trajectory is the completion of all coursework before engaging in any thesis or project-­ related research. A critical turn in our conceptualization of PTAR occurred through our work in ANE-CALL. In our work with the Ph.D. students in their dissertation research, we formed a research collaborative to study the onto-epistemology-methodology of PTAR from Indigenous-western traditions and orientations. We spent many hours talking about the participatory and action-based nature of PTAR and how these relate to the parallel processes of teaching and researching; and in particular how each of us participated in the research collaborative (Siekmann & Parker Webster, 2019). From our discussions about the cyclic nature of PTAR, we began to question what appeared in representations of the cycle as discrete steps, separating out action as a sometimes final step. Our discussions turned to how the Indigenous/Yup’ik concept of upterrlainarluta, “always getting ready”, as it relates to cultural and subsistence activities in Yup’ik culture could be applied to the notion of action in the teaching-researching cycle. As our students explained: when hunters go hunting, they do not wait until they are ready to go out to hunt to prepare for the action; rather, they are always preparing for the activity both mentally and physically. There is no separation of tasks. In other words, action is continuous, both in the mind and in physical labor. The physical act of hunting is interconnected within the ongoing and nested cycle of the action of upterrlainarluta. From these discussions emerged our Indigenous-western version of the PTAR cycle, in which action is always inherent in each interconnected and nested “step” of the process as a whole: observing-­ action, planning-action, taking-action, reflexive-action (Fig. 3.1). Thus, through these parallel processes of PTAR, all stakeholders were also working together in action-based processes of inquiry that informed one another. As such, in PTAR action is not unidirectional—it is not subject (faculty-western-­ academic) acting on object (Indigenous- nonIndigenous-­ students-­ teachers-­ community members) nor is it a final step. Rather the action is reciprocal and intersubjective (subject with subject not subject on object) through joint collaborative activity (Parker Webster & Siekmann, 2013; Rogoff et al., 2003) and is inherent in every cycle of teaching-researching. As discussed in Chap. 1, the multiliteracies pedagogy became more prominent in our conceptual framework over the ongoing development of the projects. Rather than seeing multiliteracies as a pedagogical framework and PTAR as methodological framework, we recognized that they share an onto-epistemological-­ methodological connection and are entangled.

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Fig. 3.1 Participatory Teacher Action Research Spiral (Siekmann et al., 2019, p. 133)

3.2 Participatory Teacher Action Research as Design Process The New London Group proposed the design cycle as an active, meaning making, and culturally shaped process, with the aim is to: design learning experiences through which learners develop strategies for reading the new and unfamiliar, in whatever form these may manifest themselves. Instead of simply telling learners of authoritative designs, it asks the question of design, or the relation of meaning form to meaning function. (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009, p. 11) Viewing learners as designers of meanings is in direct opposition to the transmission model of learning, which views learners as recipients of knowledge and limits the role of teachers to that of passive technicians, imparting a set of agreed upon, canonical meanings.

The three elements of the design cycles within a pedagogy of multiliteracies, Available designs, Designing and the Redesigned, are summarized by Cope and Kalantzis (2009) in the following table (Table 3.1). According to Cope and Kalantzis (2009), “Available Designs are the found or discernable patterns and conventions of representations (p. 175).” The idea of found and discernable patterns is important, because it situates the available designs within

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Table 3.1  The “What” of multiliteracies—designs of meaning (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009, p. 176) Available designs Designing The redesigned

Found and findable resources for meaning: culture, context and purpose-specific patterns and conventions of meaning making. The act of meaning: Work performed on/with available designs in representing the world or other’s representations of it, to oneself or others. The world transformed, in the form of new available designs, or the meaning designer who, through the very act of designing, has transformed themselves (learning).

observable actions. However, it is also important to note that these patterns may not be codified, and therefore are always in flux and not static. In addition, patterns that may be visible do not necessarily reflect an understanding that can be explicitly articulated by the actor. In other words, we act within patterns of activity but we cannot always explain why we are doing these actions in this context. In the context of literacy instruction, which was the focus of the work of the New London Group, these patterns would include an expanded notion of “texts”, that included visual, oral, written, etc. representations. These textual patterns would also include how to carry out and participate according to socially accepted norms and values within various community and cultural activities. In this view, available designs are always situated with-in sociocultural contexts. “Designing is the act of doing something with Available Designs of meaning…” (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009, p. 176). In the act of doing, the meaning-maker is an actor who draws from a diverse and complex array of available designs to engage in the action of designing. This re-positions the learner as active designers of meanings, rather than passive recipients of knowledge. In other words, the actor-designer produces rather than reproduces knowledge, which through the act of designing “creates a new design, an expression of their voice which draws upon the unique mix of meaning-making resources, the codes and conventions they happen to have found in their contexts and cultures” (p. 176). Therefore, designing is an act of transformation, which is the essence of learning. The redesigned are, “... the traces of transformation that are left in the social world” (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009, p.  176). As such, texts that were produced in designing become The redesigned, which, in turn, become new discernable patterns of meaning or new available designs. This is how the act of designing changes representations of meanings available to others and to oneself. In other words, what is redesigned through the design process is not only the physical-material designs (e.g. new visual, written, oral “texts”) but also the designer herself. Over time, the design cycle became one of the key concepts in relation to language and literacy pedagogy. In discussing instructional decisions, we emphasized cultural foundations of being-knowing-doing, and learners as active meaning makers. We also came to realize that the design cycle is a useful framework for conceptualizing PTAR (see Fig. 3.2). While within the pedagogy of multiliteracies available designs are the starting point, within the PTAR design process observing action is an entry point leading to inquiry, which we view as teaching and researching. In PTAR, this entry point is not

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Fig. 3.2  PTAR as design process

like a starting line in a race. Much like a river, the water is always moving. Stepping into the river does not mark the starting point for the river, rather it marks an action taken by the person. Similarly, in teaching and learning, action and activity are ongoing processes into which the teacher-researcher steps. In PTAR, the entry point is like dipping your bucket in the river in order to articulate wonderings at a particular moment in time. In PTAR, wonderings, purposes and questions are shaped within the inquiry and develop and change over time. Both teaching-learning, which is the focus of  multiliteracies and the design cycle, and teaching-researching, which is the focus of the PTAR cycle, involve identifying and assembling available designs, which can utilize both instructional resources and inquiry techniques. In our work with-in schools serving Indigenous students, these available designs include not only western notions such as instructional materials, conceptual frameworks, and research techniques, but also Indigenous ways of being-knowing-doing that are situated in Indigenous ways of knowledge transmission (e.g. Elder storytelling) subsistence and cultural activities. When assembling these available designs, the teacher-researcher should critically analyze the “texts” in order to conceptualize a framework for designing an inquiry that is onto-epistemological-methodologically aligned (Lather, 1986; St. Pierre, 2014). In PTAR, designing includes related actions of planning and implementing inquiry (teaching-researching). Planning is a common practice for teachers in their

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daily instruction. They first create lesson plans, which is similar to assembling available designs that draw from learning objectives, materials, specific activities students will engage in, formal and information assessments, etc. Teacher-researchers also engage in planning for their inquiry, drawing from various research techniques and data collection procedures that are also part of their instructional planning, for example, samples of students work, assessments, etc. Implementing entails teaching the lesson and collecting data, as well as reflective analysis and revisions or additions to design elements (both in terms of teaching and researching). These processes are intra-active and iterative. The re-designed includes both ‘process’ and ‘product’. While the New London Group focuses on learners as designers and as the redesigned through the design process, in PTAR, the redesigned “text” also include instructional resources and practices, as well as the teacher-researcher herself, all of which become new available designs.

References Battiste, M. (2008). Research ethics for protecting indigenous knowledge and heritage: Institutional and research responsibilities. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies (pp. 497–509). Sage. Brayboy, B. M. (2000). The Indian and the researcher: Tales from the field. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 13, 415–426. Brayboy, B., & Deyhle, D. (2000). Insider-outsider: Researchers in American Indian communities. Theory Into Practice, 39(3), 163–169. Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2009). “Multiliteracies”: New literacies, new learning. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 4(3), 164–195. https://doi.org/10.1080/15544800903076044 Deyhle, D., & Swisher, K. (1997). Research in American Indian and Alaskan native education: From assimilation to self-determination. Review of Research in Education, 22, 113–194. Foley, D. (2003). Indigenous epistemology and indigenous standpoint theory. Social Alternatives, 22(1), 44–52. Freire, P. (1977). Cultural action for freedom. Penguin. Gegeo, D., & Watson-Gegeo, K. (2001). ‘How we know’: Kwara’ae rural villagers doing indigenous epistemology. The Contemporary Pacific, 13(1), 55–88. Grande, S. (2004). Red pedagogy: Native American social and political thought. Rowman & Littlefield. Herr, K. G., & Anderson, G. (2005). The action research dissertation. Sage. John, T. (2010). Yuraryararput Kangiit-Llu: Our ways of dance and their meanings. (publication no. 3421513) [doctoral dissertation, University of Alaska Fairbanks]. UMI dissertations. Kemmis, S., & McTaggart, R. (2000). Participatory action research. In N. K. Denzin, Y. S. Lincoln, & L. T. Smith (Eds.), Handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies (pp. 567–605). Sage. Lather, P. (1986). Research as praxis. Harvard Educational Review, 56(3), 257–277. Lewin, K. (1946). Action research and minority problems. Journal of Social Issues, 2(4), 34–46. Lipka, J. (1998). Transforming the culture of schools: Yup’ik Eskimo examples. Lawrence Erlbaum. Marlow, P., & Siekmann, S. (2013). Communities of practice: An Alaska native model for language teaching and learning. University of Arizona Press. Parker Webster, J., & John, T. (2010). Preserving a space for cross-cultural collaborations: An account of insider/outsider issues. Ethnography and Education, 5(2), 175–291. https://doi. org/10.1080/17457823.2010.493404

References

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Parker Webster, J., & Siekmann, S. (2013). Mentoring: Engaging communities of practice. In P. Marlow & S. Siekmann (Eds.), Communities of practice: An Alaska native model for language teaching and learning (pp. 27–50). University of Arizona Press. Pratt, M. L. (1991). Arts of the contact zone. Profession, 91, 33–40. Rogoff, B., Paradise, R., Arauz, R., Correa-Chavez, M., & Angelillio, C. (2003). First hand learning through intent participation. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 175–203. Siekmann, S., & Parker Webster, J. (2019). Critical intercultural conversations: Using activity systems analysis as a tool for educational ethnography. Multicultural education [special issue]. Ethnography and Education, 14(3), 377–393. Siekmann, S., Parker Webster, J., Samson, S., Moses, C., John-Shields, A., & Wallace, S. (2019). Pugtallgutkellriit: Developing researcher identities in a participatory action research collaborative. Journal of American Indian Education, 58(1–2), 124–145. St. Pierre, E. (2014). A brief and personal history of qualitative research. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 30(2), 2–19. Swisher, K. (1996). Why Indian people should be the ones to write about Indian education. American Indian Quarterly, 20(1), 83–90. Thorne, S. L., Siekmann, S., & Charles, W. (2015). Ethical issues in indigenous language research and interventions. In P.  I. De Costa (Ed.), Ethics in applied linguistics research: Language researcher narratives (pp. 142–160). Routledge. Tuhuwai-Smith. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. ZED Books. Wilson, S. (2008). Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods. Fernwood Publishing.

Part II

Stories of Praxis

Introduction to Part II: Context The participatory teacher action research (PTAR) studies included in Part II were conducted in classrooms serving Indigenous students in primarily remote Alaska Native villages, which are only accessible by small planes, boats and snow machines. Alaska Native languages and cultures represented in these praxis chapters are Yup’ik, Alutiiq, and Ahtna. While they all share degrees of language shift to English, each has a unique historical and geographic context that are marked by influences related to outside contact. Central Yup’ik is traditionally spoken throughout southwestern Alaska, from Norton Sound to Bristol Bay, an area covering more than 112,000 square miles (roughly the size of Arizona; see Fig. 1.1). In 1997, the number of Yup’ik speakers was estimated to be 10,000, mainly in their 30s and 40s (Krauss, 1997). While there are no more recent counts available, and despite efforts to maintain and revitalize all Alaska Native languages, today there are most likely fewer first language speakers of Yup’ik (see Chap. 1). Although more than 60 percent of schoolchildren in this region are classified as limited English proficient by current Alaska state standards, less than a quarter of all Yup’ik villages—mainly those on the lower Kuskokwim River, on Nelson Island, and between these two landmarks—have a majority of children growing up with Yup’ik as their first language. There is great variation from village to village, but in some villages— especially those in the Yukon Delta and Bristol Bay regions—only the grandparental generations still speak the language. In many rural schools, the Alaska Native student population is 97% (Parker Webster & Siekmann, 2015). Yup’ik medium instruction is available to some students mainly at the elementary level. Institutionally, at all levels of K-20 education, however, Alaska Native individuals are underrepresented, and tend to be positioned in junior or support positions at the margins of the decision-making processes. In many public schools serving Alaska Native students, certified teachers are predominately white. For example, the Lower Kuskokwim School District, a long term partner in the grants discussed in Chap. 1, employs approximately 400 certified teachers,

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only about 20% of whom are Alaska Native. Throughout Alaska’s rural school districts, the vast majority of teachers are non Alaska Native educators, often moving to Alaska right after graduating with their teacher education degrees from outside of Alaska and staying for just a few years. As a result, the State of Alaska has one of the highest teacher turn-over rates in the US (Institute of Educational Sciences, 2021). Many of these educators, particularly those who are new to Alaska, are often not prepared to teach Alaska Native students, many of whom are emergent bilinguals. They also do not stay in their positions long enough to gain any experience with these student populations and therefore, have little or no opportunity for professional development focused on serving the needs of these students in culturally and linguistically appropriate ways. This limited professional development, specifically for certified teachers in the area of language teaching, was the impetus for developing grants that supported graduate programming and classroom-based research with Indigenous students (see Chap. 1). In each of the praxis chapters, we re-present the teachers’ voices, who were participants in our graduate programs, through excerpts taken from their theses and projects. All chapters in Part II share a theoretical grounding in a pedagogy of multiliteracies, integrate Indigenous knowledge systems and employ PTAR as the research methodological framework. Each chapter presents pairs of inquiries that share similar contexts in terms of grade levels and research focus and is organized following the PTAR design cycle (see Fig. 3.2) of wonderings, available designs, designing and the redesigned. The available design sections bring into conversation the concepts that the teacher-researchers assembled for their studies. These highlight the similarities and differences that make a difference between the conceptual frameworks of each, and how this shapes their work. In the designing sections, each teacher’s work is presented separately illustrating how each planned, developed and implemented their inquiry. The re-designed brings both teacher-researchers’ inquiries back into conversation, focusing on the transformative actions that shaped changes in being-knowing-doing as teachers and researchers.

References Institute of Educational Sciences. (2021). 2021 Educator Retention and Turnover in Alaska. Retrieved March 15, 2022, from https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs/regions/northwest/pdf/ak-­ educator-­retention-­infographic-­update.pdf Krauss, M. E. (1997). Indigenous languages of the north: A report on their present state. In H. Shoji & J. Janhunen (Eds.), Northern minority languages: Problems of survival (pp. 1–34). National Museum of Ethnology. Parker Webster, J., & Siekmann, S. (2015). Ethnography: Actors and actions in the fields. [Conference session]. Oxford Ethnography and Education Conference.

Chapter 4

Multimodalities in Yup’ik Immersion

This chapter presents two studies conducted by Sally Samson (2010) and Sarah Bass (2010) in elementary Yup’ik immersion classrooms, focusing on kindergarteners’ early bilingual/biliterate development. Drawing on both western and Indigenous available designs for teaching-researching, each foregrounds the connection between orality, literacy and other non-linguistic social semiotic sign systems. Sally Samson and Sarah Bass are both native speakers of Yugtun and participants in the very first cohort of the grant funded graduate programs. Both studies in this chapter were carried out in lower elementary Yup’ik immersion classrooms. In order to reverse language-shift to English, some communities on the traditional lands of the Yup’ik people have established immersion schools. Immersion schools are largely viewed as strong bilingual school models resulting in high levels of target language proficiency as well as high levels of overall academic achievement (Baker & Wright, 2017). In addition, in language maintenance and revitalization efforts, immersion schools are also viewed as playing an important role in cultural maintenance (Hermes et al., 2012; Hoffman, 2010; May, 2013; Wilson & Kamanā, 2011). Immersion schools serve students in largely English-speaking communities who are speaking English as their primary language and are learning Yup’ik as an additional language (even though there are a few Yup’ik first language speakers enrolling in these programs as well). In Bethel, the regional hub, where Sally teaches, Ayaprun Elitnaurik was established as a K-6 charter school in 1995 and provides an alternative to several English medium elementary schools. In Hooper Bay, where Sarah teaches, the community opted for K-3 Yugtun immersion for all students. In both schools, Yugtun is the primary medium of instruction in kindergarten, comprising at least 90%. One of the key characteristics of immersion programs and particularly those teaching Indigenous languages and cultures is that students have to develop oracy and literacy at the same time, while also learning content in other subjects (such as math, social studies and science) through their new language. In contrast to elementary © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Siekmann, J. Parker Webster, Multiliteracies Pedagogy and Language Teaching, Educational Linguistics 60, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31812-2_4

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education for students who come to school speaking the language that is the medium of instruction (e.g. monolingual English speaking children entering an English medium kindergarten class), in Indigenous immersion schools, students generally do not speak the languages used at school, setting up unique teaching and learning challenges especially in kindergarten. While each student’s linguistic and cultural funds of knowledge are unique, the vast majority of kindergarteners entering Sally’s and Sarah’s classrooms do not speak or understand Yugtun. The language of initial literacy instruction further sets Indigenous immersion education apart from other strong forms of bilingual education such as dual language. While students in some bilingual programs, including dual language, receive initial literacy instruction in their home or primary language, in Indigenous immersion programs, language arts is taught in the students’ ancestral language, which is usually not spoken extensively in their homes and communities.

4.1 Wonderings As Sarah and Sally stepped into their inquiries, their initial wonderings stemmed from their observations as teachers that the development of their students’ school literacy practices could be expanded through a pedagogy that was situated within Yup’ik cultural activities. Through continued observations of their teaching practices that were juxtaposed with the course content they were reading as graduate students and beginning teacher-researchers, they began to recognize there was a relationship between western notion of multiliteracies-modalities as being embedded within Yup’ik storytelling genres, such as yuraq (dancing) and yaarruiq (storyknifing). For Sarah, these wonderings coalesced around the relationship between home and school multiliteracies and their use in her instruction, and formed the basis for her primary research question: “What home and school factors contribute to the multiliteracy development in a kindergarten classroom?” (Bass, 2010, p. 23). Embedded in this question is the concept of “funds of knowledge” (Moll et al., 2001). Funds of knowledge conceptualizes knowledge as situated within a milieu that encompasses cultural, community and family ways of knowing and being, which tacitly implies the western concepts of multimodalities and multiliteracies. These concepts are found within Indigenous ways of being-knowing-doing and practiced in the Alaska Native/Indigenous subsistence and traditional cultural activities of storytelling and Yup’ik dance (yuraq). Sarah’s wonderings led her to formulate and focus the rationale and purpose for her study, which in turn helped her identify the available designs that would be needed in her designing. As she states: By using culturally relevant materials, funds of knowledge, and multiliteracies, such as singing/chanting and yuraq,..I believe that a teacher will have more success in teaching their students reading, writing, and math both in Yup’ik and English. (Bass, 2010, p. 2)

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Sally focused her initial wonderings on the affordances of yuraq (dancing) for expanding writing instruction beyond the linguistic mode, which led her to her researcher-teacher question of: “How can the use of Eskimo dancing as a precursor to orthographic writing instruction help develop writing skills in emergent learners of Yup’ik as a second language, who are students in a Yup’ik immersion kindergarten classroom?” (Samson, 2010, p. 5). Yuraq is an important practice in Yup’ik culture. It is a traditional Yup’ik multiliteracies event that involves movement, gestures, drumming and singing to tell stories. As such, yuraq orchestrates the meaning-­ making process in multimodal and culturally significant ways. As a kindergarten teacher in a Yup’ik immersion classroom, Sally was drawing on available designs originating both in western (6 + 1 trait writing, see Education Northwest (n.d.) and Yup’ik (yuraq) literacy practices: The reason I wanted to conduct my research on writing was to improve my instruction on writing, to include the 6+1 Traits in my instruction, and to see if Yuraq could be incorporated into an academic area. I also wanted my students to understand the meaning behind the dances, and that there are stories behind their performances. (Samson, 2010, p. 5)

The Yup’ik immersion school in Bethel was established to support efforts to maintain and revitalize Yugtun use in Yup’ik families and communities. As such, the program emphasizes listening, speaking, reading and writing proficiency in Yugtun as well as Yup’ik traditional knowledge. As the vast majority of her students enter kindergarten not speaking or understanding Yugtun, Sally was concerned with integrating Yup’ik ways of being-knowing-doing into all aspects of the curriculum, all within an orientation towards her students as active meaning makers. In summary then, both Sally and Sarah began their teacher-researcher journeys with wonderings that led to emerging questions. These helped to frame the basis for the rationales and purposes underlying their research and were entangled in several ways. The common purpose underlying both inquiries was creating a pedagogical approach to teaching their heritage language (Yugtun) to young children in an immersion context. The purpose was also driven by the difficulties experienced in their practice of teaching Yugtun using a western pedagogy, which was a result of their western teacher training and western public school policies that was in tension with Yup’ik ways of knowing and doing.

4.2 Available Designs The use of a multiliteracies pedagogy, grounded in Yup’ik ways of being-knowing-­ doing was foregrounded in both Sarah and Sally’s wonderings and emerging research questions, which formed the basis for identifying and assembling available designs for their inquiries. For Sally, the focus on yuraq was a direct link to her understanding of Yup’ik dance and the gestures as semiotic symbols that told the story, and were in parallel to writing the story, using a lexicon of symbols, to provide a ‘text’ to the song being sung and drumming performed. Similarly, Sarah

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connected the cultural practice of yaarruiq (storyknifing),which uses a lexicon of social semiotic symbols that are drawn while telling a story, to her instructional design for teaching emergent literacy. The understanding that literacy was not limited to the linguistic semiotic sign system, which is reflected in much of western pedagogical approaches, was central to Sally and Sarah as they assembled the available designs for teaching-researching. Their understanding of multiliteracies was based in a Yup’ik onto-epistemology-methodology that put multiple semiotic resources and modalities at the center of being-knowing-doing.

4.2.1 Yup’ik Ways of Being-Knowing-Doing As Yup’ik women and first language speakers, both Sally and Sarah grew up immersed in a culture that is framed by Yup’ik onto-epistemology and methodology. Engaging in Yup’ik ways of being-knowing-doing (yuuyaraq) through cultural activities such as storytelling (qanemciyaraq), storyknifing (yaarruiyaraq) and dancing (yuraq), and the subsistence activities of hunting and gathering, all work together holistically to guide Yup’ik people in “becoming a human being” (John, personal conversation, October, 15, 2019). While Yup’ik ways of being-knowing-doing provided a firm foundation for both Sarah’s and Sally’s approaches to teaching and researching in their Yup’ik immersion classrooms, they were still working within the western system of education. As such, both were grappling with how to teach Yup’ik language and culture within a western pedagogical framework. While both held underlying teaching-researching goals aimed toward developing an Indigenized pedagogy, their entry points and praxis trajectories proceeded along different paths that converged and diverged in unique ways. Sarah’s entry began with a focus on home-school connections that foregrounds Yup’ik (yupiaq) onto-epistemology-methodology. Citing Indigenous scholars and researchers, Sarah describes these ways of being-knowing-doing as holistic concepts of connectedness and relatedness. We [Yup’ik people] believe that everything in the universe is connected. Be it human or not human - animals, the plants, the ground have a spirit, the “Yua”. Kawagley (1999) in his article explains this further and in detail the ways and beliefs of Yupiaq (Yup’ik). This belief system is similar to the worldview and beliefs of the Maori, who believe that everything is connected, the person, the environment. Another article that comes to mind is the reading from the aboriginals from Australia (Martin, 2008), who believe that everything is "related" from the environment to the people. (Bass, 2010, p. 14)

What is unique to this entry point is Sarah’s beginning with an Indigenous-Yup’ik onto-epistemology-methodology to which she then connects the concept of funds of knowledge put forth by Gonzalez, et al. (2005), and published in western academic literature. Sarah describes it this way: Funds of knowledge is a term that is used to describe the prior learning/acquiring students bring to school. They are skills and knowledge learned in the home and community. For

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example, some funds of knowledge my students bring to class are living in a traditional lifestyle of hunting and gathering, [being] exposed to Yup’ik and English language, coming from a home where traditional arts and crafts are made, and having technology gadgets at home. (Bass, 2010, p. 2)

In Yup’ik culture, the concept of learning is expressed through observation and interaction with the environment. As Sarah states: Learning takes place in a social context through collaboration and interaction with others and their environment (Barnhardt & Kawagley, 2005). Therefore, educators have to take into consideration that learning and acquiring has taken place long before the student came into a classroom. In my case, teaching in an Indigenous community, where there is [a] clash of those still living traditionally in a hunting and gathering (survival) society and that of being exposed to living in a cash economy, which involves traveling to town and owning those technological gadgets as computers, hand held games, television, and movies. These involve images and experiences that are not historically or culturally grounded in a rural community such as the village I teach in. Even with all these “outside” influences and modern technology that is different from a traditional subsistence lifestyle, children in this village still learn by observing, which is a hallmark of traditional Yup’ik pedagogy. Barnhardt and Kawagley (2005) explain the Indigenous knowledge systems and Native ways of learning. They state “traditionally an Indigenous person acquired knowledge by direct experience in the natural world” (p.3). My interpretation of this and application to my teaching is that these students have been exposed to many types of literacy events (multiliteracies) in their homes and in their communities, their environment, their world. (Bass, 2010, p. 11)

Sally’s entry into assembling her available designs began with her recognition of the connection between yuraq (Yup’ik dancing) and the gestures used by dancers to write the story told through the dance and song. She then connected these Yup’ik available designs to the concept of writing in terms of a linguistic semiotic resource used in the western concept of literacy. For Sally, “Yuraq is telling a story, told by using multiple sign systems and a way of making meaning. The story is told through music, singing, drama, and gestures” (Samson, 2010 p. 22). Sally also viewed this connection in terms of available designs that included western approaches to teaching literacy and writing across disciplinary areas and the Indigenous-Yup’ik approach to learning and meaning making as a multimodal event. As Sally explains: Being literate is more than having the ability to read and write…[it is] showing students that writing does not have to be just pencil and paper, but that it can be in other ways. As I thought more about the subjects that I teach, I thought of how reading and writing are embedded in other subjects (math and thematic units which combine science and social studies). The only subject that stood alone was Yuraq. As I was pondering about the way Yuraq is introduced, I thought of why Yuraq has to be alienated from other subjects. There is more to Yuraq than just dancing for students. The students learn to say and pronounce words that they do not normally use in everyday speech and they do not understand what they mean. Students also are telling a great story but they do not know what the story is about, but they can guess what the story is about by the gestures of the dance. (Samson, 2010, p. 30)

Both Sarah and Sally included western pedagogical and analytical frameworks of emergent literacy related writing in their available designs that brought Yup’ik ways of being-knowing-doing into a critical dialectic with western literacies pedagogies.

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4.2.2 Multiliteracies-Multimodalities The western pedagogical approach of multiliteracies was central to both Sarah and Sally’s inquiries. Both begin with the basic argument that, “there is more to literacy than reading and writing.” (Samson, 2010, p. 26). Sarah describes it further in “that text is not only written on paper” (Bass, 2010, p. 12), which reflects an expanded notion of “text”. This expanded notion of text, which goes beyond the linguistic sign system to include other social semiotic sign systems such as visual, aural, kinesthetic, etc., underscores the conceptualization of the multiliteracies approach. As Sarah states: Multiliteracies argues that representation and communication take place using multiple sign and symbol systems (i.e. storyknife symbols, visual art, line and texture, musical notation) that humans use to communicate  - construct meaning and interpret knowledge (Parker Webster et al., 2007). (Bass, 2010, p. 12)

Sally shares this example of how she views multiliteracies: Being literate is more than having the ability to read and write, for example, the way my grandfather told his stories. He would use his voice and facial expressions to express emotions in the story. He could retell stories that he heard from childhood, and he could tell them as if he heard them for the first time. There was no dancing at our village at the time, but he would dance and sing when the story included it. He knew how to play with words that mesmerized his audience (my older siblings and me). In addition, our elders can tell what the weather will be like by looking at the sky; they could at one time make sleds and boats without the aid of measuring tools. Most hunters today were taught signs of what weather is to come, and how to survive when lost in the wilderness. People who sew with fur or fabric can visualize their end product before sitting down to work. Villages that have kept singing and dancing alive know how to keep time through the drum and movement. Dancers are expert at listening to the song and knowing what gesture to make for each word in a song. (Samson, 2010, p. 30)

In both examples, Sarah and Sally illustrate how this western concept of multiliteracies is a re-articulation of an Indigenous-Yup’ik conceptualization of a western pedagogy that uses multiple social semiotic sign systems. In this conceptualization, the onto-epistemological-methodological is not separated, but entangled together in praxis. Sarah and Sally view the concept of multimodalities as integral to the multiliteracies pedagogical framework, such that one cannot be viewed separately from the other. Both draw from The New London Group (1996), Healy (2008) and Cope and Kalantzis (2000) as part of their available designs. Sally Samson (2010) begins her understanding of this relationship with a focus on the link between the concept of “modes”, which Cope and Kalantzis (2000) define as audio, spatial, gestural, visual and linguistic. She then continues to describe these modes as multiple ways to make meaning that go beyond printed linguistic text to create more opportunities for students to make meaning: The readings from The New London Group (1996), Healy (2008), and Cope and Kalantzis (2000) say that literacy does not only come in print but in many different forms and ways. Teaching just literacy, reading and writing, reaches only a few students. But to teach through music, kinesthetic, arts, drama, and technology reaches everyone. (Samson, 2010, p. 27)

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Like Sally, Sarah includes The New London Group (1996) and Healy (2008) in her available designs, focusing on Healy’s conceptualization that multiliteracies and multimodalities are inter-connected. Sarah further states: This means not only does literacy depend on print/text, but also uses many forms of print technology, such as gaming devices and ipods. In addition it can go beyond written text and use many forms, such as music, symbols, visual lines and textures, etc. to glean new knowledge. (Bass, 2010, p. 12)

Sarah also highlights the New London Group’s term, “multiplicity” and its connection to the concept of diversity: The New London Group (1996) describes the term "multiplicity" as a new form of literacy: coming to understand that our world is becoming more and more diverse. This diversity needs to be included in the classroom and used to help in educating all students. (Bass, 2010, p. 13)

Sarah connects the notion of the diversity within a multimodalities and multiliteracies approach to the cultural diversity students bring to the classroom: Alternatively, some cultures, such the Yup’ik culture, are traditionally based on oral communication. In these cultures storytelling and chanting and singing are a way to communicate. Thus, utilizing the diversity that students bring into the classroom allows all students to look outside of their own little world, and see that there are other people whose lives and experiences are different and their use of multiliteracies is diverse. This "multiplicity" can help students to see beyond differences and come to understand the world by participating in a variety of multiliteracies. (Bass, 2010, p. 13)

Sally approaches this notion of cultural diversity more specifically through the Indigenous-Yup’ik cultural activity of yuraq: Yuraq is telling a story, told by using multiple sign systems and a way of making meaning. The story is told through music, singing, drama, and gestures. Some words that depict the story are usually sung in ways people do not normally speak in, therefore making the story seem alive. (Samson, 2010, p. 22)

4.2.3 Emerging Literacies As kindergarten teachers, Sarah and Sally’s pedagogical orientation views literacy development as starting well before children enter kindergarten. Sarah explains that: …an emergent literacy learner is a student who has some basic knowledge that writing is a way to transmit one’s knowledge by writing. They may not be able to do this just yet in the conventional way. But they know that this is something they need to learn how to do, so they practice by drawing and or scribbling either by copying, imitating or trying to write using their own special ability of invented spelling. Some children may or may not have observed literate behaviors at home, but they have been exposed to acts of multiliteracies at their home and community; storytelling, creation and participation of cultural arts, hunting and gathering (both in the preparation and participation). (Bass, 2010, p. 18)

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Furthermore, “before a kindergarten student is able to produce anything on paper, these writing traits show up in their oral production (McMahon & Warrick, 2007)” (Samson, p. 20). Both Sally and Sarah were teaching-researching in districts serving a majority of Yup’ik students in Yup’ik communities. These communities may be bilingual in Yup’ik and English, however, the students’ primary language-in-use when entering kindergarten is English. While the majority of schools in both districts provide English medium instruction, with some programs supporting Yugtun in a variety of ways, Yup’ik immersion teachers face the additional challenge of developing both oral language and literacy in their ancestral language, which is generally not spoken in their homes and communities. However, as Sally explains, children bring with them a rich array of available designs and deploy them in strategic ways in the classroom: Students in our immersion program are similar to other emergent learners in regular L1 classrooms in that they both go through stages of development in their writing. The learners start out by drawing and labeling their drawing in English. Once students realize that they can tell their story on paper, they begin drawing and telling their story using the language they are most comfortable in. What is different about L2 learners is that once they become comfortable at communicating in the target language, they make a lot of mistakes in their speech. Baker (2006) explains this as operating in interlanguage, or a temporary language in-between L1 and L2, which is influenced by their L1 as well as developmental sequences. As students begin to connect speech sounds to letter sounds, L2 learners write in the language they [are] comfortable in. For example, students that write about playing outside will tend to write using the rules of English. In English a sentence usually starts with “I”, so students will tend to write “wiinga”. The next word is usually “played” so in Yugtun students will usually write the English word or “aqui” (play). According to Larsen-Freeman and Long (1991), as students hear more and more of the L2, they begin to hypothesize on the rule system and they try it out in their speech. So once the students realize that in Yugtun the sentence usually begins with Aqui- (to play) and they realize that -llru means past tense, they usually continue to write “Wiinga” at the beginning and write “aquillruunga” (I played outside). (Samson, 2010, p. 19)

Both teacher-researchers employed spoken and written language as available designs in the children’s process of becoming participants in oracy and literacy in linguistically and culturally appropriate ways. Sally emphasizes the relationship between oral language and writing in the following way: Oral language is an important aspect in developing reading for both first and second language learners in that students need to access their prior knowledge and experience to comprehend what is written. Curtain and Dahlberg (2004) state this point as follows: ‘As students develop their listening comprehension, they begin to make connections between oral language and the print that represents this oral language’ (p. 85). (Samson, 2010, p. 26)

Similarly, Sarah emphasizes the role of oral language in literacy development: “The emergent literacy perspective advocates believe that oral language development goes side by side with literacy development. Therefore, factors such as comprehensible input (words and phrases that make sense to the child) and social interaction are important for development” (Bass, 2010, p. 16).

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While both the Lower Kuskokwim School District (LKSD) and the Lower Yukon School District (LYSD) implement immersion programs, the professional development training and instructional protocols they provide focus on English monolingual learners, learning to read and write in English. These models are provided to immersion teachers without modifications or targeted training for developing literacy in bilingual contexts. Furthermore, these models are based on the features of the English language, which, as Sally explains above, do not correspond to Yup’ik. Recognizing these challenges, acting from their teacher-researcher positionality, both Sally and Sarah successfully used the following western frameworks for emergent literacy in their work of designing meaningful literacy instruction for their kindergarten students. These are compatible with the multiliteracies framework because they acknowledge the interconnectivity of linguistic and non-linguistic sign systems. Both teacher-researchers developed a deeper understanding of this relationship as they acquired more available designs over their participation in the graduate program. The writing process framework used in Sally’s district (LKSD) was 6 + 1 trait writing (Education Northwest, n.d.), which she describes as follows: “Writing in primary grades, especially for kindergarten, mainly consists of drawing and invented spelling. To assess students’ writing, teachers look for the writing traits in the drawings.” (Samson, 2010, p. 21). Table 4.1 provides the traits, their descriptions as well as how these traits manifest in primary students’ acts of literacy. Sarah’s conceptualization of emergent literacy was informed by the following framework relating stages of emerging writing to the characteristics and features of drawing in children as young as three years of age (Fig. 4.1). Furthermore, as Yup’ik women, both teacher-researchers recognize the role of culture in language and literacy development. Sarah emphasized the role of funds of Table 4.1  Description of 6 + 1 Traits for primary grades. (Samson, 2010, p. 21, based on Education Northwest) 6 + 1 Traits Ideas Organization

Voice Word Choice Sentence Fluency Conventions

Presentation

Description Main theme, detail, “heart of the message” How writing is structured Reader able to follow message

Primary Grades Look for detail in drawing, and as child describes drawing How drawing, text, and white space are organized Beginning and ending in description and drawing Can hear writer’s voice, Expressions in drawing personality Individuality shows through drawing Able to paint “picture in reader’s Expression in storytelling mind” Understanding the letters form words Writing flows, “free of awkward Look for “rhyme and cadence in oral patterns” language” Spelling, punctuation, grammar Writing left to right, top to bottom of page, and usage, paragraphing, spaces between words, letters facing capitalization correctly (not backwards) How the finished product is laid Same as Description out, the appearance

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Fig. 4.1 Writing Stages. https://babybulldogsprek.weebly.com/developmental-­writing.html as cited in Bass, 2010, p. 31

knowledge: “Emergent literacy states that by observing and interacting with their environment in multiple pre-literate ways, children are gradually emerging as traditional literacy learners. The literacy they are learning is embedded in everything they experience at home and community” (Bass, 2010, p.  16). She further explains that: The individual cannot be separated from its culture. Therefore, educators have to take into consideration that learning and acquiring has taken place long before the student came into a classroom (John-Steiner & Mahn, 1996, p. 11) My interpretation of this and application to my teaching is that I need to remember as a teacher that these students have been exposed to many types of literacy events (multiliteracies) in their homes and in their communities, their environment, their world. (Bass, 2010, p. 12)

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4.3 Designing In this section we present each teacher-researcher’s process of designing, focusing on how they planned and implemented their teaching and researching. Their designing processes illustrate the parallel nature of teaching and researching and how the two situated and entangled positionalities of teacher-researcher and researcher-­ teacher are foregrounded and backgrounded.

4.3.1 Sarah Designing Sarah begins her description of data collection from her researcher-teacher stance. In gathering my data and analyzing them, I went over the data several times to make sure what I was analyzing matched my goal of finding factors from home and school that contributed to second language literacy development. In analyzing the students’ work samples I used drawing and writing stages. (Bass, 2010, p. 28)

Sarah continues her description of her research methodology for data collection from her researcher-teacher stance, and also illustrates the entanglement of these positionalities by referring to the use of the teaching tool of student portfolio as part of her data collections: In planning for my study and data collection, I selected four students, two boys and two girls, from my classroom. One of each pair turned six early in the year and the other remained five for most of the year. I assembled four student portfolios to reflect the growth in reading, writing, and math, which all involve literacy development. (Bass, 2010, p. 32)

Continuing her description of her data collection methodology, Sarah begins with her teacher-research stance and continues with her researcher-teacher stance as she refers to the random selection of student work and keeping field notes: I made three sections in the portfolio: reading, writing, and math. I placed the district’s standards on the front of each section, and added blank pages to place pictures, anecdotal notes, and work samples. The selections of student samples occurred randomly throughout the year. I kept field notes on parent conversations throughout the year, as data for home/ school factors and created four student profiles and four parent profiles. (Bass, 2010, p. 32)

In her designing, Sarah, as a researcher-teacher, continually revisited her research question, which meant looking for how the home activities and experiences influenced the multiliteracies-based learning and instructional activities that she implemented in her classroom. In this recursive process of designing, which includes implementing and re-implementing both research and instructional designs, Sarah moves back and forth between both teacher and researcher stances. As a teacher-researcher, Sarah was foregrounding her conceptualization of writing as situated within a pedagogy of multiliteracies-multimodalities, which is not limited to the linguistic semiotic resource nor to the act of making letters-words-­ sentences. Rather, meaning can also be made through the modality of drawing a

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visual image. In her understanding, the cultural activity of yaarruiq (storyknifing) is also an act of writing that uses a lexicon of symbols to create a visual representation of a story, much in the same way that school-based writing uses a lexicon of letters-­ words based in the linguistic semiotic resource: When I was growing up in the village, the way I believe I learned was by observing and then practicing. By observing my siblings and peers, while they were participating in knife story (telling stories with the use of a knife in/on mud), yuraq (dancing to the drum and chants), were all a part of my ‘literacy’ development as a youngster. The drawings led to storytelling, eventually in school those became words to help me in writing stories for academic purposes. For example, in doing a reading lesson on the letter P, I would bring in material that students use and see daily: palaggayaq (fur hat), piilugguq ("mukluks"), pelatuq (scarf). I would put these objects in the housekeeping/drama center so that they can touch and play with these throughout the day and hopefully use the Yugtun word and phrases for them. (Bass, 2010, p. 24)

Sarah utilizes the pedagogical concept of learning centers, which is widely put into practice in most kindergarten classrooms as a methodological process. Learning centers are designed to actively engage the whole self and provide the child with opportunities to ask questions, to investigate, and to explore, examine, and experiment with hands-on experiential activity and play. In practice, learning centers are designed as specific areas within the classroom where students learn about specific subjects by playing and engaging in activities. The primary element to the conceptualization of learning centers is that in practice, they should be spaces for children to learn and developmentally grow (physically, cognitively, emotionally, socially, etc.) through interactive experiences with each other, with adults, and with real materials that require all of their senses. In this way, it could be said that learning centers are rooted in a concept of multimodalities, and situated within a social semiotic framework (Jewitt, 2011; Kress, 2010) which occur in a holistic way, such that all activity and meaning-making events are by nature multimodal (Kress, 2010) that intra-act within a multimodal ensemble (Jewitt, 2011). As Sarah explains below. At a coloring table, they have choices of drawing these objects, or take a color sheet to color and label. By exposing them to the concrete and the familiar, my hope is that they will make the connection with the object and word and start using the word and or phrase in the target language. Another practice that I use is singing and chanting, using TPR (total physical response)which means that I integrate body gestures to relay meaning to what I am saying. This activity is one of the students’ favorites. They enjoy chanting and singing and of course a chance to move and be a little silly sometimes. They love to sing. When they are at different centers during the day, they remember a melody and start singing and or chant as they are playing. (Bass, 2010, p. 24)

As a researcher-teacher, Sarah used multiliteracies-multimodalities as a tool for analyzing student work:

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I am working on analyzing drawing and writing extensively because they are interrelated in many aspects, in relation to the concept of multiliteracies and the Yup’ik epistemology. I believe that drawing will lead to writing, to me it is a natural progression. After many opportunities to illustrate and draw, I have seen the interest in children to label the drawings, because I model this kind of activity often. (Bass, 2010, p. 34)

This progression of drawing and labeling the drawings is an example of the conceptualization and practice of multimodalities—the use of the visual representational semiotic resource/mode of drawing and the use of the linguistic representational semiotic resource or mode of writing. Through her use of multiliteracies-­ multimodalities as both a tool for instruction and data collection, she illustrates how teaching-researching are always already entangled.

4.3.2 Sally Designing The way Sally describes how she entered her inquiry, illustrates how researching and teaching are entangled in the process of designing her teaching-researching. My research began by watching and dancing with the students as Paista, our Yuraq instructor, taught students how to Yuraq. At the same time I was thinking of how I could use that song to teach writing, and what aspects of the writing traits would fit into the dance. (Samson, 2010, p. 51)

Sally demonstrates how observing teaching and learning in action allowed her to focus on her researcher-teacher positionality. In the process of observing and participating in teaching-learning of yuraq, she simultaneously engaged in researching-­ teaching. This led to her emerging wondering of how to improve writing instruction for kindergarten students while at the same time incorporating yuraq, a traditional form of multimodal Yup’ik literacy. Sally further realized that the Indigenous literacy of yuraq (dancing) was not integrated into the western curriculum, as she explains below: As I thought more about the subjects that I teach, I thought of how reading and writing are embedded in other subjects (math and thematic units which combine science and social studies). The only subject that stood alone was Yuraq. The Yuraq instructor comes into our classrooms for half an hour and teaches the students how to sing and dance Yuraq songs he has learned as a performer. The way Paista, the Yuraq instructor, teaches is very cultural. He begins by singing and dancing, and students just observe and follow. The students really enjoy learning from the instructor, and they instinctively dance to any song that the instructor sings. As I was pondering about the way Yuraq is introduced, I thought of why Yuraq has to be alienated from other subjects. (Samson, 2010, p. 50)

While yuraq is taught as part of the immersion curriculum, its separation from other subjects seems to indicate that this Yup’ik available literacy design is not on an equal footing with other subjects that are more clearly aligned with western available literacy designs. Yuraq, bringing together drumming, movement and singing also offers many affordances for supporting language development. However,

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viewing yuraq as cultural rather than academic instead of cultural-academic means that the full affordances of yuraq to support language and literacy development are not made available to learners: There is more to Yuraq than just dancing for students. The students learn to say and pronounce words that they do not normally use in everyday speech and they do not understand what they mean. Students also are telling a great story but they do not know what the story is about, but they can guess what the story is about by the gestures of the dance. As a result, what students learn in Yuraq stays in Yuraq and they do not know how to extract that knowledge and apply it to other areas. (Samson, 2010, p. 50)

It was this key observation that prompted Sally to design instruction based on multiliteracies. In her teacher-researcher positionality, Sally used both the western framework (6 + 1 Traits, Education Northwest, n.d.) and the Yup’ik framework (yuraq) as available designs in designing multimodal meaning making opportunities for her students: Yuraq is telling a story, told by using multiple sign systems and a way of making meaning. The story is told through music, singing, drama, and gestures. Some words that depict the story are usually sung in ways people do not normally speak in, therefore making the story seem alive. The 6+1 Traits of the writing process blends in very well with Yuraq. (Samson, 2010, p. 22)

In multiple cycles of planning, implementing and re-implementing instructional routines, Sally started her instructional designing with yuraq and finding connections to 6 + 1 trait writing (Education Northwest, n.d.), rather than starting with a western framework and including Indigenous frameworks as an add-on. This critical shift involved designing instructional practices using the full array of multimodal resources including gestures, drawing, reading, writing and speaking; all playing an important role in her teaching, each building on the other with the emphasis on meaning making as she described below: By the first week of November I had set a routine for writing: • Yuraq • review the vocabulary words using posters or Power Point and asking comprehension questions at the same time (i.e. who went berry picking in the dance, what is the gesture for kayaking) • write the song on chart paper or read the chart and have students point to letters or words on the chart paper • activities, journal writing, drawing, or role playing. (Samson, 2010, p. 60)

Rather than starting with teaching-learning of isolated sounds or letters, Sally starts with the dance, expressing meaning using the children’s whole body. She then engages students in multiple additional cycles of meaning making. First through comprehension checks supported by visuals such as posters and powerpoint presentations. The shared writing activity creates linkages between the literacy event of dancing and the literacy event of reading and writing. The meaning making continued with additional activities such as journaling, drawing or role playing. In this way, the students are designing meaning through a variety of sign systems, making use of the different affordances each entails.

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Yuraq matches well with the 6+1 traits in that Yuraq has traits that can be picked out and modeled, for example the Voice Trait. One of the ways Voice shows up in the drawings for the primary grades is to show "emotion on the faces of characters" (McMahon & Warrick, 2007)... One activity that I did with the students was to practice drawing faces with feelings, and another was to have a pair act out a feeling in front of the students. (Samson, 2010, p. 119)

Designing a writing pedagogy from the available designs of yuraq, 6 + 1 traits and drawing allowed for a more meaningful learning experience for these kindergarten Yup’ik immersion students.

4.4 Re-Designed The re-designed for Sarah and Sally emerges as process and product. Both re-­ position Indigenous ways of being-knowing-doing to the center of a re-­ conceptualizing of western concepts of theory and practice. This re-positioning to an Indigenous-western onto-epistemological-methodological framework for teaching-­researching contributed to an Indigenization of instructional materials and research methods and analyses. The processes of learning contribute to transformative action, which in the case of these two teacher-researchers emerges in their pedagogy and instructional practice. For Sarah, the re-introduction of yaarruiq to her instructional practices was a result of the learning that occurred through her designing, which brought Indigenous and western concepts into conversation: Yaarruiq [Story knife] is one example that is not practiced by the girls these days. The students are reintroduced to this story-knifing in my classroom. It was a daily experience when I was growing up in the long summer days. Telling stories using a knife, drawing and creating on mud. This art of story-knifing was an experience that helped me in my efforts to become literate. (Bass, 2010, p. 66)

Sarah’s developing understandings of multiliteracies and multimodalities as theoretical concepts explained through western literature, but with epistemological (and historical-generational) connections to Indigenous ways of knowing-doing, contributed to her own praxis that in turn influenced her decision to “re-introduce” the practice yaarruiq in her classroom instruction. Because Sally grew up in a village where yuraq was not practiced in her childhood, she did not grow up with the cultural practice of singing, dancing and drumming to tell stories. Observing the yuraq teacher, and learning yuraq alongside her students at the outset of her inquiry, represents her own learning process of how Indigenous and western literacy design can be brought into conversation with each other: Yuraq is Multiliteracies in action, or making meaning through multiple sign systems. One story is told in multiple ways in Yuraq. The singers sing out the words while the drummers keep up the tempo. The dancers draw the stories with their gestures while keeping up with the tempo of the drums and dramatize the story with their facial expressions and exaggerated

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4  Multimodalities in Yup’ik Immersion movements, while the audience receives the story through song, the gestures, and drama. So looking at Yuraq as writing, allows students to express their knowledge in their own way. (Samson, 2010, p. 124)

Layering Indigenous and western concepts, broadens Sally’s conceptualization of what it means to be literate and to be an immersion literacy teacher. Sally designed a pedagogy that foregrounds meaning making as and through multimodality and fosters students’ roles as designers in their own right. While drawing from the western concept of developmental stages of emergent writing (see Fig. 4.1) her analysis was also heavily influenced by the Indigenous ways of being-knowing-doing underpinning the cultural activities of dancing, singing, chanting and yaaruiq-ing and the traditionally gendered roles of performance enacted by male and female community members. These were important entry points for her development of a pedagogy that considered these traditional gendered roles and how male and female students could be engaged in writing instruction. Sarah states: This female student, like the other female student, prefers to draw rather than write, as evidenced by her writing stages and her drawing stages. It’s interesting to see this, because culturally and historically, this type of activity (drawing) was the mode most young girls communicated when yaarruiq-ing (story- knifing). (Bass, 2010, p. 58)

As yaarruiq was not traditionally or historically done by male members of the community, in her analysis, Sarah was interested in how boys responded to this activity. Through her analysis, she discovered how singing and chanting could be used to engage boys in emergent writing activities. The experiences of male student 2 singing and chanting with his peers at school were also done at home with those siblings who knew the songs and chants from previous experiences in my class. At school he was not shy or hesitant in participating in singing and chanting. (Bass, 2010, p. 63)

In yuraq, male members of the community sing the songs and drum. While males can also dance, using a different type of dance fan, males are generally the singers and chanters and drummers performing the music/song as women dance. Through her redesigned analytical process that layered Indigenous and western methodologies, Sarah created a redesigned pedagogy with instructional activities that approached the teaching of writing using Indigenous/Yup’ik multimodalities of dancing, singing, chanting and yaaruiq-ing. Sally’s growing awareness of multimodal meaning making became an available design in her data analysis as well. From her researcher-teacher positionality, Sally created a timeline, which allowed her to see connections between her story and the students’ stories. Her analysis was constructed as a series of multimodal events: After analyzing my data, I created a timeline to help me organize all the information that I had collected from the video recordings, my teacher journal, and student journals... The timeline has five distinct lines. The first line shows my story, most of which is taken from my journal and lesson plans. The last four lines are of each child in my study. The information that I used for each child was taken from their journals, my own journal, and the videos of instructions and activities that I recorded.

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Table 4.2  List of 6 + 1 Traits in Yuraq (Samson, 2010, p. 22) 6 + 1 Traits Ideas Voice Word Choice Sentence Fluency Conventions Presentation

Depicted in Yuraq Main story behind Yuraq How story is portrayed through gestures Expressions, feelings shown through movement and face Gesture, movements paint pictures of words that tell the story How telling of the story through song and gestures flow well through the story line Drumming tells dancer when to take a rest or a breath Punctuations are noticeable by the sound of the drum How the story is put together through drumming, singing, dancing

Table 4.3  6 + 1 Traits for primary grades translated into Yugtun (Samson, 2010, p. 72) Traits Ideas  Message is clear, details in drawings and oral stories

Organization  Structure of writing: The way drawing, writing & white space is organized on paper  Picture sequences  Sense of beginning and ending Voice  Reveals the writer, different from others  Individual expression, emotion shown in drawings

Translations Qanemcim Imaa  Caucia nallunaituq qanemcim  Taringnarquq qanemciq Qanemcim Ellimallri  Nani pilingauallra uitaa  Atrakun  Tungliqu’utaciitnun callret  Ayagnera, iquanun Qanemcim Erini  Qanemcilriim erini niitnarquq

Creating the timeline helped me to see what I did each month, what songs we explored and the period of time we took to go through each song. With the timeline I was able to pinpoint precisely when students showed growth in their journal writing and correlating that with my instruction. (Samson, 2010, p. 111)

This analysis led Sally to create the re-designed Indigenized 6 + 1 traits that were expressed in yuraq as depicted in Table 4.2. In creating the table, Sally also highlighted the concept of a new literacy that goes beyond the notion of a linguistic focused pedagogy of reading and writing to include a pedagogy of multiliteracies through yuraq: Teaching through Yuraq is much like multiliteracies. The first part of yuraq that students pick up on is the tune of the song, for some it is the gestures, for some it is the rhythm, and for some it is the lyrics. (Samson, 2010, p. 31)

Translating 6 + 1 traits into Yugtun (Table 4.3) with her colleagues furthered her own understanding of the framework and contributed to the pedagogy of other teachers in her school: March was also the time I took the description of the six traits from Wee Can Write (McMahon & Warrick, 2007) and proceeded to translate them into Yugtun, a critical moment. The writing curriculum is written in English, and the only parts that are written in Yugtun are the description of the topics we are to ask the students to write about during assessments. Nowhere in the guide are the traits translated. (Samson, 2010, p. 70)

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4  Multimodalities in Yup’ik Immersion

4.5 Summary Language, literacy and culture are often viewed as separate available designs. Language-culture-literacies presents a reconceptualization of an entangled available design for teaching language literacies and cultures in the context of Indigenous immersion education. Recognizing these as entangled available designs was made visible through engaging in the PTAR design process. As Sarah states, “In adding cultural practices that are diminishing slowly from our Yup’ik culture, the teachers in the immersion program introduce them to the students by incorporating them into themes in their curriculum” (Bass, 2010, p. 66). Sally also speaks to the transformative potential of a pedagogy built on these entanglements: Because Ayaprun Elitnaurvik School is a Yup’ik immersion school, teachers are always looking for ways to incorporate part of our culture into everything that we teach, and Yuraq is a perfect avenue. If we as teachers view Yuraq as more than just performance or entertainment, instead as a way to showcase our tradition, we will find many aspects in Yuraq that fit into writing, reading, and other academic subjects. There is first of all the composer, the lyrics, the music, the tempo, the drumming, the story behind the song, the gestures to go with the words which are signs or symbols that engender meaning, the procedures to dancing, the role of male and female, and the whole presentation of the dance. Think of how much language students will produce just by talking about Yuraq. (Samson, 2010, p. 119)

Sally and Sarah designed Yup’ik immersion pedagogies that are grounded in the traditional Yup’ik pedagogy of storytelling. In this way they drew on the inseparable connectedness of language and cultural activities as well as multimodal meaning making. Additionally, both applied the Yup’ik symbols of yuuraq and yaariuq in combination with western analytical methodologies to their data analysis. By re-­ positioning Indigenous ways of being-knowing-doing to the center of a re-­ conceptualizing of western concepts of theory and practice both teachers’ studies contribute to an Indigenization of not only pedagogy and instructional materials, but also to research methods and analyses.

References Baker, C.  (2006). Foundations of bilingual education and bilingualism (4th ed.). Multilingual Matters. Baker, C., & Wright, W. E. (2017). Foundations of bilingual education and bilingualism (6th ed.). Multilingual Matters. Barnhardt, R., & Kawagley, A. O. (2005). Indigenous knowledge systems and Alaska native ways of knowing. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 36(1), 8–23. Bass, S. (2010). Bridging home and school: Factors that contribute to multiliteracies development in a Yup’ik kindergarten classroom. (Publication No. 1487257) [Master’s thesis, University of Alaska Fairbanks]. UMI Dissertation Publishing. Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2000). Designs for social futures. In B. Cope & M. Kalantzis (Eds.), Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures (pp. 203–234). Routledge.

References

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Curtain, H., & Dahlberg, C. A. (2004). Languages and children making the match: New languages for young learners, grades k-8. Pearson. Education Northwest. (n.d.). 6 +1 Trait Writing. Retrieved 10 March 2022 from https://educationnorthwest.org/traits Gonzales, N., Moll, L., & Amani, C. (Eds.). (2005). Funds of knowledge: Theorizing practices in households, communities, and classrooms. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Healy, A. (2008). Expanding student capacities: Learning by design pedagogy. In A.  Healy (Ed.), Multiliteracies and diversity in education: New pedagogies for expanding landscapes (pp. 2–29). Oxford University Press. Hermes, M., Bang, M., & Marin, A. (2012). Designing indigenous language revitalization. Harvard Educational Review, 82, 381–402. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.82.3.q8117w861241871j Hoffman, J. (2010). A parent’s choice. [Master’s thesis, University of Alaska Fairbanks]. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global. Jewitt, C. (2011). An introduction to multimodality. In C. Jewitt (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of multimodal analysis (pp. 14–27). Routledge. John-Steiner, V., & Mahn, H. (1996). Sociocultural approaches to learning and development: A Vygotskian framework. Educational Psychologist, 31(3–4), 191–206. Kawagley, A. O. (1999). Alaska native education: History and adaptation in the new millenium. Journal of American Indian Education, 39(1), 31–51. Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. Routledge. Larsen-Freeman, D., & Long, M. (1991). An introduction to second language acquisition research. Longman. Martin, K. (2008). The intersection of aboriginal knowledges, aboriginal literacies, and new learning pedagogy for aboriginal students. In A. Healy (Ed.), Multiliteracies and diversity in education: New pedagogies for expanding landscapes (pp. 58–81). Oxford University Press. McMahon, C., & Warrick, P. (2007). We can write using 6+1 trait writing strategies with renowned children’s literature. Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory. Moll, L. C., Saez, R., & Dworin, J. (2001). Exploring biliteracy: Two student case examples of writing as a social practice. The Elementary School Journal, 101, 435–445. New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60–92. Parker Webster, J., Yanez, E., & Andrew-Ihrke, D. (2007). Literacy counts: A teacher’s guide to developing literacies for math in a cultural context. University of Alaska Fairbanks. Samson, S. (2010). Yuraq: An introduction to writing (Publication No. 1486008) [Master’s thesis, University of Alaska Fairbanks]. UMI Dissertation Publishing. Wilson, W., & Kamanā, K. (2011). Insights from indigenous language immersion in Hawai’i. In D. Tedick, D. Christian & T. Williams Fortune (Eds.), Immersion education: Practices, policies, possibilities (pp. 36–57). Multilingual Matters.

Chapter 5

Affordances of Visual Images in Dual Language Classrooms: Teachers and Students as Designers

Kayla Ashe and Audra Surman, whose work is re-presented in this chapter, are both White teachers from the lower 48. Kayla was an experienced teacher who had previously taught language arts outside of Alaska before coming to the Eek. Audra was a novice teacher who began her teaching career in Tooksok Bay as a special education teacher. Both were participant colleagues in the same cohort of the third grant funded graduate program and taught in dual immersion programs, where students receive content instruction in two languages. In the Gomez and Gomez model (Gomez et al., 2005), which is employed in their district, language use is strictly separated both by content and day of the week.1 In both Kayla’s and Audra’s schools, math is always taught in English, while social studies and science are always taught in Yup’ik. Language arts is taught in both languages starting in grade 3.2 Yup’ik is still spoken in the communities of Eek (where Kayla teaches) and Toksook Bay (where Audra teaches), which means that some children enter school speaking Yup’ik as their first language. In addition, all students also speak the local variety of English on a regular basis.

 Gomez and Gomez refer to this as “Language of the Day”, which means that all non-content specific interactions are expected to be carried out in Yup’ik on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays and in English on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This includes morning announcements, PE, lunch, and conversations in the halls and on the playground. 2  In grades k-2 language arts is taught in the students’ “stronger” language, or the language which is more supported at home. Because Yup’ik is still widely spoken in the community and in the children’s homes, the language of initial literacy instruction (grades k-2) is Yup’ik. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Siekmann, J. Parker Webster, Multiliteracies Pedagogy and Language Teaching, Educational Linguistics 60, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31812-2_5

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5  Affordances of Visual Images in Dual Language Classrooms: Teachers and Students…

5.1 Wonderings Kayla and Audra’s initial wonderings were prompted by their observations of students’ apparent lack of interest and engagement in the activities associated with language and literacy. Both teacher-researchers were working with curriculum materials based in a western pedagogy with western-centered content that made little connections to students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Kayla’s experience in teaching reading and language arts in previous schools before her work in Alaska framed her observations on the reading process and how her third and fourth grade students engaged in independent and group reading activities. Her observations led her to three assumptions. As she describes the process: Throughout my time teaching in the remote village of Eek, Alaska, I have made several observations about the reading process. In the past, I had opportunities to observe students in grades K-12 read with one another during school-wide reading buddies that took place on Fridays twice a month. I had also observed my own students during small group reading and independent reading activities. In these observations, students were not equally excited and engaged. At the beginning of this study, as I reflected on how students approach texts and engage in the reading process and what I could do to promote reading, I had three assumptions. First, reading is difficult, but can be made easier with the explicit instruction of comprehension strategies. Second, students should be surrounded by engaging and authentic texts. Third, while reading these texts, students should act as participants by not only reading the words, but also by responding to what they are reading through oral conversations with peers and the teacher, written responses in journals, and by reflecting on what they are reading. (Ashe, 2019, p. 1)

Continuing these observations from her researcher-teacher stance, she further developed the focus for her inquiry: This teacher action research (TAR) focuses on how one group of three fourth-grade students interacts and makes meaning over a five-week period, while reading the graphic novel, Amulet (Kibuishi, 2008–2009). It also focuses on how students interact with peers and the teacher before, during, and after reading the text. The guiding research question is: How do bilingual elementary students use the modalities present in graphic novels to interact and make meaning? (Ashe, 2019 p. 35)

Through her teacher-researcher stance, Audra, a K-12 Special Education teacher, had observed that her students, all of whom had been identified as needing support in language, were responding to the images that were part of the Visualizing and Verbalizing (Bell, 2007) curriculum with isolated words or short phrases. Her inquiry was prompted by her initial assumption that the reason for students’ limited responses might be related to a lack of culturally relevant images used in this curriculum. She shared the following specific observation: I had two first grade students describing one image that included a cement curb. A sidewalk curb is not found in rural Alaska and is a challenging thing to describe if there is no background knowledge for this concept. I could continue to ask my student in different ways to describe what they are seeing in hopes that they will understand what they are saying; but, if the student does not have enough background knowledge of the content within the image, I found my students would not know how to describe what they are looking at. (Surman, 2019, pp. 5–6)

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By connecting her continued observations to the concept of funds of knowledge discussed in the graduate coursework, using her researcher-teacher positionality, she developed her primary inquiry question: This led me to consider my students’ cultural funds of knowledge and I wanted to find a way to determine how culturally relevant content could support my student’s meaning making. …For these reasons, I decided I wanted to utilize culturally relevant images to elicit student responses and dialogue. All of these curiosities led me to my current research question: How do sixth through eighth grade students co-construct meaning when doing tasks that incorporate culturally appropriate images? (Surman, 2019, p. 6)

5.2 Available Designs In assembling the available designs for their inquiries, Kayla and Audra emphasize the significance of the concept of ‘new literacies’ (New London Group, 1996) as social, active and transformative and thereby going beyond the old view of literacy that privileges reading and writing. Because they were English medium teachers in dual language schools, they recognized the need for a pedagogy that explicitly foregrounded diversity and viewed multilinguality as an asset. In addition, they focused on multimodal meaning making as a culturally appropriate path to teaching-learning.

5.2.1 Multiliteracies: Diversity and Multilinguality A shared understanding of why multiliteracies is particularly relevant to Kayla and Audra’s contexts is the value multiliteracies places on cultural and linguistic diversity. As Audra states: “Multiliteracies recognizes meaning making as an event where learners utilize cultural and linguistic tools to understand and process learning that is designed socially” (Surman, 2019, p. 10). Kayla adds: Multiliteracies is a pedagogical framework that values multiple languages and multiple language varieties equally…The term multiliteracies emerged from the “growing significance of cultural and linguistic diversity” and “the influence of new communications technologies” (Kalantzis & Cope, 2008, p.  197). The framework acknowledges that people participate in literacy as unique individuals from different backgrounds who engage in the learning process in a variety of ways while speaking the languages and dialects of their choice. (Ashe, 2019, pp. 11–12)

Kayla focuses on the cultural diversity and technology aspects of a multiliteracies pedagogy that provide tools for a global, modern and diverse world. Further, as a nonIndigenous, English speaking teacher in a dual language school situated within a Yup’ik community, it is significant that Kayla specifically refers to the notion of multilinguality, which she describes as follows:

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5  Affordances of Visual Images in Dual Language Classrooms: Teachers and Students… Multilingualism stresses the importance of culture and worldviews within the meaning-­ making process. Multilingualism is one component of the multiliteracies framework. Multilingualism acknowledges that we live in a culturally and linguistically diverse world and considers how we can embrace the differences instead of focusing on assimilation. When referencing the ideas of both old literacies and new literacies, Cope and Kalantzis (2009) stress the importance of adapting instruction to meet the needs of each incoming generation of learners. For example, (English) monolingualism is one of the foundations of the boxed instruction of old literacy, which did not meet the needs of all learners. Old literacy finds the majority language most important, so when integrating old literacy practices, the focus is on the power language, English, instead of promoting the languages and dialects of the students within the classroom. (Ashe, 2019, p. 17)

She continues by illustrating the differences between monolingualism and multilingualism by describing the affordances of multilingualism: Monolingual ideologies limit students’ learning potential by restricting learners to thinking and speaking in only one language, often being the power language. If students have wonderful ideas, but cannot verbalize or write them in one specific language, then they are unable to express what they know. Instead, one might assume that the student does not understand what is being taught. Multilingualism allows expression of knowledge in a more comfortable manner that does not limit the learners’ knowledge. (Ashe, 2019, p. 21)

While the multilinguality aspect of multiliteracies supports drawing on the students’ full linguistic repertoires, within the pedagogy of multiliteracies, the multimodality aspect, which draws on other social semiotic resources, opens up the full modal repertoire of meaning making.

5.2.2 Multimodalities as Integral to a Multiliteracies Pedagogy Both Kayla and Audra recognize the critical role multimodalities play in meaning making within a multiliteracies pedagogy. As Kayla states: Another component of the multiliteracies framework is multimodalities, which Cope and Kalantzis (2009) describe as the various representations that can be used to assist in the process of meaning making. Multimodalities suggest that the learner is the active meaning maker who utilizes different representations while learning. Cope and Kalantzis (2009) list the following modes of representation for learners to access: written language, oral language, visual representation, audio representation, tactile representation, gestural representation, and spatial representation. (Ashe, 2019, pp. 12–13)

Similarly, Audra explains: When we look more closely at multiliteracies, a critical part of the pedagogy involves the awareness of modalities as an “integration of significant modes of meaning-making, where the textual is also related to the visual, the audio, the special, the behavioral, and so on” (New London Group, 1996, p. 64). (Surman, 2019, p. 17)

The significance of multimodal meaning making is further illustrated by Audra and Kayla in their examples of how modes used in a book and a movie contribute to meaning making in different ways:

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Each mode holds different meaning qualities. One way to think about how each mode is different, is when a book is made into a movie. Some might find the book to be better than the movie while others might find the movie more exciting. This is because the meaning that is made from the written text of a book will be interpreted differently from person to person. The film will be received or rejected for the different visual elements, and other features used when trying to depict the written words from the pages. The key point is that it is not possible to exactly replicate the other modes through the use of a different mode. Therefore, it is important to understand how differently each mode supports the meaning that is made. (Surman, 2019, pp. 18–19) Cope and Kalantzis (2009) argue that teaching and/or making meaning through more than one mode allows students to not only gain a deeper understanding of the content, but also to see that content from different angles by using different lenses. An example of this is the famous comparison of a book to the movie representation. A book is never the same as a movie. A person can watch a movie and read a book and see the plot through two very different lenses... Cope and Kalantzis (2009) argue that “written language is not going away” but instead is “just becoming more closely intertwined with the other modes, and in some respects itself becoming more like them. (p. 15). (Ashe, 2019, pp. 21–22)

Jewitt and Kress (2008) would explain this notion of the linguistic being intertwined with other social semiotic resources, as multimodal ensembles. They would also argue that all meaning-making events are multimodal. Audra utilizes Kress’ (2010) concept of modes and multimodal ensembles as a key available design supporting her research. She describes the modes and their qualities that interplay within a multimodal ensemble: Speech is a mode that is ephemeral and is based on the progression of elements within time (Kress, 2010). Once an utterance has been spoken, we cannot go back in time to replay or change it. Speech utilizes learned structures such as words, sentences structure and grammar of the language (Kress, 2010). Additionally, speech provides for a depth of qualities including volume, stressing of words, rhythmic organization, pitch, sustained and stretch sounds, as well as silence (Kress, 2010). (Surman, 2019, p. 19)

What is significant in this passage is the reference to silence as a quality within the mode of speech, and indicates a strong relationship to Indigenous ways of being-­ knowing-­doing that recognizes silence as an essential form of speech and communication. This connection foregrounds Audra’s interest in and rationale for assembling available designs that support her research question rooted in the cultural relevance of her instructional materials and practices: Writing utilizes a spatial display of text that follows the format of spoken words (Kress, 2010). Writing is a linear process due to the learned systems such as reading left to right from the top to the bottom of the paper. The benefit of writing is the ability to go back to text and reread or edit the information. Additionally, because writing does not occur in real time, the use of punctuation, font, letter size, color, spacing, and other graphic qualities supports the meaning that the text is trying to portray (Kress, 2010). It is also important to note that spoken words and written words are socially mediated. Different dialects of the same language develop an understanding of a word based on how it is socially used. An example of this in the use of the word soda can versus pop can, or snowmobile rather than snow machine. The culture in which the language is used will determine the meaning that it makes.

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5  Affordances of Visual Images in Dual Language Classrooms: Teachers and Students… The process of reading a visual image however, is different because the reader focuses on only the frame content that is presented. Images are utilized all around us in everyday life, from pictures seen in user manuals, photos and graphics accompanying newspaper articles, to the photos we store on a cell phone. Images are displayed depictions within an arranged space (Kress, 2010). The meaning of an image is made through the viewer’s interpretation of the qualities within the framed space (Kress, 2010). This is heavily dependent upon color, size, shape, spacing and quality of the image. (Surman, 2019, pp. 19–20)

Audra describes her interest in looking for an available design that would address “the lack of culturally relevant images” when using instructional materials for her Visualizing and Verbalizing lessons. Audra turned to Moll et al.’s (1992) conceptualization of funds of knowledge to add to her concept of multimodalities: Funds of knowledge are “the essential cultural practices and bodies of knowledge and information that households use to survive, to get ahead or to thrive” (Moll et al., 1992, p. 21). This idea recognizes that teachers are not the only source of knowledge in the classroom; rather, each student brings a wealth of knowledge into the classroom each day. Each household follows a unique set of rules and practices different traditions; these qualities help shape each child in different ways (Moll et al., 1992). Moll also states “if literacy is viewed as a set of cultural practices then education for literacy is more naturally seen as a process of socialization, of induction into a community of literacy practicers” (p.  21). (Surman, 2019, p. 14) Considering the local knowledge surrounding my community: subsistence hunting, sewing, carpentry, mechanics, food processing and storage, weather safety, and others, it is clear that there is much to learn from the families in the local community. (Surman, 2019, p. 15)

Kayla views multimodalities as integral to Indigenous representations of meaning making through cultural activities such as yuraq: Samson (2010) engaged in research to determine how to connect various literacy genres to those relevant to the Yup’ik culture by integrating Yuraq, the traditional native dance. Yup’ik culture has its own modes of storytelling, including Yuraq, which is a multimodal storytelling genre. As Samson (2010) states, “Yuraq is telling a story, told by using multiple sign systems and a way of making meaning” and that the story “is told through music, singing, drama, and gestures” (p. 22). (Ashe, 2019, pp. 22-23)

These examples also point to the notion of modal affordances and their usefulness to specific meaning-making events. As Kayla states: When engaging with different modes, students are accessing different semiotic resources…and [D]ifferent semiotic resources offer different affordances, or meaning potential. Modal affordances suggest that students learn and express understanding through different modes in different ways and find some modes more useful than others. (Ashe, 2019, p. 22)

And, Audra highlights the meaning potential within affordances: Importantly, each mode holds different qualities within the designing process that allow us to communicate with different affordances for meaning making. An affordance according to Jewitt (2011) is “meaning potential” or “what it has been repeatedly used to mean and do, and the social conventions that inform its use in context” (p. 24). (Surman, 2019, p. 18)

Examining the modal affordances within multimodal ensembles can reveal how the interplay of different modes contribute to meaning  making. For example, Kayla

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uses graphic novels, which she views as a multimodal genre, as an available design in her instructional plan for her research. Graphic novels are representations of multimodal ensembles that go beyond the more traditional novel that primarily utilizes the linguistic mode. Kayla explains how multimodal ensembles are foregrounded in graphic novels: Graphic novels are multimodal texts that allow readers to question and consider “how color affects emotions, how pictures can stereotype people, how angles of viewing affect perception, and how realism or the lack of it plays into the message of a work” (Schwartz, 2002, p. 263). The modalities offered in a graphic novel include written language, visual representation, and spatial representation. Written language can be similar to text written in regular novels, but also includes written language in speech bubbles. At times, the written language can contain audio representations, because the text represents a sound instead of just a word. Graphic novels also contain several visual representations. The way the visual representations are arranged allows readers to access the spatial representations. (Ashe, 2019, p. 24)

In addition, Audra points out that comics are also multimodal texts: Jacobs (2007) describes comics “as multimodal texts that involve multiple kinds of meaning making” used to strengthen literacy instruction “through the inclusion of visual and other literacies” (p. 21). (Ashe, 2019, p. 25)

5.3 Designing In a PTAR design cycle, designing includes both planning and implementing of an instructional plan as well as a plan for inquiry. These are intra-connected and inform each other through data that is created by students-as-designers and teacher-­ researchers-­as-designers. In both Kayla and Audra’s inquiries, the shift from a focus on teacher-researcher-as-designer to student-as-designer is a significant contribution to PTAR. This shift opens up potentials for the student-as-designer to participate as a collaborator in the inquiry process. In the following sections, we first provide an overview of each teacher-researchers’ instructional design and then focus on their discussions of student-as-designers.

5.3.1 Kayla Designing Based on initial observations of her students’ lack of interest and engagement with the texts they were reading, Kayla began her instructional designing by creating two protocols designed to gain information about their reading preferences. “In early February, I gave students a reading interest survey and a reading comprehension questionnaire to gain insight into what genres interested my students, how they preferred to read, and which strategies they used while reading” (Ashe, 2019, p. 55). Using the student responses to these protocols as an entry point, Kayla began designing and implementing her instructional plan:

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5  Affordances of Visual Images in Dual Language Classrooms: Teachers and Students… In late March, we were finally able to start the project and dig into the series novels. Each day, students would eagerly return from lunch so they could read as much as possible in our short twenty-minute time block set aside for “The Suitcase Project.” (Ashe, 2019, p. 57)

The Suitcase Project was organized by reading and discussion groups that spent part of the time reading portions of the novel, followed by a group discussion and individual journal entry: Monday through Thursday, students would find their spots, start the recorders, and either finish a journal entry or start reading a new chapter. Some students were able to read one chapter and complete a response to that chapter within the twenty minutes. Other students had to read one day and respond to that chapter the following day, depending on the lengths of the chapters. (Ashe, 2019, p. 57)

To help students facilitate their discussions and journal entries, Kayla created four different prompts which were in the form of sentence stems and circle maps.3 After a few weeks into the project, Kayla noticed students in two of the reading groups were more engaged in their discussions and journal entries about the novels: I grew drawn to continue observing the Captain Underpants and Amulet groups. Both groups were very engaged, communicated with one another, used creativity when responding in journals (through the use of written text and visual representations), and read books that were multimodal. At this point, I was intrigued by how students responded to their selected texts and realized that there was something potentially special about these kinds of texts…I started zooming in on observations and focused solely on the Captain Underpants and Amulet groups, because both groups were so consistent with engagement, both groups liked responding to the text with written language and drawings, and both groups communicated orally with one another during the reading time. (Ashe, 2019, pp. 58–59)

As previously stated, the graphic novel as a genre is, in itself, a multimodal ensemble. The modes and their affordances offer the reader an array of available designs. In the designing process, the reader-as-designer creates meaning through the interplay of these multimodal representations. In her research, Kayla describes how her students actively engage in the designing process to create meaning. The first example (Fig. 5.1) illustrates how students use the interplay of different modes within the text to learn vocabulary: Students used combinations of visual representations, written language, and oral language to help them write responses to this event. The visual representations show that the bright lights from another vehicle were impacting the character’s ability to see while driving. For example, an image shows Karen closing her eyes and trying to cover the bright light with her hands. The light shines on the faces of the characters in the car and then the accident happens. David complains about the high beams in the speech bubbles, allowing the written language to support the visuals. The sound effects also present readers with a written audio form of the crash. (Ashe, 2019, p. 67)

 A sentence stem provides part of a sentence that is completed by the student. For example, “This character likes to ________________________________” (Ashe, 2019, p. 133). A circle map is composed of concentric circles and used to brainstorm ideas that show what you already know about a topic by using context information 3

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Fig. 5.1  Excerpt 1.1 “High beams” (Ashe, 2019, pp. 64–65; Kibuishi, 2008, p. 4)

Kayla further explains how the visual representation of the high beams of the car’s headlights in the illustrations contributed students’ understanding of what high beams meant: This particular vocabulary event begins while students are reading page 4 of Amulet  (Kibuishi, 2008). The images on the page (see the “text” column in the excerpt

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5  Affordances of Visual Images in Dual Language Classrooms: Teachers and Students… below) show a bright light entering the car, blinding the characters as they drive around the corner. The images then show the mother [Karen] and father [David] reacting to the light. By the bottom of the page, the car in which they are driving is seen going off the road. Speech bubbles include written text revolving around the fact that bright lights are blinding the family, making it hard for David to safely drive the vehicle. Sounds of the car honking and hitting the fence in the accident are provided. Lastly, the individual frames show the images leading up to the event and the accident. Below, Excerpt 1.1: “High beams” shows the page from Amulet in which the high beams become problematic, the transcription of the conversation revolving around this event, and the journal entries in which students reference the accident. The first column shows the text in which students were looking at, reading from, and discussing. In the middle column, the transcript from this event is shown. This transcript starts at about one and a half minutes into the first day. The initials indicate who is speaking, with the T representing myself as the teacher and the other initials representing the three students in this group. (Ashe, 2019, p. 64)

Kayla begins her analysis, using her researcher-teacher stance, with an explanation of why she stops the reading and responds to Daisy’s increased intonation, meaning the voice rising in pitch, which, in Daisy’s case, is signaling uncertainty or asking for confirmation: On page 4, Daisy is the reader. She reads from the speech bubbles and increases her intonation as she reads high beams in lines 2–3. She finishes reading the written text before I stop the group to respond to her increased intonation at the end of the word beams. In lines 5–7, I ask students if they know what high beams are and direct them to look at the pictures. Since students were directed to the text itself, they do not verbalize what high beams are. Instead, Daisy simply says “there” in line 8 and Cam says “those things” in line 12 without providing a specific name or description of the object and making use of the available mode (visual representation) to make meaning. (Ashe, 2019, p. 65)

Kayla then continues her explicit guiding of students through the reading to elicit specific vocabulary for the lights coming out of the car: In line 14, I direct their attention to the car and ask what comes out of the car. Using the visual mode and becoming more specific with what I am asking, students begin using the linguistic mode to give a name to what is coming out of the car. In line 16, Daisy begins suggesting that flashlights are coming out of the car. In lines 22–24, I tell Daisy and Cam that we do not refer to those lights as flashlights, but instead call them headlights. In line 26, I ask students what headlights help people do. In line 27, Daisy states that headlights help people see. In lines 28–30, I add that if they are too bright, people struggle to see and then ask what happens to the dad. In line 31, Daisy responds that the dad cannot see. In line 32, I say “it’s too what” and Daisy responds on line 32 with the word “bright”. Immediately after reading, students started writing a response following the format of a note to pen pals to inform them of what is taking place in the story. In her written response, Daisy concluded that the bright headlights were the cause of the crash. In Cam’s written response, he described that David was blinded by the bright light and ended up dying. Rosley worked on the reading and writing independently without support from her peers during our reading block earlier in the day. While she missed the conversation about high beams, she still referred to them in her writing. She referenced different frames from the passage, mentioning physical appearances and emotions. She also wrote “someone high beam” and described how David was stuck. Although she missed out on the vocabulary discussion with the group about high beams and did not know the exact meaning of the

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term, she recognized through visual representation and written text within the speech bubble that the term was important and contributed to the crash. (Ashe, 2019, pp. 66–67)

From these analyses of student responses, Kayla makes an important discovery about her designing process from the perspective of a teacher-researcher: While interacting with students, I tended to use elicitations by probing and asking for students to provide words to finish my sentences or questions. For example, on line 26, I ask, “they [headlights] help the car do what?” Daisy is able to respond to that with only one word. Similarly, on line 32, I ask, “it’s too what?” Again, Daisy responds with just one word. In this event, I am teaching a new word to students, so I tend to provide most of the structure for the conversation to ensure that students understand the vocabulary word. Interestingly, while my response to increased intonation seemed important and necessary at the time, Rosley proved that discussion of the term was not necessary for students to understand the importance of the word itself. While Rosley’s writing does not fully suggest that she understood the meaning of the word (as she uses the word as a verb rather than a noun), it does demonstrate her ability to construct a response that included the high beam, showing her knowledge of the term’s importance and its significance to the story without the teacher’s help. (Ashe, 2019, pp. 67–68)

In her reflexive analysis of the parallel designing processes—readers-as-designers and teacher-researchers-as-designers intra-acting with multimodal text—Kayla describes her emerging understandings of how meaning making occurs within a multimodal-multiliteracies reading event: Going into the study, I thought that vocabulary conversations were necessary and important. I stepped in thinking I could support meaning making by providing definitions of difficult or unknown words. When seeing that Cam and Daisy used our conversation in their writing, I immediately felt reassured that my vocabulary conversation was in fact necessary and important; however, after looking over the transcription, I realized that I did not let students talk enough. Instead of letting students answer my questions, I would provide sentence starters and students would often answer with one word. I provided meaning instead of letting students make meaning. After seeing that Rosley wrote high beams in her journal without being present in the conversation, I realized that understanding the written and/or oral definition of each and every word in a text is not the most important piece of the meaning making process. While vocabulary conversations may have been more important for traditional texts, the visuals in graphic novels support the written text and allow for students to connect the visuals to what they are reading. The combinations of the visual and linguistic modes support vocabulary development and reading comprehension. (Ashe, 2019, p. 68)

Using what she learned from her ongoing analysis within her designing process as a researcher-teacher, Kayla describes how students collaborate without teacher interaction to use the written linguistic mode and the visual mode to make meaning. The following event took place as students were reading pages 46–47 of book 2 of the series (Kibuishi, 2008). The facing pages contain similar spatial designs—the upper half of each page has speech bubbles with visual images and the lower half uses only visual images. In Excerpt 3.5: “Prepare the cannon” (Fig. 5.2), notice the absence of Kayla’s voice in the transcript, which involves only the students in a discussion about the reading. Kayla describes the significance of this event in her own designing process as the teacher-researcher, and how this influenced the readers’ designing processes. Both

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Fig. 5.2  Excerpt 3.5: “Prepare the cannon”. (Ashe, 2019, p. 94; Kibuishi, 2008)

designing processes worked together to facilitate collaborative meaning making among the students without any teacher intervention: In this particular event, Cam and Daisy both look at the visual representation of a canon and try to determine the meaning without written text. They negotiate on what the name for the visual is and settle on blow up thing. When Cam sees the written text on the following page, he shouts the word and teaches his peers the actual word for the image. This is an example of the way students started to make meaning without me stepping in to teach vocabulary words through discussion. Cam was able to use two different modes to determine the correct name for the cannon. (Ashe, 2019, p. 95)

In her final analysis, Kayla describes both readers’ and the  teacher-researcher’s designing processes that inform one another to facilitate and contribute to meaning making through multimodal texts: While digging deep into the data, I learned even more about why my assumptions about providing so much structure and support were wrong. I came to view my students as designers who made meaning by interacting with multiple modes of representation. Students were fully involved in the transformative process of learning instead of the reproductive process of learning that I had incorrectly assumed necessary in their understanding of the text. Not only did students engage with multiple modes to make meaning, but they also worked collaboratively and supportive as a team while reading the graphic novel, interpreting the meanings, and writing responses in their reader response journals. Within this, students did not need much support from me. I engaged in some conversations with the group, but most of their time was spent working together and interacting deeply with the text. (Ashe, 2019, pp. 96–97)

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5.3.2 Audra Designing Similarly to Kayla, Audra also started her inquiry by observing her students during classroom activities such as the teacher-student interaction during Visualizing and Verbalizing (Bell, 2007) sessions. In addition, after making her initial instructional decision to organize a series of lessons around the use of culturally appropriate images, she also wanted to gauge her students’ views of reading texts and images to guide her design: Before starting my tasks, I pulled each student aside to talk through a semi-structured interview to learn more about their thoughts as learners...The focus of my questions revolved around their feelings as a reader and writer. The purpose of the interviews was to get each student thinking about their own skills and abilities as well as informing me how my students felt while participating in class. (Surman, 2019, p. 51)

From these interviews, as a researcher-teacher, Audra learned the following: My students all felt that a picture is something that could be read. This excited me as I was designing all of the tasks around the use of culturally appropriate images. Interestingly, when I was asking the students about reading strategies, all of my students responded with a form of creating images or referring to images within the book as a way to support their understanding. Buttercup stated, “If I read, you think you’re in a book and have-...” where she pauses, and I offer “so you imagine yourself in the story” to which she agrees. Rex explains that looking at the pictures and the words are important things to look at while reading. Aubree also explained when she listens to storytelling in Yugtun she is “picturing [the story]” as it is being told. (Surman, 2019, pp. 53–54)

These observations reinforced Audra’s instructional designing to support her students’ meaning-making process through culturally appropriate images. In addition to using isolated images, Audra also made the connection that images could tell a story, similar to the way books tell a story. This led her to consider using series of images that would allow her students to tell stories, rather than describing isolated images. In her role as teacher-as-designer, she created five tasks, varying the goal, amount of shared information, and how students interacted with the images. The discussion below focuses on Task 1 and Task 4, which both revolved around sequencing images in order to tell a story. In order to highlight the parallel processes of teacher-researcher-as-designer and learners-as-designers, select elements for Task 1 and Task 4 will be discussed below. The first task required students to agree on the order of ten images, which all were related to a story of playing lap game, a game similar to Baseball (Moses & Moses, 2013a). A group of three of Audra’s students worked together on this task. Audra shares this general observation about how students approached this new kind of assignment for the first time: The students were working together as they viewed all of the images, they were able to move them around the table and discuss what they were seeing. I found that the students were not talking much at the beginning of the task, rather, making reference to the images by pointing at them and referencing specific qualities in the pictures… the students then pointed out important details and manipulated the order of the story. Then the students were able to create a verbal response or explanation for the reasoning in moving the images in the order that they chose. (Surman, 2019, p. 78)

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In order to make sense of how her students utilized the affordances of the different modes made available in this activity, Audra video recorded students during completing the task. Excerpt 4.1 “Choose a game, then they start playing” (Table 5.1) takes place a few seconds into the first task, as students were deciding on the sequence of the beginning of the story. The left column includes the transcription of the oral interaction and the right column provides the images students were discussing as well as information about what they were doing with the images: arrows indicate pointing to images or moving images. A (Aubree) and B (Buttercup) are student-selected pseudonyms, while T represents the teacher (Audra). In this excerpt, Aubree had placed the image of kids touching the bat before the illustration of  kids running around. Buttercup, on the other hand, thinks the order of the images should be reversed. Audra’s instructional designing of offering a series of images for the students to sequence according to their own interpretations without a predetermined correct order, resulted in complex meaning-making events on the part of the students. The ability to discuss different interpretations of the images and the storyline resulted in multimodal meaning making on the part of the students. As Audra describes: Aubree and Buttercup experienced a disagreement at the picture captioned ‘what team goes first,’ Aubree stated “they’re gunna start the game” as she pointed to the image captioned ‘what team goes first’ (line 003). Buttercup tried to make the hand motion of grabbing the bat hand over hand that this picture depicts while she said, “no look, they start (hand motions) before they play the game” (line 004) … Buttercup now tried to share her thinking by pointing to the image captioned ‘what team goes first?’ while saying “they’re starting a um…” (line 006). Buttercup is interrupted from her explanation as Aubree physically manipulated the arrangement of the images. Aubree moved the second image, “what team goes first?” down and pushes the third image, “setting up to play,” above to switch the order. Aubree then shared her thinking, “caus they seem like running already and then they, they choose a game…” …She then points at the image ‘what team goes first’ and continued to explain “…then they started playing” (line 007). (Surman, 2019, pp. 67–69)

In her reflexive analysis, Audra recognized that each student engaged not only in their own design process, but that her students-as-designers also collaboratively constructed meanings. In her researcher-teacher positionality and through the process of transcribing and analyzing the multimodal meaning making, sparked by multiple interpretations of one particular illustration (Table  5.1 line 003), Audra came to the key realization that both interpretations are valid. She adds: I found that my students developed two interpretations of one illustration, which created two different beginnings for the story…My students found it challenging to agree on one interpretation of this illustration. Two students felt this illustration was depicting the children running around before the game had begun while the kids are starting to pick who would be on their team. One student interpreted the illustration showing the children already playing the game as the kids were running around in the action of lap game. Given that the text was not used for this task, both interpretations are valid with the students’ added explanations. (Surman, 2019, pp. 75–76)

Audra had selected images from a book that were presented in a specific order. However, the goal of the task was not to reproduce the predetermined sequence of the images, but for students to collaboratively create a story, ordering the images in

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Table 5.1  Excerpt 4.1 Task 1: “Choose a game, then they start playing” Words and gestures 003: A: they’re gunna start the game (pointing to the bottom right corner of the illustration labeled with a blue arrow)

Picture

004: B: No look. They (pointing at the picture labeled with a blue arrow) (placing hands repeatedly over one another like the action in the illustration) 006: B: they’re starting a. um (…) (Aubree leans into the table and then moves the image ‘setting up to play’ up and to the left and moves ‘what team goes first?’ Down and to the right. She sits back in her chair and looks at the new order.) 007: A: Caus they seem like running already and then they they choose a game then they [started playing] Adapted from Surman (2019, pp. 68–69); Lincoln & Moses (2013)

such a way that would make sense to them. Acting from her researcher-teacher positionality, Audra came to understand that the most complex meaning making occurred when students-as-designers created different interpretations of the images and therefore had to negotiate the order that made the most sense given their real world knowledge about playing lap game: While Task 1 led Audra to make observations about her students’ designing process, during Task 4, Audra participated in the process not only as the teacher-researcher-as-designer of the task, but also as co-designer with her students. For Task 4, Audra once again selected images from a story involving a cultural activity – this time the focus was on seal hunting (Moses & Moses, 2013b). She made an adjustment to the instructional design by selecting only a subset of the illustrations included in the written story. In addition, asking students to create images, which would fill in any missing scenes, emphasized that there was not one correct way to complete the activity.

Table 5.2 shows the four selected scenes. Audra describes the overall process her students-as-designers follows: The students and I then took turns describing the image we had to the rest of the group. Throughout this process many personal connections were being made as students were discussing the upcoming Yurarpak or Dance Festival, where the community celebrates the children that have participated in their first catch or hunt and will be recognized by the community. This is a yearly event [which] is an important celebration where people can remember loved ones through the name sakes that are being presented in the festival (C. Moses, personal communication, November 25, 2018). The students were discussing the different

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Table 5.2  The four images used in Task 4 (Surman, 2019, p. 100; Moses & Moses, 2013b) Imagining seal hunting

Preparing for seal hunting

Going seal hunting

Celebrating the first catch

garments that they would need to locate in order to participate in Yurarpak. Once each illustration had been discussed with the group, I then explained how all of these pictures were from the same book. I prompted the students with, “this isn’t the complete story, so I’d like all of us, we’re going to try and figure out what parts of this story are missing.” We then discussed what the possible order could be for the images that we did have. (Surman, 2019, pp. 101–102)

The next step in the task was for students to create their own illustrations to add to the existing images. In Excerpt 4.6 (Table 5.3), Buttercup, Rex and Audra discuss the content and placement of an image created by Buttercup. Rex, who is the only one present who has participated in seal hunting, suggests moving the image of harpooning the seal on an ice flow before the illustration of hunters spotting a seal in the water. Audra explains her interpretation of this interaction, which has been shortened for clarity as follows: This proposed order confused me because I interpreted the change to mean the hunter would first harpoon the seal before finding and locating the seal. Rather than telling Rex my interpretation, I restated his suggestion, “you think.” while pointing out at Buttercup’s drawing, picture three, “..t.hey’d harpoon it..and then they’re looking for it?” (line 009). Rex responded to my statement with an utterance of agreement to this proposed idea “um hm” (yeah) and with the gesture of raising his eyebrows (line 010). In the Yup’ik culture the gesture of raised eyebrows shows agreement which is similar to nodding one’s head up and down. Immediately, Buttercup disagreed with the idea and claims “uh uh, (no) they have to look for it.” and if they see it they have to catch it” (line 011). Simultaneously, Rex shared with me “if they shoot it on the water uh they-... .have to harpoon it before it drown” (line 013). I continued my verbal prompting, “so tell me more about that, did he shoot this seal here?” while pointing to the image “going seal hunting” (line 018). He responded “no after, closer and then…” (line 019). (Surman, 2019, pp. 109–111)

This exchange represents a significant transformation in the teaching-learning environment, as Audra, Buttercup and Rex acted as co-designers, carefully considering each other’s interpretations and expertise. This was made possible through the open-ended nature of the task, the students’ active role as illustrators and collaborators and experts on Yup’ik cultural and subsistence activities. Audra articulates it in the following way: Rex and I had developed different interpretations of the illustration. “going hunting” as well as Buttercup’s drawn illustration which was placed after “going seal hunting.” Rex was interested in changing the order of “going seal hunting” and Buttercup’s drawn illustration of harpooning the seal. I believe Rex was considering his funds of knowledge of seal hunting. I believe Rex was considering different information within the illustrations. “going seal hunt-

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Table 5.3  Excerpt 4.6: Task 4: “Have to harpoon it before it drown” Words 008: R: This one (pointing at Buttercup’s picture labeled with blue arrow) would be right here (pointing with left hand in space between images labeled red arrow)

Pictures

009: T: You think (.) (pointing at Buttercup’s picture with right hand, blue arrow) they’d harpoon (pointing at “going seal hunting” image, red arrow) it and then they’re looking for [it/?] (gesturing hand out to the following image, blue arrow) 010: R: [um] hm (yeah) (looking up at the teacher and raising eyebrows) 011: B: Uh uh (no) they have to look for it (pointing to “going hunting,” blue arrow) and if they see it they have to catch it (pointing to her drawn image, red arrow) 013: R: [if they shoot it] on the water uh they[have to harpoon it] before it drown 018: T: So tell me more about that\ is- (pointing at image labeled with blue arrow) did he shoot this seal here/? 019 R: No after (.) (starts to back away from the table) closer and then../ Adapted from Surman (2019, pp. 106–108); Moses & Moses (2013b) ing” and Buttercup’s drawn image which caused him to consider a different arrangement for the illustrations. The seal in “going seal hunting” was in the water and I wonder if based on his funds of knowledge. he knew that the next image would not be the seal up on the ice, as Buttercup had depicted the image. By suggesting switching the order of the images. I believe Rex was drawing on his knowledge of hunting. These were connections to knowledge that I and the other girls who were participating, did not have. (Surman, 2019, pp. 139–140)

5.4 Redesigned Through their designing process, both teacher-researchers discovered how to meet their students’ needs by creating instructional materials using multimodal, collaborative, and open-ended activities to stimulate creative expressions of learning. Both Audra and Kayla created lessons that were adaptations of or additions to the mandated school curriculum, which was a product that they hoped to use in the future. Through these instructional designs, each teacher-researcher and her students engaged in a parallel process of designing. This led to a reconceptualization of

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teaching-learning, which re-positioned the student-as-designer and collaborator in the inquiry. Kayla’s use of the series of graphic novels and her use of journaling moved beyond the linguistic modes of listening, speaking, reading, writing to include a full array of multimodal semiotic resources for meaning making. “I felt that the way students were constructing meaning, connected directly to the text being multimodal. The data analysis illuminated the multiliteracies framework as I recognized that students used multiple modes simultaneously to make meaning throughout the study” (Ashe, 2019, p. 99). In response to the special education curriculum, which uses non culturally relevant images as static prompts to generate “correct answers”, Audra designed multimodal learning opportunities for her students, utilizing culturally relevant images: Within my study, I utilized culturally appropriate images from the book set Piciryaramta Elicungcallra,4 depicting traditional Yup’ik activities and events present within my local community. I selected drawn images that I felt my students would best relate and connect with. The images included events such as playing lap game, seal hunting, berry picking, and throw parties. (Surman, 2019, p. 20)

Through these instructional designs, both teacher-researchers and students engaged in a parallel process of designing. This led to a reconceptualization of teaching-­ learning which re-positioned both teacher-researcher-as-designer and student-as-­ designer as co-collaborators in the inquiry. Viewing students as designers prompted both Kayla and Audra to remove highly structured prompts and replace them with open-ended activities, which gave students ownership of their own learning. For example, Kayla explains her decision to remove sentence stems for students’ journaling: Within my own research, I wanted to make sure that the objectives of the activities (conversations and written responses) allowed for students to engage with the text in a transformative way rather than a reproductive way. After analyzing the data, I realized that the prompts with sentence stems asked students to participate in a reproductive way of writing. However, students did engage in a transformative process when participating in nonrestrictive writing and when engaging in meaning making and conversation with peers. (Ashe, 2019, p. 105)

Similarly, Audra explains how removing restrictions and replacing them with open-­ ended and multimodal activities that allowed students to draw on their available designs, opened up the potential for creating and negotiating multiple meanings: I have learned that my students’ meaning making is highly impacted by the available designs my students have to work with. When restrictions are put into place on how they can develop meaning, they are limited in constructing a completely developed idea. This leaves my students circling in information rather than applying it and building upon it through the designing process. When students are provided access to all semiotic resources, there can be multiple meaning potentials developed and shared amongst learners. (Surman, 2019, pp. 149–150)

 The Piciryaramta Elicungcallra project was a materials development grant funded by the US Dept of Education (S356A0900​​​66), which resulted in the development of 43 Yup’ik medium books for grades k-6. https://uaf.edu/pe/ 4

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5.5 Summary District mandated curricula and instructional strategies tend to place teachers in the role of delivering the content that often tacitly operates from a deficit model of instruction. Audra and Kayla not only engaged in designing instructional plans, but also fundamentally reconceptualized the relationship between teachers and students to that of teacher-researchers-as-designers and students-as-designers as co-learners collaborating in the PTAR design process: Instead of focusing on what I thought my students might not know or understand, I started interacting in conversations with them about the stories and how they were responding to what they read. I now deem those conversations more important than the scaffolded probing I provided at the very beginning of the study. (Ashe, 2019, p. 107) Thoughtfully designed tasks have the power to break down the walls of restrictive and binding curriculum and can provide dynamic possibilities in education. (Surman, 2019, p. 149) I have learned that my emerging bilingual students can think critically and are willing to take a risk in their learning. Tasks can enrich student instruction and allow them to do sophisticated and open-ended meaning making. (Surman, 2019, p. 147)

Both teacher-researchers developed and integrated new opportunities for their bilingual students to access the full array of their linguistic and cultural resources using a variety of multimodal tools. Both teachers and students engaged in nested and parallel processes of designing, each drawing on their available designs to engage in the design process. As Kayla and Audra designed and re-designed their pedagogical practices, they began to view their students as active designers of meaning, rather than as passive recipients of knowledge. Through these nested and parallel processes of designing with rather than for their students, each teacher re-designed her own praxis, which transformed both teacher-researchers’ attitudes and conceptualizations of the learning potentials of their Indigenous bilingual students.

References Ashe, K. (2019). The suitcase project: A journey in multimodal reading of graphic novels with emergent bilingual fourth grade students. (order no. 13811089) [Master’s thesis, University of Alaska Fairbanks]. ProQuest dissertations and theses global. Bell, N. (2007). Visualizing and verbalizing for language comprehension and thinking (2nd ed.). Gander. Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2009). “Multiliteracies”: New literacies, new learning. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 4(3), 164–195. https://doi.org/10.1080/15544800903076044 Gomez, L., Freeman, D., & Freeman, Y. (2005). Dual language education: A promising 50–50 model. Bilingual Research Journal, 29(1), 145–164. Jacobs, D. (2007). More than words: Comics as a means of teaching multiple literacies. English Journal, 96(3), 19–25. Jewitt, C. (2011). An introduction to multimodality. In C. Jewitt (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of multimodal analysis (pp. 14–27). Routledge. Jewitt, C., & Kress, G. (2008). Multimodal literacy. Peter Lang.

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Kalantzis, M., & Cope, B. (2008). Language education and multiliteracies. In S.  May & N.  H. Hornberger (Eds.), Encyclopedia of language and education (Vol. 1, 2nd ed., pp. 195–211). Springer. Kibuishi, K. (2008). Amulet, book 1: The stonekeeper. Graphix. Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. Routledge. Lincoln, Q. R., & Moses, C. S. (2013). Angqalleq Kiagmi. Lower Kuskokwim School District. Moll, L. C., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (1992). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory Into Practice, 31, 132–141. Moses, K. C., & Moses, C. S. (2013a). Angqalleq Kiagmi. Lower Kuskokwim School District and University of Alaska Fairbanks. Moses, K. C., & Moses, C. S. (2013b). Ciquyam Pit’qerraallra. Lower Kuskokwim School District and University of Alaska Fairbanks. New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60–92. Samson, S. (2010). Yuraq: An introduction to writing (publication no. 1486008) [Master’s thesis, University of Alaska Fairbanks. UMI Dissertation Publishing. Schwartz, G. (2002). Graphic novels for multiple literacies. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 46(3), 262–265. Surman, A. R. (2019). Multimodal meaning making with culturally responsive images: Designing tasks for 6th-8th grade special education students (publication no. 13811089) [Master’s thesis, University of Alaska Fairbanks]. ProQuest dissertations and theses global.

Chapter 6

Designing Past-Present-Future: Traditional Funds of Knowledge Through Modern Technology

This chapter pairs the work of one Native teacher (Sheila Wallace) and one nonNative teacher (Natalie Cowley), because both their inquiries centered on the uses of technology in language maintenance. While Sheila was a high school teacher in the regional hub of Bethel (where most people speak English) and Natalie taught middle grades in the remote community of Kasigluq (where many people speak Yup’ik), both student populations had exited out of Yup’ik medium instruction, which ends in grade 6 district-wide. Both wanted to engage their students in language and literacy learning experiences that were grounded in Yup’ik ways of being-knowing-­ doing through the cultural activity of storytelling, which was supported by the use of technology. Sheila focused on developing a high school Yup’ik language class to counteract language attrition in her students, who had either graduated from the local immersion program or who had moved to Bethel from communities implementing K-6 dual immersion programs. As an English language arts teacher, Natalie developed a mobile game using A Raven’s Gift (Rearden, 2013) as the starting point for her students, most of whom were no longer receiving Yup’ik medium instruction, since the Dual language program ends in grade 6.

6.1 Wonderings As an English language arts teacher in a dual language classroom, Natalie began her inquiry with the observation that “The district mandated curriculum [in English language arts] does not incorporate indigenous Alaskan culture or languages” (Cowley, 2015a, p. 2). She recognized the need for a curriculum and pedagogy that would support continued language development, which is situated in Indigenous ways of being-knowing-doing and culturally based activities:

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Siekmann, J. Parker Webster, Multiliteracies Pedagogy and Language Teaching, Educational Linguistics 60, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31812-2_6

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6  Designing Past-Present-Future: Traditional Funds of Knowledge Through Modern… Westernized curriculum often puts emphasis on literacy as just reading and writing, while devaluing native ways of learning…My students learn through Yup’ik dance and storytelling. Incorporating these culturally situated ways of learning into my instruction to help students learn the content standards they are required to learn, makes the content more relevant. (Cowley, 2015a, p. 3)

As a Yup’ik teacher, Sheila identified the lack of high school level classes allowing students to continue developing their existing language proficiency and cultural knowledge. She explains that “Although Yup’ik I and II are offered at the high school, these classes are designed for non-speakers of Yup’ik, where the emphasis is heavily placed on Yup’ik arts and crafts” (Wallace, 2010, p. 8). Another impetus for her inquiry was “...the difficulty of finding teaching and learning materials in the target language” (Wallace, p. 9). A related observation both teacher-researchers shared was the role technology could play in developing a culturally responsive pedagogy in the context of language and culture shift within Indigenous communities. As Sheila explains, technology is often cited as a contributor to language shift to English, which “is becoming more pervasive with the [disruption of] intergenerational transmission (Krauss, 1980) as people become more dependent on the influx of technology and mass media than ever before through the internet and television” (Wallace, 2010, pp.  11–12). Likewise, Natalie’s inquiry was prompted by her wondering of how technology might be used to support language and cultural maintenance: So how can I incorporate Indigenous knowledge and technology? They seem like they are in contradiction with one another. Cultural knowledge is seen as knowledge from the past that ingrains them in place while technology can put them in a world outside of their local place. (Cowley, 2015a, p. 4)

These observations and wonderings led to a rationale for using technology to support language and cultural maintenance in their contexts. Natalie foregrounds the use of technology as a culturally relevant tool that can also mediate district mandated content standards. “My hope is that with my master’s project, Surviving Alaska, I make a place for both technology and culture to be relevant tools that engage students in meeting academic content standards” (Cowley, 2015a, p.  4). Similarly, Sheila identifies technology as a tool to engage students in literacy events that foreground Yup’ik storytelling genres, which foster individual and community participation in language and cultural activities: The Yup’ik Multimedia curriculum has a dual purpose of promoting a need for language maintenance and addresses the critical need for preservation of oral storytelling tradition in Yup’ik. This integration of authentic Yup’ik material helps to bridge the gap between the school culture and the community and is used as a vehicle to promote relevance, interest, and motivation. (Wallace, 2010, p. 12)

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6.2 Available Designs Both Sheila and Natalie approached their inquiries from a conceptual grounding in Indigenous ways of being-knowing doing, which they then related to the western concepts of place-based education and funds of knowledge. Drawing on multiliteracies as a pedagogical design, they focused on how to use technology in culturally appropriate ways to support language and literacy development.

6.2.1 Indigenous Ways of Being-Knowing-Doing While Sheila and Natalie come from very different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, both were brought up in contexts with minoritized, culturally diverse populations, who were also marginalized because they spoke a different language or dialect of English. These influences shaped their perspectives on teaching-learning. As an Indigenous woman, who grew up in an Alaska Native village speaking Yugtun and practicing cultural and subsistence activities based in traditional ways of being-­ knowing-­doing, Sheila brought these available designs with her as a teacher in the western school context. For Sheila, the traditional activity of Indigenous storytelling became the principle available design for her teacher-researcher project: The focus on Yup’ik knowledge and culture through storytelling in this multimedia curriculum incorporates an inclusive model for culturally responsive teaching, learning, and assessment. Students use Yup’ik as a cultural base for understanding how it fits into the realm of everyday life through the projects surrounding the Yup’ik storytelling genres: fables, song and dance, biographies, and customs. (Wallace, 2010, p. 25)

Sheila continues her description of storytelling as an intergenerational passing down of knowledge and cultural traditions that serves to preserve the past and connects to the present: Storytelling in the Yup’ik culture has always been an integral part of oral history and stories are passed down from through generations. The tradition of storytelling serves important functions in the Yup’ik society as it connects the past to the present and preserves historical and cultural traditions. These stories were traditionally told again and again. Each time, new meanings from the same story were constructed; each person listening to the story adapted what they heard to their own personal experiences through their “physical, emotional, and spiritual needs at the time” (Parker Webster & Yanez, 2007). Through storytelling, important aspects of everyday life are taught in a society where livelihood and prosperity largely depends on hunting, fishing, and gathering from the land and sea. Hunting and domestic skills are integral and necessary for survival. Storytelling provides the Yup’ik people instructions on how to live, how to act in given situations, and how to survive in a hunting and gathering society. (Wallace, 2010, p. 27)

Further, Sheila emphasizes the role of Indigenous oral storytelling as the principal method for providing instructions on how to live as an Indigenous person: This means that stories are much more than simply telling a story; they encompass the personal, often spiritual, aspects of everyday life in a society where life is dependent on

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6  Designing Past-Present-Future: Traditional Funds of Knowledge Through Modern… hunting and gathering for survival. They tell about cultural mores and direct a person’s everyday life. Stories teach rules and regulations to keep in harmony between the temporal world that we live in with our spiritual connection to the land and its inhabitants, as well as the world of the supernatural…Building a curriculum centered on storytelling fulfills a cultural expectation to continue the tradition of Yup’ik oral storytelling that have been passed down from generations. It is important to pass the art of storytelling today to continue this centuries old tradition. (Wallace, 2010, p. 51)

Growing up on Chicago’s south side in a primarily African American neighborhood, Natalie also brought with her an awareness of available designs that lay outside of the western notion of schooling and academic content curriculum. With this background and familiarity of such available designs, Natalie approached her project with an understanding of how her students also brought with them available designs that represented linguistic and cultural diversity, which she links to the concept of funds of knowledge: I wanted students to really understand how they could use their own funds of knowledge in the classroom to be able to discuss the material presented. Moll et al. (1992) explain Funds of Knowledge refers “to these historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household or individual functioning and well-being” (p. 133). (Cowley, 2015a, p. 10)

She also connects these funds of knowledge to the available designs of Indigenous knowledge and cultural activities utilized in the digital game she was going to create for her instructional design: I wanted students to be able to draw upon the skills and knowledge they already know and be able to find correlations between their knowledge and the knowledge being presented by the Elders. Through these correlations they would be able to make connections so they may be able to utilize this knowledge to complete the tasks presented in the game. (Cowley, 2015a, p. 11)

6.2.2 Multiliteracies: Multimodalities and Multilinguality Given both teacher-researchers’ focus on Indigenous ways of being-knowing-doing in assembling their available designs, the western pedagogical framework of multiliteracies provided an array of interrelated available designs that would also be culturally relevant. In addition, by extending the notion of being literate beyond the linguistic social semiotic resource, characterized by reading and writing, to include multimodality, multilinguality and technology, a pedagogy of multiliteracies would provide the framework for creating a culturally responsive curriculum for both Natalie and Sheila. Natalie describes how a pedagogy of multiliteracies serves to address the linguistic and cultural differences represented in her students’ lives and juxtaposes it to the way literacy is often viewed in western schooling: Multiliteracies overcomes the limitations of traditional approaches by emphasizing how negotiating the multiple linguistic and cultural differences in our society is central to the pragmatics of the working, civic, and private lives of students” (New London Group, 1996,

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p. 60). In westernized teaching, students are taught that the only way to be literate is to be literate in reading and writing. It does not take into account Indigenous ways of being literate about the world around them. (Cowley, 2015a, p. 5)

Similarly, Sheila draws on Healy (2008) to describe multiliteracies as a way to address the need for a diversity in conceptualizations for teaching literacy in the context of western schooling: A tenet of multiliteracies approaches is that literacy education must enable people to live literately in a world of deep difference, both within and across increasingly pluralistic states. In other words, instead of trying to school difference out of people, multiliteracies education entails schooling in diversity (Healy, 2008, p. 104). (Wallace, 2010, p. 42)

Natalie also describes how multiliteracies can extend the notion of what it means to be literate in today’s society in general, and how this relates to her students, who, know how to travel between the many rivers and lakes that surround our village without using a map. He understands how to traverse the region, not from reading it from a text, but through practice, observation, and life experience. Learning how to navigate our local landscape is an important skill, and indeed a form of spatial literacy, that he needs in order to be a productive member of our community, to help with fishing and hunting. (Cowley, 2015a, p. 5)

Being literate, therefore, involves multilinguality and multimodality, both key concepts in a pedagogy of multiliteracies: Multiliteracies explain that students should be multilingual and have the opportunity to work with different modalities. When students are multilingual they are able to “negotiate discourse differences” (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009, p.  3) among the many varieties of language found in Kasigluk. For example, a student speaks Yugtun with Elders, VE with their friends, and SAE in classroom presentations. In my project, I try to include these multilingual differences. Multiliteracies does not only pertain to different linguistic variations: it also relates to students being able to navigate different modalities. Cope and Kalantzis (2009) point out that modalities can be “written language [page and screen], oral language, visual representation, audio representation, tactile representation, and spatial representation” (p. 10). Each one of these modalities needs students to use a different set of skills to be able to evaluate and understand the information being presented. (Cowley, 2015a, p. 7)

Similarly, Sheila views multiliteracies as a pedagogy built on the understanding that literacy is more than reading and writing and that ‘texts’ are extended beyond the linguistic, to include multiple sign systems and multimodalities: Multiliteracies incorporate multiple sign systems to construct meaning and to interpret meaning through multimodal texts. For example, the meaning-making from varied texts can be represented and communicated through multiple sign and symbol systems through song and dance, visual arts, music, and drama. (Wallace, 2010, pp. 42–43)

As such, this conceptualization of a pedagogy of multiliteracies provides a culturally congruent framework for Sheila’s Yup’ik multimedia project: In the Yup’ik Multimedia curriculum, therefore, the concept of multiliteracies is incorporated through meaning making from fables, biographies, song and dance, and Yup’ik customs. This mirrors the multiliteracies concept grounded in the perspective that there is a

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6  Designing Past-Present-Future: Traditional Funds of Knowledge Through Modern… wide spectrum of literacies that are socially situated. The meaning making from storytelling through the different modes and meaning making helps students to articulate Yup’ik knowledge and helps them to make sense of the world through Yup’ik worldview. (Wallace, 2010, p. 43)

6.2.3 Technology as a Tool When conceptualizing the role of technology in their instruction, both Sheila and Natalie emphasize that technology use should not be an end in itself. Instead, they view technology as a tool to work towards content standards in language, literacy, social studies and science. As Natalie explains: as teachers we must ensure that we are focusing on the skill we are trying to teach. “When using technology in conjunction with language learning, the technology chosen should supplement the lesson and not be the lesson.” (Galla, 2009, p. 176). I agree with Galla, who argues that teachers must be sure that the technology does not become the focus for the lesson, but instead it is just the mode in which the lesson is completed. (Cowley, 2015a, p. 10)

As a curriculum writer for her high school Yup’ik language class, Sheila is acutely aware of the necessity to frame not only her units, but her overall rationale for the class, on achieving specific standards: “Integration of technology into the classroom can “empower foreign language teachers to enhance language learning and provide a platform for achieving standards” (Sarieva & Zoran, 2008, p.  8)” (Wallace, pp. 45–46). Similarly, Natalie chose to create an augmented reality (AR) game, a specific type of digital game, to position students as creators or designers of knowledge: Holden and Sykes (2011) explain “formal learning environments [need] to become places capable of building, rather than simply transmitting, knowledge” (p. 2) This is why I wanted to use AR, because it allows students to build their own knowledge and interact with the academic content in a way that is engaging, AR allows students to become active participants in their learning, and not just passive recipients of content. (Cowley, 2015a, p. 15)

Following Dikkers et al. (2014), Natalie describes augmented reality as “a mobile interface that enables the design of games around a particular location, authentic roles, authentic documents, narrative challenges, and game mechanics that sculpt user experience” (Cowley, 2015a, p.  4). In her conceptualization of AR, Natalie emphasizes location, authenticity, storytelling and purpose as key elements of building an augmented reality game for her students. This view importantly entails integration of cultural knowledge and culturally relevant pedagogies in standards-based instruction, as AR “allows for the creation of a story based on cultural knowledge to help students engage in learning about science and literacy skills” (Cowley, 2015a, p. 4).

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6.2.4 Place Based Education Having grown up in a remote village, where the Yup’ik language was still widely spoken and where cultural activities such as storytelling as well as subsistence hunting, gathering and fishing were actively practiced by the community, Sheila is deeply connected to yuuyaraq, the Yup’ik way of life. One of the key elements of this onto-epistemo-methodological framework is the connection to the land as an important foundation of every aspect of life, encompassing Yup’ik values such as how to take care of the land and its animals. As a nonIndigenous teacher in a remote Yup’ik community, Natalie used the western framework of place based education in the rationale for her instruction strategies: One reason I chose to use AR is because of its ability to reinforce place-based learning. “The primary value of place-based education lies in the way that it serves to strengthen children’s [and adults’] connections to others and to the regions in which they live” (Smith, 2002, pp.  593–594). Dikkers et  al. (2014) explain how AR reinforces placed-based pedagogy: Specifically learning embedded in the particular histories, environment, and culture of place (ideally students’ lifeworlds) can: (1) make learning relevant, (2) demonstrate the power that knowledge can have in understanding the world (3) promote agency among learners, (4) raise equity and issues with the curriculum, and (5) address pressing global environmental concerns (p. 3). (Cowley, 2015a, p. 9)

Similarly, Sheila identified authenticity in terms of materials, language use and audiences as the purposes for her curriculum, and selected technology applications that would engage students in a variety of storytelling events in the classroom and beyond through offering “a class based on real world knowledge and use the applications of technology to bring that knowledge into the classroom” (Wallace, 2010, p. 8).

6.3 Designing Because of their individual comfort levels and experience in using technology themselves, Sheila and Natalie also viewed technology as a tool for designing purposeful language and literacy events that could “preserve their language, and show them how their indigenous language is relevant even in a digital age” (Cowley, 2015a, p. 7). They saw the relevance of technology as a tool for teacher-researchers-­ as-designers to use within their classrooms because, “Many students today are naturally motivated by activities that incorporate and use technology and tools” (Wallace, 2010, p. 46). It can also serve as a tool for students-as-designers for “creating and presenting the material in engaging and interactive ways and as a modality through which students can present their learning” (Cowley, 2015a, p. 10).

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6.3.1 Natalie Designing Natalie approaches planning her inquiry from her researcher-teacher stance. She begins with observing and analyzing the instructional curriculum in terms of cultural relevance and her students’ lived experiences. Using a concrete example, Natalie describes how the language arts curriculum limits students’ access to their funds of knowledge and Indigenous ways of being-knowing-doing, and consequently, inhibits their ability to make meaning from these stories based in primarily western cultural contexts and experiences: The district mandated curriculum does not take into account my students’ unique life experiences. For example, in one reading for the language arts curriculum, the story discusses walking down the street to a carnival and stepping off of a curb and seeing a clown, an experience my students have had no exposure to. In rural village settings, we don’t have streets, we have boardwalks. These boardwalks are made of wooden planks, so there are no curbs. Not only do we not have curbs or streets, but my students have never visited a carnival or seen a clown in real life. My students struggled with the context of this particular story because they did not have the necessary background knowledge to understand the basic content of the story, making it harder to analyze the text. (Cowley, 2015a, p. 2)

In response to the lack of cultural content and relevance in the district curriculum, Natalie uses Indigenous ways of being-knowing-doing traditionally taught through storytelling to provide the overarching conceptual framework for her instructional design. She combines the use of physical tools, such as tarps, ropes, etc., that will be used in the actual building of a shelter with the technology of western media methods “using the iPad app Aris1 for game play and note-taking, writing their journals in Google Docs on the iPad, and creating digital stories using Adobe Voice” (Cowley, 2015a, p.  6). The bringing together of both Indigenous and western instructional methods is also reflected in the use of both standard American English and Yugtun. As she plans an instructional design for the unit of study, Natalie also utilizes the Indigenous concept of doing, which is grounded in a collaborative orientation to working together in groups, “to complete a variety of tasks: interviewing, building shelters, writing journals, discussing content, and creating digital stories” (Cowley, 2015a, p. 6). Natalie begins implementing her instructional design by first having students read the post-apocalyptic novel, Raven’s Gift, (Rearden, 2013), in which many of the people in the local area were wiped out by a strain of Avian Flu. Natalie explains that she chose the book, “because it tied to our local communities, and helped students with background knowledge before beginning the game” (Cowley, 2015b, Game section). She then introduces the augmented reality (AR) game, which provides the means to bring together sources of information using modern technology, traditional Indigenous knowledge and real-world physical tasks: My game takes place in our village, Kasigluk, and the characters they meet in the game are all local elders. My students play as survivors in a post-apocalyptic world…The game

 Natalie used the Augmented Reality for Interactive Storytelling (ARIS) platform, an open-source game developed by David Gagnon and colleagues at UW-Madison. 1

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begins where the book leaves off, and the students pretend to be children from the story. (Cowley, 2015a, p. 4)

In the game, students are provided prompts that send them out on quests to gather information and engage in activities that will help them learn to survive without modern technologies, relying on Indigenous knowledge and practices. “The game is broken into four sections…The skills presented include making shelters, hunting, medicinal plants, and making clothing. Each section is used to help students gain background knowledge to help them include in their writing” (Cowley, 2015b, Game section). Each of the sections involves activities that include those listed below, to progress through the game: • • • • •

Accessing the game prompt to begin the quest Creating research questions and interview protocols Interviewing Elders to gain information Journaling and making an action plan Journaling about the outcome of the task and information to help to proceed with the next section of the game

Implementing the four sections of the game also involves teacher-directed lessons and activities that help students learn about and practice multiliteracies skills such as creating research questions, interviewing, journaling, editing, drawing and completing tasks using technological tools. Natalie describes this process for Week 1 of her lesson plan, which begins with providing instruction on “how to create research questions and conduct interviews with Elders” (Cowley, 2015b, Teacher Guides section). After interviewing, students then proceed using the knowledge gained from the Elders. The following excerpt from her lesson plan describes how the students advance through the game: Have students discuss what they learned from the Elder on how to build a shelter. Then they need to draw a picture of how they would build a shelter using tarp and rope. Once students have taken a picture of their drawing then have them grab a tarp, rope, and a pair of scissors. They will then go out behind the school to build their own shelter using the supplied materials, and materials they find outside of the school. When done they will record themselves explaining how they made their shelter and why. Students finish shelter. Then students get on Aris to get the prompt to journal about how they survived the first week by using knowledge from elders, so others may learn how to survive from them. (Cowley, 2015b, Teacher Guides section, Week 1)

From the outset, students-as-designers are provided opportunities to access and assemble available designs they will use in their own designing processes. Because the game format is cyclic, it allows students to add new information for building on available designs. Students then use these newly assembled available designs in their designing processes to carry out tasks that will move them forward in the game. Natalie describes it this way: Available designs are all the ways in which students are presented the material, but as students process the information from the available designs they are involved in the designing process. “Designing transforms knowledge in producing new constructions and representations of reality” (New London Group, 1996, p. 76). My project has the students engaged in

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6  Designing Past-Present-Future: Traditional Funds of Knowledge Through Modern… several different design processes for several different tasks and outcomes. (Cowley, 2015a, p. 11)

Natalie further describes how students engage in their own designing processes by utilizing their multilinguality as they progress through the game and unit of study. While the storyline and quests in the game are presented in standard American English (SAE), students are provided opportunities to use Yugtun and the regional English dialect (often referred to as Village English, or VE) to carry out tasks of the game: The storyline of the game is presented in SAE, however, the videos and audio of elders is presented in Yugtun. The students are able to discuss and take notes in Yugtun or in VE. They then interview elders using Yugtun, but their final journals and digital stories are in SAE with some inclusion of Yugtun. I wanted my project to show them that each language/dialect has a place and use in our classroom. (Cowley, 2015a, p. 7)

6.3.2 Sheila Designing Sheila also entered into her inquiry as a researcher-teacher observing needs in her school district’s current curriculum. Specifically, she identified the need for a Yup’ik language class as opposed to classes focusing exclusively on Yup’ik crafts. As a first language Yup’ik speaker growing up in a remote village in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, she learned to read and write Yup’ik in elementary school, as her community implemented an early exit bilingual program locally known as the “Yup’ik First Language Program”. After moving to Bethel, where the dominant community language is English, she enrolled in a high school level Yup’ik language class, only to find out that this class did not focus on maintaining and expanding her Yup’ik proficiency: In this class, the only time I remember using my Yup’ik fluency productively was when I was assigned to read the Yup’ik weather forecast for KYUK, a local bilingual radio and news station. Beyond that, I focused on my craft assignments in silence. I remember feeling that my ability to speak, read, and write in Yup’ik was largely ignored and devalued as I worked diligently on my Yup’ik crafts. (Wallace, 2010, pp. 6–7) I wanted to develop lessons that would challenge my students’ language growth and development. Through these lessons, it was my hope to promote a sense of purpose, belonging, and value in my students’ ability to read, write, and speak Yup’ik. (Wallace, 2010, p. 8) The focus on Yup’ik knowledge and culture through storytelling … [and] incorporates an inclusive model for culturally responsive teaching, learning, and assessment. Students use Yup’ik as a cultural base for understanding how it fits into the realm of everyday life through the projects surrounding the Yup’ik storytelling genres: fables, song and dance, biographies, and customs. (Wallace, 2010, p. 25)

Table 6.1, provides an overview of Sheila’s instructional design, teaching language and culture through Yup’ik storytelling. Again, drawing on her experience of reading the weather forecast when she was a high school student herself, Sheila identifies authentic uses and audiences as an

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Table 6.1  Language focus, culture focus and multimedia integration by unit Unit Language focus, culture focus and multimedia integration Public service Students summarize the importance of Yup’ik storytelling, its role in the Announcements Yup’ik culture, and how storytelling is used to teach cultural values and norms. The language focus is to inform, tell about, and describe the significance of Yup’ik storytelling. Students then make a public service announcement in Yup’ik at the local radio station. Yup’ik fables Told in present tense, Yup’ik fables often are told in verses with a chant or song that is repeated between the verses. Language form is more playful, and could have nonsense words or sounds. The final task is to write an original fable including all elements of the fable and present using PowerPoint Yup’ik Biography pieces are in the past tense, third person, and singular form. They Biographies inform about the life of a person and the person’s life events. Students research a family member, as it is a cultural value to know family kinship, and retell the life of the person in narrative form. The final task is to produce a biography piece using an iMovie. Yup’ik dance Students compare and contrast a song and dance from two different Yup’ik regions. This song and dance is the same with dialectal and regional differences. The language focus is that movements for a song and dance are often similar for words that are different from each other due to dialectal variations. In groups, their task is to take the words and illustrate movements in both songs. The task prepares them to learn a traditional song, record it digitally to post in a podcast, and to perform in person at a local dance festival. Yup’ik customs Yup’ik customs are written in narrative form in future tense, third person, and informs the listener how to interact with game when hunting, gathering, preparing as well as how to conduct everyday life in a domestic setting, such as how to prepare game, the discarding of its contents, and its distribution to community members. It may inform of domestic duties, such as how to conduct oneself through the pubescent years, to rituals performed during childbearing experience. Students then select five traditional rituals and create a mini book using Photoshop. Adapted from Tables 6 and 8 in Wallace (2010, pp. 41, 53)

important element of language teaching and learning. In addition, she explains that in the context of language maintenance, her students are learning Yup’ik not for academic or professional purposes, or even to travel abroad, but as a way to participate in Yup’ik linguaculture, to connect to their family and communities, and as part of their Yup’ik identity: I felt that it was worthwhile to offer a class based on real world knowledge and use the applications of technology to bring that knowledge into the classroom. In this class, my students were required to present their final multi-media projects in a setting outside of the classroom; it was an attempt to make their school work a part of a larger social connection within the community for a meaningful application. The public demonstrations of their projects, such as the public service announcements, were then used as a performance assessment. (Wallace, 2010, pp. 8–9)

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Here, Sheila employs the power of technology to create a sense of purpose and authenticity for the units through establishing meaningful audiences within the classroom, the students’ families and the community. Viewing students-as-designers, Sheila designed lessons that used Yup’ik story genres as available designs and thereby bringing them into conversation with western available designs, such as a public service announcement or multimedia presentation. In this way, students are creating new texts that are shared beyond the classroom context: As a project based elective class, students were required to produce Yup’ik multimedia materials using technology as a vehicle to enhance language learning. The goal was not for the mere purpose of using technology but to encourage opportunities for interactions in the target language through their multimedia projects. Integrating technology into the class, such as movies and PowerPoint presentations, was intended to capture student interest and motivation. ...Through these lessons, it was my hope to promote a sense of purpose, belonging, and value in my students’ ability to read, write, and speak Yup’ik…In this class, my students were required to present their final multimedia projects in a setting outside of the classroom; it was an attempt to make their school work a part of a larger socia connection within the community for a meaningful application. The public demonstrations of their projects, such as the public service announcements, were then used as a performance assessment. (Wallace, 2010, p. 8)

This is very similar to Natalie’s instructional designing and intended outcomes. Using Yup’ik Elders’ traditional knowledge about survival and an English medium post-apocalyptic young adult novel as starting points for orchestrating a context that engaged her students in the design process, resulting in their own digital stories.

6.4 Redesigned Both inquiries were institutionally framed as teacher action research projects rather than theses. As such, their processes started from a perspective of validating and further developing deeper understandings of what constituted a culturally responsive language and literacy pedagogy. In other words, both Natalie and Sheila, prior to entering the master’s programs, approached teaching and learning from a critical pedagogical stance that recognized the importance of utilizing Indigenous ways of being-knowing-doing through cultural activities and technology. Natalie redesigned literacy instruction through the AR game that  integrated Yup’ik literacies and cultural knowledge and practices through the use of virtual reality and multimodal activity. Sheila redesigned Yup’ik language and culture instruction through a year-long multimedia class based on Yup’ik storytelling genres. Using an online curriculum mapping tool, “The curriculum then serves as a multiple purpose of providing curriculum and materials for BRHS that is also shared with others in the district” (Wallace, 2010, p. 18). The curricula designed by both Sheila and Natalie engaged students in a series of design cycles that culminate in student generated artifacts. While playing the game, Natalie’s students-as-designers completed a series of quests and as a culminating

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product, recorded digital stories, which are published online (Cowley, 2015b, Teacher Guides section, Digital Stories): At the end of the project, students were asked to create digital stories to present to the community what they learned from the project. I wanted the students to have a culminating project that encompassed all that they learned. I also wanted to give them a new audience to write for and an opportunity to create a multimodal text. The students were presented with three options for topics for their digital stories: What I learned, Tips on how to survive, or A year in the life of their characters. (Cowley, 2015a, p. 16)

While Sheila did not implement the curriculum, her planned activities positioned students as designers who create artifacts, such as public service announcements, multimedia presentations and digital stories in the form of yuraq (Yup’ik dance). These redesigned products would also contribute to filling the gap in Yup’ik language materials Sheila identified at the start of her inquiry. The Yup’ik Multimedia curriculum has potential to be shared with other sites that offer Yup’ik at the high school level. The lack of Yup’ik material continues to be a pervasive issue within the school district due to only a handful of published Yup’ik material appropriate for high school students. (Wallace, 2010, pp. 17–18)

Both teachers’ redesigned deepened their understandings of what a culturally responsive language and literacy pedagogy is and how it is put into practice in Indigenous classrooms. Their new understandings brought to the community as critical to understanding and bridging the school-community gap that often exists in Indigenous contexts. For Natalie this meant bringing community knowledge into the classroom during content time, so that local knowledge was viewed as academic content and therefore integral to teaching and learning in western school contexts: I have learned how to help my students engage in learning not only in school, but value what they learn outside of school...My students have a knowledge base that I want them to understand they can utilize in the classroom. (Cowley, 2015b, Next Steps section)

Sheila, on the other hand, focused on having students share their Yup’ik language and cultural knowledge with their families and other community members beyond the classroom: Through this experience, I realized the potential and power of extending their class work into the local community. In this way, students became more cognizant about the quality, accuracy and creativity in their projects when a public component to their projects was included. (Wallace, 2010, p. 9)

In the process of creating her multimedia curriculum, Sheila also deepened her own understandings of the significance of storytelling in Yup’ik being-knowing-doing: Building this curriculum has taught me the important role of Yup’ik storytelling in our daily lives. I have learned how traditional storytelling shapes the lives of people. They teach about how one should conduct themselves in culturally appropriate ways. Fables and ­customs teach heavily on how animate and inanimate things should be handled, especially during hunting, gathering, and preparation of animals. (Wallace, 2010, p. 56)

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6.5 Summary The use of technology has often been cited as contributing to language shift from Heritage language use to English. However, the two teacher-researcher projects presented in this chapter illustrate how a reconceptualizing of technology can reshape it as a tool for language and cultural maintenance. In her conversations with her Yup’ik-medium partner teacher, Natalie discovered that the digital game did not only support English language arts, but also contributed to develop their Yup’ik language proficiency: I conferenced with our Yup’ik teacher on their abilities in Yup’ik, and he explained that they are stretching themselves to find the correct Yup’ik words to interview elders. He also explained that they are greatly interested when an elder uses a word they do not know to negotiate for the meaning. He has seen that the students are starting to use higher Yup’ik words that they have learned in this project in other aspects of their lives. Not only has there been an increase in their Yup’ik production, but I have also seen improvement in their writing and speaking skills. (Cowley, 2015b, Next Steps section)

Similarly, Sheila’s focus was on using technology as a tool for developing higher levels of Yup’ik proficiency and literacy skills: What I hope results from this curriculum development is that, first, it gives students with proficiency and literacy skills in Yup’ik an opportunity to expand their language learning in an academic environment. I feel that these students have great potential for expanding their Yup’ik fluency through projects that help contribute to the preservation of our language while providing Yup’ik material for other teachers and learners of Yup’ik. (Wallace, 2010, pp. 57–58) I want my students to grow and achieve and be ambassadors for their language, their culture, and their communities…In our Yukon-Kuskokwim area, the influx of technology through television, radio airwaves, and the internet has greatly influenced the increase in English language use. However, we can instead use the same technology tools used by our youth as a vehicle to promote the Yup’ik language by making them accessible online. (Wallace, 2010, p. 47)

The two studies presented in this chapter focus on developing a pedagogy that supports language and culture maintenance. While Natalie’s middle school and Sheila’s high school students had participated in Yugtun-medium instruction in their elementary schools, they both recognized the problem of the discontinuation of Yugtun language instruction after the sixth grade. Without any Yup’ik language programs in place to support further language development, through their inquiries, they sought to counteract language and culture attrition by developing multimodal technology projects based in Yup’ik cultural knowledge. At the same time, they connected traditional Indigenous knowledge to the present using contemporary tools and taught the required western academic content, bringing both Indigenous and western knowledge systems together through storytelling.

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References Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2009). “Multiliteracies”: New literacies, new learning. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 4(3), 164–195. https://doi.org/10.1080/15544800903076044 Cowley, N. (2015a). Surviving Alaska. Unpublished master’s project (University of Alaska Fairbanks). Last retrieved 3/9/2022. Cowley, N. (2015b). Surviving Alaska. Retrieved March 10, 2022 from https://nataliecowleyakiuk. wixsite.com/indigenousfuturisms Dikkers, S., Gagnon, D., Martin, J., & Squire, K. (2014). Participatory scaling through augmented reality learning through local games. Tech Trends, 58(1), 35–41. Galla, C. (2009). Indigenous language revitalization and technology from traditional to contemporary domains. Northern Arizona University. Healy, A. (2008). Expanding student capacities: Learning by design pedagogy. In A.  Healy (Ed.), Multiliteracies and diversity in education: New pedagogies for expanding landscapes (pp. 2–29). Oxford University Press. Holden, C. L., & Sykes, J. M. (2011). Leveraging mobile games for place-based language learning. International Journal of Game Based Learning, 1(2), 1–18. Krauss, M. E. (1980). Alaska native languages: Past, present, and future. Alaska Native Language Center Research Papers, 4, 26–27. Moll, L. C., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (1992). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory Into Practice, 31, 132–141. New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60–92. Parker Webster, J., & Yanez, E. (2007). Qanemcikarluni tekitnarqelartuq/One must arrive with a story to tell: Traditional Alaska Native Yup’ik Eskimo stories in a culturally based math curriculum. Journal American Indian Education, 46(3), 116–131. Rearden, D. (2013). The Raven’s gift. Penguin Books. Sarieva, I., & Zoran, A. (2008). Guiding principles: Second language acquisition, instructional technology, and the constructivist framework. In T.  Erben & I.  Sarieva (Eds.), CALLing all foreign language teachers: Computer assisted language learning in the classroom (pp. 7–12). Eye on Education. Smith, G.  A. (2002). Place-based education: Learning to be where we are. Phi Delta Kappan, 83(8), 584–594. Wallace, S. (2010). Multimedia curriculum mapping: A tool for task based authentic second language teaching and learning through technology. Unpublished master’s project (University of Alaska Fairbanks).

Chapter 7

Reclaiming and Reinventing Indigenous Ways of Being-Knowing-Doing

All of Alaska’s 20 Indigenous languages have been impacted by language shift. However, as discussed in previous chapters, individual languages are situated differently based on the length and intensity of contact with English. While Yup’ik, the context of the other studies presented in this volume, still has a relatively broad base of first language speakers, including several immersion teachers and at least some children still learning Yup’ik as their first language in the home, intergenerational transmission has been interrupted for Aluttiq and Ahtna, which are the focus of the two teachers’ work re-presented in this chapter. Candace Branson’s Koniag Alutiiq dialect is spoken by approximately 30 fluent speakers (Branson, 2015a). Ahtna, one of Sondra Shaginoff-Stuart’s ancestral languages, is spoken fluently by less than 100 individuals, all of whom are elderly (Shaginoff-Stuart, 2016). In these communities, cultural activities, such as hunting, beading, storytelling1 and basket-making, are still being carried out. However, instruction and most interactions take place in English. Both Candace and Sondra were participants in the same graduate program cohort, and are learners of their ancestral languages while, at the same time, stepping into teacher roles within their communities. Candace worked with high school students in Kodiak and Sondra worked with university students at the Kenai Peninsula College, who were also second language learners of their ancestral languages. In addition to being learner-teachers, as teacher-researchers they also had the responsibility of creating instructional methodologies and materials as part of their teacher-inquiries, because of the lack of these teaching tools in their languages.

 While traditional stories are still being told, they are written down in English and most often told in English. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Siekmann, J. Parker Webster, Multiliteracies Pedagogy and Language Teaching, Educational Linguistics 60, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31812-2_7

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7.1 Wonderings, Rationale, Purpose Candace begins her inquiry from her researcher-teacher stance with a personal observational account of language loss in her family and her own language work, which acts as an example of the story of so many Indigenous people: My native ancestry comes from my mother’s side of the family. While my mother’s family is native, and we spent a lot of time around them when I was young, we did not hear Alutiiq spoken. My great grandmother, the matriarch of the family, no longer spoke Alutiiq. She had been a speaker prior to being left at the Baptist Orphanage on Woody Island, just offshore of Kodiak Island, at age five. The English-only policy at the orphanage caused my great grandmother and her siblings to lose their ancestral language and the language of their family of origin. That is how the Alutiiq language ceased in my family until now. I am learning the language from the Elders in Kodiak who are willing to teach me. The other learners of the language are some of my best friends and teachers. (Branson, 2015a, pp. 8–9)

English-only policies in boarding schools permeate the experiences of many Alaska Native communities and contribute to language shift, resulting in trauma surrounding language use. This trauma surrounding using the language has a profound effect on teaching the language. Language teachers, who have experienced being punished for using their Native languages, now struggle with instructional approaches requiring the use of the target language in their teaching, because they do not want their students to be silenced the way they were silenced. This creates complex dynamics in Indigenous language classrooms, which are unique to the context of language revitalization. Sondra also begins her inquiry from her researcher-teacher stance by observing how hegemonic oppression and historical trauma influence her students’ language use. She uses one of her student’s examples to illustrate how this hesitancy to speak the language affects language teaching and learning: “…when she attended school as a child, she was not allowed to speak her Native language, and she was punished if she did. This trauma filtered her ability to speak in class” (Shaginoff-Stuart, 2016, p. 23). Candace continues with a reflexive observation based on challenges experienced in her teaching: One of my biggest hurdles as a young teacher of my ancestral language has been to engage students with the material long enough to get them comfortable with the language. Instead, I overload the course with language material I want to teach and run out of time to cover it all in-depth. The students are not able to take it all in and I can hardly make time to cover the Alutiiq values, tools and art, history, spirituality, and stories that the students would so much benefit from learning. (Branson, 2015a, p. 13)

This struggle of how much “language” to teach and how to connect language and culture, is familiar to many novice language teachers. However, it takes on more significance in this context. She is also learning the language while teaching it. And she has the added complexity of having to develop language materials which are scarce for most Indigenous languages, but especially so for those with fewer remaining speakers, as in the case for Alutiiq and Ahnta.

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These observations formed the basis for their inquiries. While TAR framed the inquiry for all students across the programs represented in this book, within the ANE CALL program, master’s candidates produced projects instead of theses. As a result, Candace and Sondra’s wonderings were embedded in purpose statements and rationales, rather than stated as formal research questions. In their rationales, both teacher-researchers identify their purpose as reclaiming the classroom as a place to counter and replace the historical hegemonic pedagogies of formal western schooling forced on generations of Indigenous people, with an Indigenized pedagogy. In such a pedagogy, teaching and learning the ancestral language takes place in tandem with practicing cultural activities, which are always already entangled. In addition, it is critical to recognize that teaching and learning of endangered languages is always shaped by colonial and hegemonic practices that threaten their survival. Candace’s rationale is grounded in this key principle, which illustrates what Vizenor terms linguistic survivance: One of our Elders remembers having to write “I will not speak Alutiiq” on the chalkboard many days after school, but she also remembers telling her teacher that she could not make her stop speaking Alutiiq. If it were not for examples like this of linguistic survivance, the Elders who teach us would have forgotten their language long ago. Linguistic survivance is any act that is contrary to dominant culture that re-affirms the language of an individual or group (Vizenor, 2008). (Branson, 2015a, p. 3)

For Sondra, the concept of survivance is realized through an Indigenous pedagogy that can overcome historical trauma surrounding language and culture loss by emphasizing healing and well-being: As a response to declining language use of Ahtna, this project explored ways of teaching Ahtna Athabaskan to adult second language learners through a traditional beading activity called Łinay’sdułkaas de’ – Let’s start sewing. Beading is a traditional Native activity that incorporates cultural teaching and meaning that promotes healing and well-being. (Shaginoff-Stuart, 2016, pp. 5–6)

7.2 Available Designs As language learners themselves, Sondra and Candace approached their inquiries from the perspective of cultural maintenance and language revitalization. In assembling their available designs, they began with Indigenous ways of being-knowing-­ doing, which are critical to creating a pedagogy of healing through reclaiming their language and culture. They brought these Indigenous available designs into conversation with western pedagogical frameworks.

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7.2.1 Indigenous Ways of Being, Knowing and Doing In the ANE-CALL program, an effort was made to include many more Indigenous authors and resources as course materials in order to foreground Indigenous ways of being, knowing and doing. One of the most important texts used in coursework was Healy’s edited volume, Multiliteracies and Diversity in Education: New Pedagogies for Expanding Landscapes (2008). A frequently cited chapter in that text was The Intersection of Aborginal Knowledges, Aborginal Literacies, and New Learning Pedagogy for Aborginal Students by Martin (2008). This chapter brought together the concepts of multiliteracies and Indigenous ways of being-knowing-doing, which resonated with our students. In particular, the students viewed Martin’s concept of relatedness, which she defines as “sets of conditions, processes, and practices that occur among and between elements of a particular place and across contexts that are physic, social, political and intellectual” (p.  61), as kindred to the Alaska Native concept of connectedness among the human-animal-spiritual realms. For Candace and Sondra these concepts are embodied within the living culture bearers of the Elders who tell stories that teach about the relatedness and connectedness of all things. In the following quote, Sondra explicitly makes the connection between elder storytelling and relatedness: My Aunt Katie would tell us that everything is alive, from a blade of grass to even a rock. The water, sky, trees and mountains are alive, in fact, the mountains are our people, and we experience them all around us through the environment and stories. (Shaginoff-Stuart, 2016, p. 12)

As culture bearers and teachers of the language, Elders are living available designs both Sondra and Candace draw upon for their inquiry. Elders participated actively in Candace’s planning and implementation of her instructional design: In our class, we bring in Elders to share language and their experiences growing up in the villages 50–70 years ago. Elders are essential to the class’s connection with the language and culture, as students get to experience the ideas expressed in class about our cultural values. They share stories, beliefs, experiences, and their expertise of the language and culture of the Alutiiq People. They are able to develop relationships with the youth as well as educate them. Building these relationships is essential as we are re-establishing the Elder’s role in the community, as role model, teacher, and storyteller. (Branson, 2015a, p. 22)

For Sondra, the Elders acted as her mentors, passing down their ways of knowing-­ being-­doing through storytelling, which in turn Sondra passes down to her students through teaching language through cultural practices. What is unique to Sondra’s instructional design is the central role of healing and well-being and their connectedness to learning the language and culture: Through the Yenida’a (Ancient Stories) Teachings, the animals are related and when we see them, we know the animals carry a message of warning or that visitors are coming and because of this we must respect them with thankfulness. The act of beading has that connectedness that helps learners to physically complete a project, while also creating meaningful understanding of giving and thinking good for others. There is an intrinsic state of healing of the spirit and mind. Just like joining beads, materials, creating a safe environment,

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and using the Ahtna language to create a beaded necklace, a cohesiveness of understanding the deeper meanings of language is learned that ties language, cultural identity and accomplishment. (Shaginoff-Stuart, 2016, p. 12)

7.2.2 Western Pedagogical Frameworks: Multiliteracies, PACE Model, and Task Based Language Teaching In keeping with the importance of relatedness and connectedness, Sondra and Candace focus on the concept of multimodalities that are integral to the pedagogy of multiliteracies. Multimodalities reflect the connectedness of meaning making with-in and across multiple sign systems, modes, and human and non-human relationships. Sondra explains: Cope and Kalantzis (2009) revealed that our everyday lives could be explained through using multimodalities. They state that we use many modalities throughout our day to learn and make meaning (p. 13). Multimodalities can also support language learning in the classroom. (Shaginoff-Stuart, 2016, p. 17)

Candace describes modes as follows: “A person can make meaning from aural, gestural, visual, tactile, kinesthetic, and spatial stimuli. These types of input are called modes, and to use many modes to teach is to teach with multimodalities” (Branson, 2015a, pp. 14–15). Sondra further explains how the modes are connected to one another in a learning event: Language learners are encouraged to watch and observe using the multimodalities of the auditory and visual senses. Seeing a completed necklace and using the beads and sewing items to make the necklace helps language learners to understand what is needed to complete the design or final project. The use of beads, sewing items and use of gestures instead of English prolongs the Ahtna language experience. Physically using tactile touch of items to accomplish the task solidifies deeper connection to meaning of each item and action. Learning the words for bead, and colors, learners are able to orally practice Ahtna with confidence through games and conversation. The written form is introduced to help students hear and connect the sounds to the writing system, but it is not the main part of the lesson. (Shaginoff-Stuart, 2016, pp. 13–14)

Because Sondra and Candace were also learners and novice language teachers, they utilized established western instructional models from the field of second language acquisition and language teaching that allowed them to teach through the cultural practices of storytelling and beading. What both the PACE model and task based language teaching (TBLT) have in common is their orientation towards contextualized, meaningful and authentic language learning activities with the goal of developing language proficiency, broadly defined as being able to use language for specific communicative purposes. Candace chose the PACE model which “is a language teaching strategy that focuses on contextualized, authentic language instruction by way of storytelling (Adair-Hauck & Donato, 2002)” (Branson, 2015a, p. 20). Specifically, she made the

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connection between the role of storytelling in Indigenous pedagogy reflected in this western model: When I read about the reliance on stories through the PACE Model, described below, to provide context for the language lessons, I felt like I had found the missing component from my teaching practice. Through stories, the class can learn a lot of vocabulary, past tense endings, and even some chunks of language, but we would also have to talk about the ­cultural values embedded in Alutiiq stories, the oral tradition of storytelling, and why we do not hear our stories anymore. (Branson, 2015a, p. 13)

Candace explains the phases in the PACE model in Table 7.1. Sondra chose the task based language teaching (TBLT) model (Willis & Willis, 2007) because of its focus on meaning and its emphasis on an outcome or product beyond language. The focus on meaning is described by Sondra as, a communicative teaching method that focuses on purposeful and meaningful language use. It is a naturalistic way of learning language that can be nurturing and holistic rather than teaching language as a step-by step rote language lesson (Willis & Willis, 2007, p.  13). (Shaginoff-Stuart, 2016, p. 19)

In addition, Sondra saw TBLT as appropriate to her teaching-learning because of its relatedness to the doing and physical outcome of hands-on creative activities that are also connected to mental and spiritual well-being. As she states: “Beading has always been the activity I wanted to draw on to teach Ahtna. Making items with your hands helps the mind to settle and be calm. Even when the outcome is uncertain, there is an end result” (Shaginoff-Stuart, 2016, p. 5). Therefore, the actions of doing-speaking-listening result in making visible the entanglement of meaning and Table 7.1  Overview of the PACE Model Presentation

The instructor presents the story a number of times in a dynamic, dramatic way, multimodally, with the assistance of props including illustrations, backdrops, puppets, etc., that can help the students make sense of the story. The goal of this phase is to ensure that the students understand the main pieces of the story. They may not understand all of the grammar and vocabulary, but they can identify a sequence of events with general knowledge of the story. Attention The students are encouraged to notice a form of the grammar, chosen by the teacher. Noticing is when the learner realizes that a feature is changing the meaning or structure of the language. (Schmidt, 1990). [it] does not include any explicit instruction on the language, only focusing attention on the grammatical form in question. While the teacher helps the students notice the grammar, the teacher does not explain or elaborate in an explicit way. Co-construction During the co-construction phase, the students have the intriguing challenge of developing their own understanding of the grammatical patterns found in the story. The teacher guides students through probing questions to develop an understanding of the grammar. Through this process, students create their own understanding of the language. Extension Students demonstrate their learning through practice and creation. This is where students push their understanding of the grammar to use it in new ways, in new forms, and in other contexts. Adapted from Branson (2015a)

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grammar, which is critical to learning language for communicative purposes. As Sondra explains: As a consequence, learners will begin to connect their own understanding of language to communicate with what they have learned and experienced from the activity. It is important to focus on the meaning of the language teaching rather than decontextualized grammar. The learning of grammar will be embedded in the process of doing an activity, hearing the sounds and how the meaning connects to the action of the activity. (Shaginoff-Stuart, 2016, p. 21)

7.3 Designing In PTAR as design cycle, pedagogy and inquiry intra-act to inform one another. For Sondra and Candace, their positionalities as learners of their ancestral languages are complexified by their teacher-researcher positionalities. In this way, their own language learning and that of their students are parallel which, in turn, frames their designing of instruction and inquiry. They draw on Indigenous ways of being-­ knowing-­doing to Indigenize their pedagogy of language teaching through storytelling and beading.

7.3.1 Sondra Designing Even though Sondra had a higher proficiency in Ahtna than her students, like her students, she was also a second language learner. Therefore, she approached her designing as a teacher-researcher and a learner. For Sondra, this connectedness she experienced with teaching-learning helped make visible other connected relationships as she engaged in her inquiry. The starting point for developing her approach to second language teaching was grounded in an Indigenous perspective of the relatedness of teaching and learning to ways of being-knowing-doing. As she states: Martin (2008) highlights Aboriginal ways of learning and invites the reader to think from an Indigenous perspective. The learning and teaching for Aboriginals is one and the same function spiraling and connecting with the land, sky, and people. The concept of relatedness is defined by the physical, social, political and intellectual understanding that everything is alive. Aboriginal children must understand where they come from, by acknowledging their relatedness (Ways of Knowing), respecting that knowledge (Way of Being) and expressing relatedness through the culture (Ways of Doing) (p.  63). These teachings for Aboriginal children are close to the teachings of Alaska Native peoples. (Shaginoff-Stuart, 2016, p. 16)

Sondra’s designing processes were also based on her own experiences as a learner of her ancestral language, which resulted in her creating an instructional-inquiry design that focused not only on aspects of language teaching, but also on the historical aspects of the language and culture as intra-connected with Indigenous ways of being-knowing-doing. As she explains:

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To understand these concepts [of western and indigenous notions of learning-teaching and the designing process] more fully I had to ask myself, “Where does the learning take place for Native people?” This connection of relatedness also applies in relation to the beading activity Alaskan Native learning and teachings. I realized this when I think back to when I learned how to bead and sew from my Aunt Katie. I remember sitting with her at her kitchen table, as she instructed me on how she made her beaded necklaces and shared with me about the language, family, traditions and stories while teaching me how to bead. I felt very ­connected and I could shift my mind seamlessly between learning about our family and sewing. (Shaginoff-Stuart, 2016, p. 17)

This illustrates the concept of the entanglement of teaching-learning and a design process in which all phases flow back and forth and intra-act with one another. For Sondra, this concept of entanglement also included the material objects used in creating the necklace and the multimodalities used in the physical act of beading: This is why it is very important to use real items of sewing and beading and not trivialize the items by using plastic beads or yarn...it is important that this activity mirrors real life and it needs to be taught in this manner to solidify the deep meaning of the items through use of the hands. (Shaginoff-Stuart, 2016, p. 18)

With this conceptual framework in place, Sondra, as a teacher-researcher, created four lessons that culminated in the creation of a beaded necklace. As a researcher-­ teacher and learner of the language herself, Sondra worked with her Elders to identify the vocabulary that would be needed to conduct the lessons. During this process, Elders acted as highly proficient language models to help Sondra with her own language development, so she would feel competent in teaching her students. The Elders then recorded target language sentences related to beading (Shaginoff-Stuart, 2015), thereby enacting their roles as language and culture bearers, and at the same time, contributors to the preservation of Indigenous knowledge to be passed down to future generations. Sondra then assembled the sewing tools and materials that would be needed during the construction of the necklace, and created YouTube videos combining the Elder’s voice with photos of the vocabulary items. Acting from her teacher-researcher positionality, Sondra always began the lessons with words and actions that helped promote a sense of healing and well-being, which created a safe learning environment. This is important because of the historical trauma around language use experienced by some of her students. Sondra starts each lesson by reminding students about the importance of staying in the language, even if they might not be able to say everything correctly. She states in her lesson plan: Encourage students to stay in the language, by using gestures or pictures. Help students feel comfortable by letting them know when learning a language for the first time, the language must be heard many times, in different ways for language to be retained. So they must practice. Let students know they do not need to speak correctly at first when they are beginning, as long as they are trying to make connections by asking questions and answering in the language. They must try to stay in the language rather than revert into English. Students may feel uncomfortable when put on the spot to answer, so make sure they are ready to speak. By demonstrating the activity with gestures to allow students to mentally prepare for the next item to learn. Keep in mind all students learn at different times and to be flexible when students are learning. (Shaginoff-Stuart, 2016, p. 58)

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Each lesson followed a recurring pattern of starting with what Sondra calls “helping language”, for example classroom management phrases like  “How are you?”, “Come sit down”, “Let’s get ready”, as well as formulaic questions and answers, such as “What is this?”, “This is a___”, “Where is ___”, etc. These are then used while students learn vocabulary relating to the actions and items used in beading. These phrases allow Sondra and her students to use the target language throughout the lesson without reverting to English. As a learner of the language herself, Sondra must carefully plan how to create a safe learning environment for herself and her students to stay in the ancestral language. In order to do this, she utilizes real objects, physical movement involving the objects, as well as asking and answering questions during vocabulary instruction. For example, during the first lesson, students learn to identify and name sewing items such as needle, thread, scissors. In subsequent lessons, they learn how to ask for items, describe the number, color, size of items, and how to respond to and give instructions for beading. In the final lesson, all learners construct their necklace and record an instructional video in the target language that teaches others how to create a beaded necklace.

7.3.2 Candace Designing Similar to Sondra, Candace’s inquiry also required historical and cultural research as part of designing her instructional-inquiry plan. Her entry into inquiry was selecting an authentic and culturally significant story appropriate to the proficiency level of the learners, which, following the PACE model, is the foundation for all language learning activities. Since stories written for native speakers of the target language are typically too linguistically complex for beginning and intermediate language learners to comprehend, it is not unusual for the teacher to make some modifications to the text. Selecting an appropriate story can be challenging regardless of target language, however, world language teachers usually have an overwhelming number of stories to choose from, including age appropriate versions (for example picture books). On the other hand, language shift results in the loss of language, culture and knowledge, including the loss of stories, which are tools for preserving and teaching Indigenous ways of being-knowing-doing. As a result, in the context of Indigenous language endangerment, preservation and revitalization, the teacher might need to engage in a complex process of designing the story to be used, before even planning instructional activities. As a language learner herself, and as researcher-teacher, Candace worked collaboratively with Elders and fellow “language warriors” to identify, translate and illustrate the traditional story she was going to use in her lessons. This process connects her not only to her language community, but also to her learners. Candace’s process of designing her lessons focuses not only on teaching language, but also on the cultural themes and traditional values embedded in traditional stories. Candace purposefully chose a story no longer told in the community to contribute to the work of stories “being reclaimed by Alutiiq people” (Branson, 2015a, pp.  15–16). As

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Candace explains below, Alutiiq stories are an important element in teaching traditional principles of the Alutiiq onto-epistemological-methodological framework: I wanted [my students] to understand why Alutiiq people had stories about animals transforming into a human and that these stories were not just for entertainment, but taught the world view, expectations of the community, social roles, and the difference between right and wrong. (Branson, 2015a, p. 21) The Alutiiq story known by the English title Grouse Girl (Golder, 1907) is a transformation story of a ptarmigan and two hunters, which teaches the Alutiiq values of kindness and respect for all living beings and the consequences of harmful actions. While the story had been told by Alutiiq Elders orally for generations before contact with Europeans, the first written version was published in the English language in 1907. Candace explains that Golder, the ethnographer who first wrote down this particular story, was not an Alutiiq speaker…the stories were told in Russian and later translated and written in English from memory. ..[which] most likely embellished and altered the story. He may not have included key cultural concepts, rituals, and story themes due to his cultural orientation and audiencethe American public. (Branson, 2015a, p. 17)

Candace points out that the process of translation altered not only the language used in the story, but also the meaning of the story, as translation involves interpretation and cultural reframing. In order for Golder to produce the written English language version called Grouse Girl, an Alutiiq Elder told him the story not in her Native language (Alutiiq) but in Russian, the language of the colonizers at that time. Likewise, Golder, an English language speaker, who also spoke Russian as a second language, then translated the story into English. As Candace observes, in publishing a written text, some of the modalities of the original storytelling event were lost or changed: “The [original storytelling] process was also multimodal because he heard an oral story, possibly with gestures, intonation and other modes, and later wrote the story himself” (Branson, 2015a, p.  17). Working with her community of fellow advanced language learners, Candace then adapted the written story for an audience of beginning language learners. They “abridged it into a five-minute oral story...and then took it to the Elders for [translating it] into the Alutiiq language” (p. 17). This process resulted in the Alutiiq version of the story, now titled “Qateryuk” (meaning “ptarmigan” in Alutiiq). Finally, Candace worked with an Alutiiq artist (David Zachary Tucker) to create 11 illustrations accompanying the story, an example of which is included in Fig. 7.1. The following is the English translation of the text provided with this image: He grabbed the woman and told her, “Now, you will not go anywhere, I will make you my wife.” She pushed him away and found her ptarmigan skin in her husband’s bag. She said, “I told you, I will never be your wife.” She put on the skin and flew out the smokehole, leaving the young, handsome man wifeless and partnerless. (Branson, 2015b, Qulianguaq section

Enacting her teacher-researcher positionality, Candace used the illustrated Alutiiq version Qateryuk, when implementing the PACE model with her high school Alutiiq students. Candace used this story in planning and teaching a unit on Alutiiq language, culture and values, spanning four weeks and comprising 16 class periods. An important element of the instructional design was the pre-storytelling phase during which local Elders visited the classroom to discuss the significance and

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Fig. 7.1  Illustration from Qateryuk (see Branson, 2015b)

characteristics of storytelling in Alutiiq culture. Candace explains the importance of Elders participating as follows: They [the Elders] share stories, beliefs, experiences, and their expertise of the language and culture of the Alutiiq People. They are able to develop relationships with the youth as well as educate them. Building these relationships is essential as we are re-establishing the Elder’s role in the community, as role model, teacher, and storyteller. We are also connecting the small group of youth learning the Alutiiq language to an even smaller group of Alutiiq Elders. (Branson, 2015a, p. 22)

After making sure the Elder was welcomed respectfully to the classroom, and brainstorming the purpose of western schooling, Candace posted the following question: “There was a time when communities were smaller and the kids did not go to school, but still learned the skills and knowledge necessary to be successful in their communities. How did native communities achieve those goals without schools?” (Branson, 2015a, p. 23). The students and Elders jointly generated a list of ways that people pass on knowledge, including stories, watching and learning, mask making, traditional gatherings and engaging in subsistence activities: The process and discussion validated that the current educational system is only one way of gaining knowledge and that the rest of our community’s knowledge can be learned in other ways, including listening to our Elders, who often did not complete much American schooling…The end result was the take home message that the participants left with, was that our language, stories, process of mentorship, our family connections, traditional gatherings, ceremonies, competitions, travels and much more, were all valid ways of learning. (Branson, 2015a, pp. 24, 25)

This pre-presentation activity laid the foundation for the remainder of the PACE lesson. During the presentation phase, Candace told the story multiple times with

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images and gestures focusing on understanding the meaning of the story. She further enriched the story and brought it back to the original storytelling event, because: “it was delivered to the students multimodally, since I used oral language with gestures, illustrations, intonation, and props to convey the meaning” (Branson, 2015a, p.  17). Candace describes how she drew her students’ attention to the past tense endings occurring in the story: With my particular story, I chose to focus the students’ attention on the intransitive past tense endings because it is such a communicatively useful structure …The attention phase in this unit consists of two activities: students first underline the forms under investigation and then cut the words out. That is all it takes to bring attention to endings. (Branson, 2015a, p. 26)

During the co-construction phase of the PACE model, the teacher guides the students in discovering patterns in the relationship between meaning and form. Thus, rather than telling her students how the past tense is formed in Alutiiq, Candace engages her students-as-designers of meaning and form in the following ways: When I taught this section in class, I facilitated a Think-Pair-Share activity, where we posted the story for everyone to see and asked the students questions about the structures from the story. The students also have the past tense words that they previously cut out in front of them. I then asked the students to group the words in the order in which they think the words should be grouped. Students were learning to look for patterns, as well as recognize the graphing, phonemes, and morphemes. After the students had grouped the words, I asked questions like these: What do these words have in common? Why do you think they share that? Do these endings have meaning? What do they mean? Can you think of examples of words you already know that also have that in common? Activities like this are important to the learning process, and encourage discovery of the forms. (Branson, 2015a, p. 29)

For the extension “students used their resources to retell the story orally and record their voices on an iPad with the illustration of the scene they were telling about” (p.  31). In addition, Candace foregrounded Indigenous ways of being-knowing-­ doing during the culminating activity as “students participated in a values discussion in English to deepen their understanding of the Alutiiq storytelling tradition and Alutiiq values” (Branson, 2015a, p. 32).

7.4 The Redesigned Sondra and Candace worked with-in contexts of language revitalization, teaching their ancestral languages to Indigenous high school students and adults who had not grown up speaking or even hearing their ancestral languages, due to the disruption of intergenerational language use. Ahtna and Alutiiq are no longer spoken in the communities and few formal or informal opportunities exist for those interested in learning their language. Both focused their inquiries not only on creating much needed curriculum for their languages, their redesigned also resulted in an Indigenized language teaching curriculum that centered on bringing Elders into

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planning and implementing the project using cultural activities such as beading and storytelling for language outcomes. In addition to the curriculum, Candace’s project contributed the reclaimed Alutiiq language version of Qateryuk, which added to the corpus of published Alutiiq stories and would be available not only to teachers and students but also the larger community: The story will be made available to the public, including teachers and students, adding to the collection of authentic materials available in the Alutiiq language and to the collection of traditional stories. This is a clear example of traditional knowledge being redefined and increasing its value to indigenous people. (Branson, 2015a, p. 17–18) Applying technology to the stories can make them available to a broader audience. The lesson unit I created only reaches 20 students a year, but a video of a traditional story can reach thousands in a number of days when shared widely. This can increase the number of authentic materials in Alutiiq in the community, as well as the accessibility of those materials. (Branson, 2015a, p. 34)

Sondra’s students also created an online teaching video, which would be added to instructional resources made available to future students and the wider community: Students then apply what they learned by developing their own patterns and sharing the lesson with others in the classroom or outside of the class. This creates a living language that is used and reused, embedded in the items and the action of a living culture and experience. (Shaginoff-Stuart, 2016, p. 18)

Sondra demonstrates a deep understanding of how the processes of designing and language teaching-learning are related much in the same way as the connected processes of Indigenous being-knowing-doing. Sondra’s recognition of the importance of using culturally authentic material objects to carry out the task of beading and making a necklace illustrate the entanglements of an Indigenous view of materiality, which views human-nonhuman relationships that are not separate. This relatedness is brought together through multimodal activity. As she states: During this process of creating the activity, I learned many underlying connections of language and interchangeable meanings. While writing this paper I began my own process of creating meaning through making nats’ii zaghe ‘snelyaayi-necklace (Maxim, personal communication June 10, 2011) every night while I was writing. Beading is an exchange of thought, motion and feeling, a connection between me and the person who will receive the necklace, and while I connect each bead, I say Ahtna words along with the action, which connects me to language and meaning. (Shaginoff-Stuart, 2016, p. 38)

Sondra also describes the connectedness and inseparability of good thoughts, a clear mind and healing to the entanglement of the design process (available designs-­ designing-­redesigned) and Indigenous being-knowing-doing. She explains how her individual thoughts were also part of a larger community of teachers-learners, which helped her in carrying out the processes of researching and writing in a western academic setting: While beading, I focused my thoughts on my graduate class and teachers thinking good thoughts for them. Beading helped me to clear my mind, reset my thoughts and later, when

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I returned to work on my paper, I was able to write about the process. (Shaginoff-Stuart, 2016, pp. 38–39)

As a teacher-researcher, Candace views the process of designing and implementing her instruction as a cyclical and iterative process. As a researcher-teacher, through her analysis of student artifacts and learning processes, Candace recognized that, while the podcast assignment met the specific language learning objectives, students would be more engaged if they had more freedom to retell stories in a more creative and open-ended way. She describes the adaptation she plans to implement the next time: In the unit discussed here, the students created podcasts of story retells using illustrations from the story. While these were not as engaging as I had hoped they could be, we were rushed for time as the school year ended. Next year the assignment will be to make a podcast that tells the story adapted to present day. They would have to make their own graphics and use their imagination, thinking about the story in new ways. This multimodal project will benefit students by encouraging them to do extensive redesigns with the content and the mode, as well as provide the teacher and community with a new available design. The students will have the opportunity to incorporate their ancestral language into a modern medium. (Branson, 2015a, pp. 33–34)

Each of the above examples can be viewed as points in a trajectory of discovery about the concept of connectedness that was made visible in PTAR as design process, teaching-learning and being-knowing-doing. This led Sondra to a deeper understanding of how these processes were also connected and in nested relationships one to another.

7.5 Summary In their inquiries, Sondra and Candace enact their entangled positionalities as learners-­teachers-researchers of their ancestral languages. In language revitalization efforts, where proficiency is limited (even in the Elder population), and where the language is no longer spoken in the wider community and within families, classrooms are often one of the few opportunities to use and learn the language. By stepping into a teacher-researcher positionalities to conduct inquiries related to their learning-teaching practices, both Sondra and Candace are decentering the assumption that native speaker proficiency is the primary qualification for teaching a language. The entangled intra-action of learner-teacher-researcher positionalities deepens their understandings of language pedagogy. This also decenters the role of teacher-fronted language instruction with a reliance on using English, rather than the Indigenous language in the classroom. Throughout their inquiries, both Sondra and Candace foregrounded Indigenous ways of being-knowing-doing. From this conceptual grounding, they discovered western pedagogical frameworks that resonated with Indigenous pedagogies, allowing them to reclaim classrooms for Indigenous language learning:

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During this process of beading and writing my Elders came to mind, Helen Dick from Lime Village, Jeanie Maxim of Gulkana, and my Aunt Katie, their prayers, discussions and memories to find our natural connections to activities to bring our languages to the sound world, not just to paper. This healing aspect of connection to words, sounds and activity is where the mind opens to learn and feel safe to speak, and to express and live the culture. Cultural knowledge, such as what my Elders talk about here, is transmitted through these activities by recognizing that everything is alive and has meaning. (Shaginoff-Stuart, 2016, p. 39) The process of translating the story from Golder’s words to the words of our Elders demonstrates how empowering the design process can be. We validated the oral tradition, the Alutiiq language, the Elders’ knowledge, and our community’s values through the reclaiming of our story. (Branson, 2015a, pp. 17–18)

Both Candace and Sondra’s inquiries reflect their own needs as learners and how, as teachers, they want to meet the needs of their students. These teacher-researchers are learning their ancestral languages as adults and are, at the same time, teaching their languages as one component of ongoing language and cultural revitalization efforts. Both are acutely aware of the colonial and hegemonic forces that resulted in language shift to English and are positioning themselves as part of a small but growing group of activists, who refer to themselves “language warriors”. In this way, they recognize that language and cultural revitalization are not just about cultural practices or learning the language, but are related to spirituality, which must be grounded in a decolonizing pedagogy that can contribute to healing.

References Adair-Hauck, B., & Donato, R. (2002). The PACE model: A story-based approach to meaning and form for standards-based language learning. The French Review, 76(2), 265–276. Branson, C. (2015a). Qulianguanek litnauwilita: Let’s teach through stories. Unpublished master’s project (University of Alaska Fairbanks). Branson, C. (2015b). Qulianguanek litnauwilita: Let’s teach through stories. Retrieved March 10, 2022 from https://letsteachfromstories.weebly.com/ Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2009). “Multiliteracies”: New literacies, new learning. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 4(3), 164–195. https://doi.org/10.1080/15544800903076044 Golder, F. (1907). Aleutian stories. Alaska Native Language Archive. https://www.uaf.edu/anla/ record.php?identifier=AL950B(B076)1907 Healy, A. (2008). Expanding student capacities: Learning by design pedagogy. In A.  Healy (Ed.), Multiliteracies and diversity in education: New pedagogies for expanding landscapes (pp. 2–29). Oxford University Press. Martin, K. (2008). The intersection of aboriginal knowledges, aboriginal literacies, and new learning pedagogy for aboriginal students. In A. Healy (Ed.), Multiliteracies and diversity in education: New pedagogies for expanding landscapes (pp. 58–81). Oxford University Press. Schmidt, R. (1990). The role of consciousness in second language learning. Applied Linguistics, 11(1), 17–46. Shaginoff-Stuart, S. (2015). Łinay’sdułkaas de’: Colors. Retrieved March 23, 2022, from https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3OzuD1rtcs Shaginoff-Stuart, S. (2016). Łinay’sdułkaas de’: Let’s start sewing. Unpublished master’s project (University of Alaska Fairbanks). Vizenor, G. (2008). Aesthetics of survivance: Literary theory and practice. In G. Vizenor (Ed.), Survivance: Narratives of native presence (pp. 1–23). University of Nebraska Press. Willis, D., & Willis, J. (2007). Doing task-based teaching. Oxford University Press.

Part III

Ciuliamta Uyangtakut as Praxis

Chapter 8

Toward Indigenizing Pedagogies in Western Schooling: A Conversation

As we attempt to analyze dialogue as a human phenomenon, we discover something which is the essence of dialogue itself: the word. But the word is more than just an instrument which makes dialogue possible; accordingly, we must see its constitutive elements. Within the word we find two dimensions, reflection and action, in such radical interaction that if one is sacrificed–even in part–the other immediately suffers. There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis. Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world. (Freire, 1996, p. 68)

In writing this chapter, we take inspiration from the dialogue between Freire and Macedo in Chap. 3 of their book, Literacy: Reading the Word and the World (1987). In breaking the monologic of academic writing, the re-presentation in a conversational style, illustrates the importance of the dialogic in Freire’s work. For Freire, dialogue is necessary to praxis, and therefore, “...dialogue cannot occur between those who want to name the world and those who do not wish this meaning–between those who deny others the right to speak their word and those whose right to speak has been denied them (1996, p. 69)”. In keeping with Freire and Macedo’s example of a multivoiced re-presentation, this chapter brings western and Indigenous perspectives into dialogue with each other through a series of conversations Sabine and Joan had with Dr. Theresa Arevgaq John. In preparation for these conversations, we each journaled about the key themes emerging in the praxis chapters: Storytelling, dance, Elders, Indigenous pedagogy, Indigenous ways of being knowing and doing; and posed guiding questions for discussion. We recorded and transcribed our conversations, spanning three sessions, totaling about five hours. Compiling and sorting key points resulted in this final chapter, which is organized in the following way. We start with introducing ourselves and our shared journey. Then Arevgaq presents the Indigenous conceptualization of the Yupiit ways of being-knowing-doing, which is a continuation of the discussion of the onto-­ epistemological-­methodological framework presented by Joan and Sabine in Chaps. 2 and 3 of this volume. Sections 8.3. and 8.4, are presented in a dialogic format. The © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Siekmann, J. Parker Webster, Multiliteracies Pedagogy and Language Teaching, Educational Linguistics 60, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31812-2_8

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first of these sections focuses on language and literacy teaching and learning, and the pedagogy of multiliteracies. The second section focuses on implications and next steps for continuing to develop and implement an Indigenized pedagogy for use in western schooling.

8.1 Introducing Who We Are Wiinga yupiugua. Yugtun atqa Arevgauguq. Maurluugka Angayinkuuguk Piiyuuk-­ llu. Ap’aurluugkawa Qungurkankuk Ussuuganllu. Angayuqaagkawa Kangrilngunkuk Anguyalukllu. Pingayunlegnek anelgutengqertua, talliman angutet, pingayunwa arnat. Anglillruukut Nunakauyarmiuni, Qaluyaani. I am a Yup’ik person. My Yup’ik name is Arevgaq. My grandmothers are Anguyaluk and Piiyuuk. My grandfathers are Qungurkaq and Ussuugan. My parents are Kangrilnguq and Anguyaluk. I have eight siblings, five brothers and three sisters. Kangrilnguq, my father, was recognized as a Chief of Association of Village Council Presidents (AVCP) who served 60 villages and as a Culture Bearer by the Alaska Federation of Natives (AFN). My father and I both received our 2010 Doctorate of Philosophy Degree from University of Fairbanks. His was an honorary degree. In 1956, I was born in Umkumiut, a traditional summer fish camp on Qaluyat (Nelson Island) located five miles from Nunakauyaq (Toksook Bay) along the Bering Sea Coast. I grew up speaking fluent Yugtun and I learned how to speak English when I was in the fifth grade. My highest western pedagogical credentials include a Doctorate of Philosophy Degree in Indigenous Knowledge Systems. I also received a Master’s in Multicultural Education, Secondary High School Teaching Certificate in Interdisciplinary Humanities and Language Arts, and a Bachelors in Sociology. My parents, grandparents and great-grandparents were born in sod houses, they grew up only speaking Yugtun. They were the ‘real’ or ‘the genuine’ Yupiit. Village tribal members lived by practicing yuuyaraq (a way of being a human), nutemllaryarat (a Yup’ik epistemic cultural values and principles), and ellatuyaraq (awareness of spirituality and a holistic worldview). My parents and elders taught me wisdom and compassion as they learned from their ancestors. Nightmute, Alaska had no electricity, hospital, water and sewer system, outboard motors, four wheelers, snow-machine, road system, airport and general stores. In the early 1960s, the first village federal school was operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). This was the first time I saw non-Indigenous people residing in the village. In 1963, our parents relocated to the traditional fish camp Nunakauyaq, currently known as Toksook Bay. The purpose for relocating was to be closer to ocean marine mammal food sources. Nunakauyaq was closer to many traditional food gathering sites, medicinal plants and bountiful berries from the land. The move to Nunakayaq ended our seasonal semi-nomadic lifestyle, and led to the construction of school and permanent village infrastructure.

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I am the first generation in my community to be exposed to English and attend formal education via BIA schools. Eventually, I attended the Catholic Boarding High School along the Yukon River, from seventh grade to senior year in St. Mary’s. My generation lives both Indigenous and western educational lifestyles with a strong personal foundation that keeps us holistically balanced. Joan Many of my strongest childhood memories are filled with scenes of family gatherings at my maternal grandparents’ house, where after shared meals, there were always stories told in a blend of Italian and English. When I was very young, my grandparents, who were bilingual in Italian and English, would often speak to me in Italian. As I grew older and started school, they addressed me more and more in English. Perhaps they thought speaking only Italian would interfere with my learning English and becoming a successful student. As an adult, my understanding is still fairly good, and much better than my oral proficiency, but I often wonder how my overall development in both languages would have been so different had my grandparents continued speaking to me in Italian. I grew up in south Texas on Galveston Island and in elementary school, Mr. Jimenez would come to the classroom and teach us Spanish two or three times a week. I remember how easy it was for me because of its similarity to Italian. I continued taking Spanish as a foreign language in junior and senior high school. And, since Spanish was the first language of many of my friends and their families, it seemed a great opportunity to practice the language in safe and supportive sociocultural environments. I think I learned early on from my experiences in these multilingual contexts that learning a language was not just an academic exercise carried out in a language classroom. If one wanted to really learn a language, it also involved participating in cultural activities and in community settings where the language was being used in daily life. My parents also believed that a well-rounded education should not be limited to what many describe as “the basics”. They encouraged me to take art and music in school, and they also provided me with private piano and art lessons. I am certain that engaging in these “extra-curricular” activities gave me the additional multimodal tools needed to open up diverse ways of viewing and understanding the world. Over the years, I have come to realize how these multilingual and multimodal learning experiences contributed to shaping the trajectories of my academic and professional career–from private piano teacher, professional musician and visual artist to public school teacher and finally, university faculty member. When I came to the University of Alaska Fairbanks as program director for a master’s in language and literacy and subsequently joined the collaborative research team for Math in a Cultural Context,1 it became clear to me that the traces of my life

 Math in a Cultural Context (MCC) is a supplemental elementary school math series developed in collaboration with Yup’ik Elders and teachers, mathematicians, math educators, university faculty and Alaska school districts. The math modules are accompanied by storybooks of traditional Yup’ik stories told by Yup’ik Elders (see https://www.uaf.edu/mcc) of modules that also story1

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experiences and education had laid a solid foundation for the collaborative work I would do with teachers and my academic colleagues over the next two decades. This volume tells some of the stories along this journey. Sabine Growing up in a small town in Northern Germany, everyone in my elementary school looked like me and everyone around me spoke German. The first time I heard another language was my mother helping my older siblings do English and French homework: she would quiz them on their vocabulary lists and do dictations with them. As the younger child, I was fascinated by these sessions and recognized the high value my family and the school placed on learning these languages. However, I didn’t really have a concept of the usefulness of being able to speak and understand additional languages until our first family vacation to England. Since I had not started to learn English in school, I was not able to interact with anyone outside of my family, yet I was immediately enthralled with being immersed in another language and experiencing a culture different from my own. My fondest memory of that vacation was not seeing the crown jewels, going to the beach, or touring pre-­ historic sites. Instead, I vividly recall begging my brother and sister to teach me how to order two scoops of banana ice-cream from a street vendor. I felt such joy and satisfaction when I was able to approach the ice-cream stand all on my own, utter “two banana please”, hand over the exotic coins my mother had given me and receive a delicious and beautiful treat in exchange! When I finally started learning English in fifth grade and French in seventh grade, the highly structured and largely grammar-based approach to teaching foreign languages in German schools in the early 80 s did not appeal to me. However, even as I suffered through the drill and kill lessons, memorized my vocabulary lists and endured many tearful dictation sessions with my mother, I never lost my desire to use languages to get to know new people and new cultures. It is no surprise, then, that in addition to taking every opportunity to travel, I also took a particular interest in foreign exchange students who would regularly visit our local school. These experiences ultimately culminated in me becoming a foreign exchange student myself, and I became the first person in my family to ever travel by plane and visit a destination outside of western Europe to spend one whole year in the US. As I was trying to figure out what “the rest of my life” would look like, I could not fathom becoming a language teacher until I realized that language teaching and learning did not have to be painful and boring. This set me on a journey to understand the science behind language learning in order to discover “better” language pedagogies. While earning an interdisciplinary graduate degree in English Linguistics and Cultural Anthropology, I first learned about language and culture loss experienced by many Indigenous communities across the globe. I began to recognize how much is at stake for Indigenous communities working to maintain and revitalize their ancestral languages and cultures. I was also forced to books with traditional stories that are the result of a diverse collaboration of Yup’ik Elders and teachers, mathematicians and math educators, university faculty and Alaskan school districts.

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acknowledge my own privileged positionality. This allowed me to see that learning a language is never just about words and grammar, instead, language learning exists in a context. This context includes biases and power relationships, which impact all languages and cultures as they come in contact with each other. This is what brought me to Alaska, which is where Joan’s and my story begins.

8.1.1 Who We Are as Collaborators Joan and Sabine first met in Philadelphia, where Joan and her colleague, Patrick Marlow were presenting at a conference. Patrick invited Joan to accompany him to meet Sabine, who had applied for a position at UAF, for dinner. The fortuitous meeting came about because Sabine, who lived in Pennsylvania at the time, couldn’t travel to Alaska because she was 37 weeks pregnant. Over the course of the evening, through sharing personal stories and professional experiences, it became clear that while Sabine and Joan had different academic training and experiences, we shared many of the same philosophical and ethical perspectives–to put it simply, we clicked. This connection has continued to develop throughout our collaborative work on the series of interdisciplinary projects supporting Alaska Native (language) education through teacher professional development (see Chap. 2). Initially we saw our disciplinary background as complementary: Sabine an applied linguist and language teacher, Joan a multiliteracies and cultural studies scholar. Even though we came from different disciplines, we discovered that we had both read Vygotsky and were using his concepts in our work with-in Alaska Native educational communities. We further connected through teaching and researching at the intersection of language and literacy development and pedagogy. As part of our collaborative teaching, writing and presenting at conferences, we began to develop a reconceptualization of the relationships within and between our disciplines, and also recognized the connectedness to the onto-episteme-methodological framework grounding our work. Through our work with-in Indigenous communities and Indigenous scholars, we also became aware of the entanglement with Indigenous ways of being-knowing-doing. Joan and Sabine first met Arevgaq in 2006 at the start of the collaborative projects described in Chap. 1. Grant partners, representing the university, the regional tribal organization as well as the participating rural school districts, met at the Kuskokwim Consortium Library in Bethel. One of the key goals of the meeting was to identify Indigenous Ph.D. students, who would be working with specific faculty advisors and specific cohorts. Joan was the faculty member leading the multiliteracies cohort and we actively recruited Theresa John to be the Ph.D. student associated with that focus area, because of the expertise and experience she would bring to the program. Another reason Arevgaq was a perfect fit for the program was that she was a tenure-track faculty member at the university and earning a Ph.D. would open up opportunities for academic and professional advancement.

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Joan and Arevgaq’s collaborative work has developed over the years beginning with co-teaching a class for M.A. students (see Parker Webster & John, 2013) and continuing with co-presenting at conferences and co-authoring articles (Parker Webster & John, 2010). Theresa and Sabine’s collaboration initially focused on the development of Yugtun medium books starting in 2009, which also resulted in several conference presentations and publications (Siekmann et  al., 2013). Over the years, we have served together on graduate student committees, traveled to and presented at numerous local, national and international conferences, and have continued our ongoing academic, professional and personal conversations as colleagues as well as friends. In the next section, Arevgaq describes how Elders, as the culture bearers and wisdom keepers of the Yupiit world view, pass on the traditional ways of being-­ knowing-­doing through storytelling.

8.2 Indigenous Ways of Being Knowing and Doing: Qasgiq and Yugtun Knowledge Systems Arevgaq The Elder stories tell us that the qasgiq was revered and perceived to be the central place of prayer (Bird, Therchik, A., Spark, and Agimuk, personal communication, 2008). In ancient times, before the outsiders started to arrive, the term yuraq meant to pray. Today, the same term defines the practice of dance. Another critical term that was practiced in qasgiq was called agayu, defined as a form of prayer. Therefore, the qasgiq was regarded as the most respectful central communal gathering place in the villages. Besides qasgiq being a place for praying, it had additional multiple purposes. Men and boys used it for shelter, bathing, creating hunting equipment and utensils. The placing of the men was orderly according to their stature in the community. The leaders, elders and shamans had special seating places where the common members sat and slept in outlying spaces (John, 2009). The overarching theme ciuliamta uyangtakut is embedded in qasgiq natural laws which are to revere, respect, reciprocate, to be responsible to maintain and sustain Yup’ik laws in ways of knowing and ways of being. The physical structural framework, window, doorways and inner pieces were replaced annually. The fundamental purposes of qasgiq as a learning, teaching and healing center were passed down by the ancestral knowledge system, wisdom for centuries. According to Elders’ Panruk and Kangrilnguq oral Indigenous knowledge, the theme ciuliamta uyantakut has a very deep meaning that is comprehensive and is connected to every element of our ways of living. The first word ciuliamta means ‘our ancestors’. The second word uyangtakut means that ‘ancestors are watching over us’.

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This has been practiced and passed down from pre-contact time to the contemporary time and it can be applied into the future. This theme also applies to the spiritual realm of the Yupiit knowledge system where life is immortal. The notion of believing Yuuyaraq (the human way of being) is believed to be an ongoing continuum. This interconnected worldview of the spiritual realm applies to how families believe in renaming the newborn children after our deceased relatives. Yugtun naming ceremonies have been passed down from generation to generation, to every newborn child. That concept of Yup’ik interconnectedness involves humanity, nature, and spirituality, in our custom, in our ways of knowing, in our ways of doing and believing. We believe that some being, the Creator, created this, and also provided us all the tools that we need to survive, the marine mammals, fish, the land animals, the medicinal plants, water, the ecology and cosmology, everything we know to be real has a spirit. The oral traditions of pre-contact time, when the earth’s crust was thin, were creation stories, ghost stories, and Shamanism. These teach the interconnectedness between the human and non-humans when they can become one, which is symbolized in the half man-half animal masks. If humans live accordingly, by following cultural epistemic values, then they will earn their role to be good hunters. That is why animals reciprocate by giving themselves to the hunters, who earn their role by showing respect to the animal by taking good care of it. These stories, with their morals and lessons that pertain to our culturally systemic values, build the foundation to make us resilient in understanding our historical standpoint and our interconnected world view; so do our language, culture, ceremonies and our family kinship trees. The fundamental concept of being connected requires respect for one another. We believe in immortality, meaning that we don’t believe in one life. Our life is a continuum that the Creator provided for us, and it continues on to intergenerations after that, just like our ancestors did. That is why our Indigenous identities are so critical. Our Indigenous names are so essential to identify who we are, what family trees we come from. This concept of identity is also marked by the designs on our parkas, on our hunting tools, designs, which are the images representing what kinship line and which land base we come from. The child’s first dance is an opportunity to introduce the namesake of that child, to the bloodline of that child, and also to explain how that name transitions from one household to another household from one village to another village. So the first dance gives you an identity, an Indigenous identity, that you are to nurture, hold, and respect. The ceremony of dance is a huge responsibility that works as a form of prayer to bring healing for the mind and body.

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8.3 Language and Literacy Teaching and Learning: A Dialogue Between Yup’ik Pedagogy and the Pedagogy of Multiliteracies The dialogue re-presented in this section was guided by our shared question of how the teachers in our graduate program drew on both the Yup’ik pedagogical tool of storytelling through yuraq and yaaruiq and the western pedagogy of multiliteracies to support the language and literacy education of Yup’ik children. Sabine and Joan In response to the needs and interests of the teachers in our graduate programs, the western conceptualization of a pedagogy of multiliteracies became the overarching framework (see Chap. 2). Since all of the teachers were living and working in villages where the student population was primarily Indigenous, the concepts of multilinguality and multimodality were critical to developing a language and literacy pedagogy appropriate for their classroom settings. In each of the praxis chapters, stories play a primary role in teaching and learning for all the teachers’ work represented in this volume. Arevgaq Qanruyutet, qulirat and qanemcit provide the conceptual frameworks and are used in teaching Yugtun epistemology. Education in Yugtun epistemology requires multiple conceptual frameworks and methodologies identified as the qanruyutet, or advice, and qulirat and qanemcit, oral narratives. Yugtun can refer more narrowly to the Yup’ik language or more broadly as in the manner of human beings/Yupiit. In villages, the Elders tell age-appropriate stories with lessons, morals and metaphors through the art forms of the qanruyutet, qulirat and qanemcit, which are mediated with the assistance of adults who guide and work collaboratively to ensure that children understand and grasp essential elements of the educational context and processes. The collaborative efforts of the adult educators ensure that all children understand the story context through observation and the questioning processes before stories are elevated to the next learning plane (John, 2009). Qanemcit stories reflect family language, songs and dances, kinship system, the war heros, the great hunters, the powerful shamans, edible and medicinal plants, and cultural values and principles. These are the same funds of knowledge, the traditional ecological knowledge, the Indigenous Knowledge system, weather and climate change, ecological oral stories, the upper world, middle world and the under-world human and non-human beings that share this global world. The teachings about the time when the crust of the earth was thin (ella mamkitellrani). The oral traditions (qulirat) that teach us about how the land was created by the spiritual realm of Ellam Yua, The Creator. The changes in the crust of the earth (ella mamturillrani) also changed the timeframe and the content of oral traditions which were original instructions. The qanemcit and qanruyutet instructions cover the timeframe after the crust of the earth became thick. These are recent memories of the contemporary families that were experienced and learned by relatives.

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Sabine and Joan Storytelling is a multilingual and multimodal space where language and culture come together to inform and instruct. The praxis chapters are examples of how teachers utilized a pedagogy of multiliteracies to support their students’ multilingual development. In working with the teachers, the connectedness of language and culture emerged as a recurring pattern. This entanglement of language-culture has been referred to as linguaculture in the literature on anthropology (Friedrich, 1989) and language teaching (Mackerras, 2007; Thorne, 2006). We are proposing a concept that reflects this entanglement, which we call multilinguaculture that draws from both multilinguality and linguaculture in the practice of language teaching and learning in educational contexts. Loss of any of the elements within multilinguaculture results in loss within the larger system. When we lose language, we also lose important cultural knowledge such as stories. When we lose stories, we also lose important cultural values and pedagogical tools. Therefore, the importance of language teaching is more than learning words. It involves teaching within multilinguacultural contexts, which connects language to cultures, values, identity and wellness. In the contexts of Indigenous language and literacy teaching, it involves multiple named languages as well as multiple varieties of English, each of which are tied to cultural and value systems that students learn to navigate to become responsible members of their communities. Arevgaq The language is critical in Indigenous identity, kinship, and intergenerational connections. The language is our power. The language is the one that defines terminologies, and that also defines the meanings, forms, and functions of essential concepts we need to understand and know. The language brings in the knowledge base, brings in the traditional ecological knowledge. I know that a lot of our youth have an identity crisis today because they have lost their language connection. They have lost their connection to and communication with their grandparents and other Elders. When we break down the language, then we break down the cultural fabric; we weaken the power of the language. That is why our ancestors really enforced the value of holding on to our language. Learning their language makes children inspired to know who they are, where they come from, and how they can reclaim their culture. And then they can become leaders of language users in their own communities. Sabine & Joan This notion of developing leaders is evident in Candace and Sheila’s work (see Chap. 7). Both, as Indigenous teachers, take a stance toward developing students as advocates of their linguaculture within and outside of the classroom. Candace used the term language warriors to describe her students’ learning as an act of survivance (Vizenor, 2008) as they worked with local Elders in reclaiming the transformation story of Grouse Girl. Sheila’s students used Yugtun to research their family kinship, interview Elders about their personal histories and to give public service announcements on the local radio station, viewing them as multilinguacultural ambassadors.

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Arevgaq The parents, the relatives, the community, Indigenous teachers, everyone shares a responsibility in teaching about our language and culture. Also, non-Indigenous certified teachers, as well as principals and superintendents all play a huge role in the child’s holistic development. Joan & Sabine For example, Natalie as a non-Indigenous teacher of English language arts advocates for maintaining and developing a praxis of multilinguaculture. In playing the augmented reality game, students start with exploring their Alaska Native culture, first through reading the story of A Raven’s Gift, which is written in English. They then interview local Elders and journal in Yugtun to deepen their understanding of cultural survival skills such as building a shelter. Using the Elder knowledge, they then engage in the physical activity of building the shelter. Finally, students create digital stories, which are produced using English, to share with others about how to use local traditional knowledge to survive. By doing this, Natalie foregrounds the affordances made available through using multilinguaculture in educational contexts. This also illustrates that there is no set entry point to multilinguaculture in the classroom. In other words, developing multilinguaculture does not necessarily start with “learning the language” and progresses to “learning the culture”. Because language and culture are entangled, one does not necessarily precede the other. Arevgaq In communities where there has been language loss but very strong dance groups, they’re learning not only the lyrics of the songs but also the meanings of the words. There is the possibility that the more that they learn the dances, this will allow them to bring back the language and culture, because they’re performing it. Then they will begin to understand the words and the meanings as time comes. Joan & Sabine What we have come to understand from working with the teachers is that yuraq is a form of storytelling, which is the Indigenous pedagogy for teaching through connectedness of linguaculture. In addition, in storytelling, language is only one tool in an array of tools, or social semiotic resources, for meaning making. Multiple social semiotic resources, often referred to as multimodalities within the multiliteracies framework (see Chap. 2), carry with them traces of multilinguaculture. Yuraq (dance), and yaaruiq (storyknifing) are specific examples of how teachers engaged students in multimodal meaning making through storytelling. Arevgaq The opportunity to dance is a great opportunity to reconnect to lost relatives and to relatives that moved to other villages when they married. Dance is also a good opportunity to bring healing to the people. It gives people an opportunity to bring back old stories, because dance tells the kinship storylines of families, of villages, of regions.

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For example, a child’s first dance ceremony is an opportunity for the kids to learn about their families, their kinship lines, their namesake lines, who they are related to. Those are the storylines that belong to those dances. It’s a comprehensive concept that tells multiple layers of stories and meanings and functions. That is the critical point, for the families to present the identity of that individual present, to present the family tree, and also present the living being of the ancestor spirits. That interconnectedness of the family at the social base builds that foundation for the family. Joan & Sabine Sally (see Chap. 4) used dance as a pedagogical tool to teach language, culture and literacy in her Yup’ik immersion kindergarten classroom. While dancing had previously been practiced at the school as a separate “cultural” activity, Sally integrated it into the core academic curriculum and related elements of dance to the 6 + 1 traits writing. In this way, she used multiple social semiotic resources to support the development of her students’ multilinguaculture through the cultural activity of dance. Arevgaq Our regalia designs and family songs are a place for the teachers to start conversing with the children’s parents and their community, to research who they are, where they come from, because every community has slightly different protocols and ethics. Like for my family, we try to maintain those protocols and ethics in modern life, by teaching our children how to make the motions, and how to perform in a traditional manner, so that we accurately represent how our ancestors did it. This involves teaching Yugtun words to the young children from the beginning. So when they hear the words in yuraq, they can connect them to the motion. It doesn’t have a direct translation. The words and the motions are connected and are the language of the dance. You understand the story of the dance, and connect the motions to the meaning. Joan & Sabine Like Sally, Sarah used the Yup’ik multimodal storytelling event of yaaruiq as a pedagogical tool with her kindergarten immersion students. Through storyknifing, Sarah brought the literacies of students’ funds of knowledge into the classroom to support their school-based language and literacy meaning-making development. Arevgaq Yaaruiq are the first learning tools that involved groups of women, mothers and grandmothers, in the learning process of Yup’ik girls. In my memory I always remember sitting around with five other girls really having an intense learning moment. The storyknives were made by the grandfathers for them. I had three different types of storyknives made of wood, metal and ivory that were used for different seasons. Like the family designs of the regalia, designs on storyknives have been passed down from generation to generation and identify the kinship line of the children. And in telling the stories, the storyteller also draws designs or symbols into the snow or mud with the storyknife. So,the symbols have meanings and functions,

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which have to be taught to the listeners and observers who will then become storytellers themselves by using their story knives. The content of the stories relates to what the children understand as part of their daily lives like the social relationships between the grandparents and the grandchildren. So they provide knowledge and wisdom that the children need to understand the cultural epistemic values embedded in social life, social functions and social activities between intergenerations (Fig. 8.1). The symbols tell you stories. When telling a story, the storyteller draws different parts of the story as she tells it. She always begins with a housing site, a square, because that shape represents a house. Next, she draws in one corner, the bed. In another corner there’s going to be a stove. And then next to the wood stove, there’s going to be stacks of wood, and there’s going to be a table with food. And then the storyteller starts putting in the different people in the story. For example, sitting on the bed is the grandmother (see Fig. 8.1). Sitting on the floor would be the grandfather. Next to the door is the grandchild who is entering the house. The lines on the faces of the images of the grandmother and child mean they are speaking. The grandfather, who has no lines on his face, is not talking, but is listening. Joan & Sabine The symbols in yaaruiq are a social semiotic sign system, which, like the linguistic sign system and the kinesthetic sign system of dance, has a lexicon and a grammar. In yaaruiq, there are multiple modes in use during the storytelling event. Modes offer different potentials for meaning making, which are referred to as affordances, and are shaped by people’s use of them in specific social situations (Jewett, 2008). In our view, modes are entangled and intra-act with one another. So, in a meaning-­ making event, such as in yaariuq or yuraq, meaning is distributed across all modes to varying degrees. In this way, meaning is carried in a different way by each of the modes in the multimodal ensemble. Western literacy instruction, however, often focuses exclusively on the development of the linguistic mode and it thereby isolates one mode from the ensemble. Because all literacy events are inherently multimodal, this focus on one mode is problematic for all children, but in particular, this is compounded for Indigenous students whose literacy genres like yuraq and yaariuq are multimodal events. Arevgaq Just from listening to the stories, children can start imagining the type clothing their ancestors wore and how they engaged in cultural activities. So, one would imagine the grandparents sewing, on their bed or making a hunting tool on the floor, and maybe cooking their Native food. Kids today might include things from contemporary life like a television or cell phone. That is why Sarah’s work is so critical. It will be a revival of one of the most critical learning methodologies, and traditional tools like the yaariuq for the children to learn to use. And it can help to reconnect them with the older generation as certified teachers identify and co-facilitate with the elders that remember using those story knives. Using their funds of knowledge, their Indigenous ways of knowing and their

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Fig. 8.1  Symbols used in yaaruiq (storyknifing). During our conversation, Arevgaq is drawing this image, while she is introducing each symbol in the story (Source: John, personal communication, January 2023)

traditional ecological knowledge is going to bring in so much wealth of knowledge to the children. In yaariuq, the children have to learn to imitate the characters’ voices; voices of family members which are parents, the old people, the young people, while drawing the symbols. So they have to have a very good imagination and emotional ability, because they have to express the emotions of the characters. They also have to be able to verbalize the descriptions of all the material elements like the house, the trees, the animals, with their words. So Sarah’s work is very critical to bring back that conceptual learning tool of the community into the classroom. And, when she blends in all the multiple ways of knowing, multiple ways of understanding, who the children are, where they come from, what language they speak, their family, it connects to their waters, to the land, to their food, to their clothing.

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Joan & Sabine As we learned from Sarah and Sally’s work (see Chap. 5), drawing on multiple social semiotic resources in language and literacy instruction is critical in working with emergent learners in Yup’ik immersion settings. But, we also learned from Kayla and Audra’s work that multimodal meaning making is integral to all learning events regardless of grade level (see Chap. 6). In Kayla’s work for example, her 4–6 th grade students were learning English language arts in a dual language context, but the concept of multimodal ensembles and their affordances was highly influential in promoting students’ engagement with their literacy activities. Her Yup’ik students frequently created voices for the characters and imitated the sound effects represented in the stories. Much in the same way that Arevgaq describes how children imitate character’s voices in the yaaruiq stories, Kayla’s students did so without any prompting from their teacher. Working with 6–8 grade students in her special education classroom, Audra used culturally based images as a starting point for students to tell stories, to increase the amount and complexity of English language produced. Similar to telling a story in yaaruiq, students also created their own images that added on to the original story, and each explained the image to their peers and how it extended the story. This allowed students to make and express new meanings through multiple modes, similar to the way the storyteller connects image to story in yaaruiq. While all the teachers whose work is discussed in the praxis chapters recognized that tools may be different or that different tools can be used, we wonder what shouldn’t change when using traditional cultural activities in western schooling. Arevgaq The traditional ways of storytelling, like yaariuq and yuraq; those have to always remain in place. You can use more modern tools to carry them forward. But the essence has to be maintained. If teachers use traditional pedagogical activities, it is essential that they reflect on traditional protocols and ethics. In the contemporary life, especially with the few Elders we have left, we need to take advantage of their knowledge and ask them what these protocols and ethics are and how they should be carried out in the classroom.

8.4 Implications and Next Steps: Engaging in Praxis Toward the end of our conversations, we turned our attention to implications and next steps for continuing the work by the educational community to bring together Indigenous and western pedagogies. What also emerged in these conversations was how the Yup’ik concept of ‘becoming aware’ (ellangluni) was central to learning and becoming a responsible member of the community. This opened up a conversation that brought the Freirean conceptualization of praxis into dialogue with the Yup’ik concept of ellangluni.

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Joan & Sabine In our work with Alaska Native teachers in our graduate programs, several Indigenous concepts emerged, which contributed to deeper and more critical understandings of many of the western concepts related to language and literacy teaching with-in the context of language maintenance and revitalization. Native teachers, in particular, found that the concept of ellangluni, becoming aware, which is described as how and why human beings gain an enlightened understanding of knowledge, was related to learning to see things in a new way that made a connection between Indigenous and western theory-practice. This knowledge is embedded with a purpose of making positive changes in their individual lives, so that they would become a responsible and contributing community member. We view this relationship between awareness and action as related to Freire’s (1977) (western) notion of praxis, which is a transformative process of reflexive action that can help us question, challenge and build on our understandings of the relationship between theory-­ practice (see Chap. 2). Arevgaq The Yup’ik word for becoming aware, ellangluni is the holistic concept of the collective consciousness of the Yup’iit people, their world view. Ellpengluni is a related term, referring to the senses. It’s like when a person hears and sees and smells and tastes something, they all come together as the person reacts to whatever they are experiencing. So, when a child, a baby, a brand newborn baby, is learning to move its own body, that’s a sign that that child is becoming aware, ellpengluni, of the world around it, and that is the time when the elders and the parents get excited. When they start moving their body with purpose, that is the time elders realize that the child’s senses are awakening. And when a child is at that stage, the elders begin to sing songs and tell stories to the children, and when the parents and all the relatives convene together to talk about each child’s development, their development of awareness. When they are at this level of awareness—when they are ready—we can start teaching them how to dance, or we can start showing the girl how to sew a fabric or teach the boy how to hunt, how to make a bow and arrow. So the caretaker’s awareness (parents, grandparents, relatives, community members, Elders) is very essential to developing the child’s awareness, so they can become good human beings and productive members of the community. Joan & Sabine This concept of developing awareness as a reciprocal relationship with-in a community, bears a striking similarity to Vygotsky’s (1978) theory of cognitive development, because it also focuses on the social nature of all human activity and situates learning within social contexts. Specifically, the zone of proximal development (ZPD) is defined as the distance between the actual development level, as determined by independent problem solving, and the level of potential development, as determined through problem solving under guidance of a more knowledgeable person or in collaboration with more capable peers. This ‘zone’ is not static but rather is constantly in flux, meaning that learning takes place in the context of

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collaborative, socially situated activity involving diverse cultural resources of the participants working together to create a space that brings together multiple zones of proximal development. As Webster and John (2010) explain: Key to learning and accomplishing the task is the self-determination of the learner’s readiness to move out of her comfort zone, which she does knowing that the teacher is ready to contribute her expertise and help. Likewise, the teacher recognises the importance of the learner’s recognition of her readiness and thus approaches the learning event as learnerrather than teacher-driven. The recognition of the concept of self-determined readiness on the part of the learner is critical because without it a teacher or peer can force the learner into the danger zone where she may experience extreme disequilibrium making the potentials for learning so unstable the learning space becomes chaotic and learning shuts down. On the other hand, when the learner is allowed to determine her readiness and is supported by peers or teachers who recognise this moment, the learning event can be a highly creative event where new revelations and knowledge emerge. (p. 188)

It is important to mention that while within Vygotsky’s theoretical framework the individual learner has a self-determination of readiness, they are always situated as part of a community held together by a shared orientation of goals and purpose. This seems closely related to the Yup’ik concept of developing awareness for individual and community well-being, or mindfulness. Arevgaq The mindfulness of the children will make them become compassionate and knowledgeable, so that they can be part of that communal membership. And the communal membership has roles and responsibilities to where each community member has to step up and be part of that growth in the community; to be part of the education in that community; to be part of understanding the concept of communal survival, communal wellness, communal science, communal engineering, communal art and so on. They have to work together. So, mindfulness means to follow the ancestors’ words of wisdom to critically and collectively think at the same level. This is the notion of social equity where all members are viewed equally with reverence, respect, reciprocity and responsibility. Each community member has the right to be proactive, practice yugtun language, yugtun way of life, yugtun way of believing, yugtun nutemllarput (living through original cultural epistemic values and principles) with balance and harmony. Compassionate knowledge is given to them by their educators (the parents, the grandparents, the leaders, the shamans, the healers, the aunties and uncles), everyone who cares about the children. They do this by calling the children together and saying it’s time for a story, and I’m going to tell you a story because I love you. Before they begin, they always say, because I love you I’m going to tell you, teach you, instruct you, guide you, mentor you. They also made us understand why they were going to tell us something or for what purpose and reason. Joan & Sabine Paolo Freire’s pedagogy of praxis is grounded in educators teaching with love as necessary to humanizing and liberating education. In his early work, Freire makes the claim that “Education is an act of love” (1973, p. 38). The importance of love is

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carried through in his most well-known book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1996). When faced with the truth of oppression—when they have an awareness that oppression exists—love is the act of courage that enables teachers and students to find their freedom through love as a conscious act in the pursuit of humanity through dialogue in the classroom. The ability for a teacher to do this is by acting with “armed love”, which from discussions in our classes with the teachers over the years, has come to mean having the pedagogical tools to not only teach, but also advocate for their students. With a deep understanding of the connection and relatedness of theory and practice they would have a “fighting love of those convinced of the right and the duty to fight, to denounce, and to announce” (Freire, 2005, p. 74) and become advocates for their students’ rights to an education grounded in Indigenous and western knowledge systems. As bell hooks states in Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2003): When teachers teach with love, combining care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust, we are often able to enter the classroom and go straight to the heart of the matter, which is knowing what to do on any given day to create the best climate for learning. (p. 134)

In our view, this ‘armed love’ is an awareness of the connectedness and inseparability of theory and practice. In other words, the Indigenous being-knowing-doing and western onto-epistemological-methodological are always already entangled and cannot be separated. And, if this concept of theory-practice is separated, this disruption can result in incongruencies that can have adverse consequences for teaching and learning. Theories without practical implications call into question their applicability for practitioners, thereby inhibiting the potential for transformative action or praxis. For us, as for Freire, praxis is a dynamic and entangled relationship within theory-practice, which therefore, cannot be separated or exist apart from one another. Arevgaq All Indigenous traditions emphasize the connectedness of epistemic values to the lessons and morals that the children have to become aware of. All three work together as the thread that will make them succeed in life. If the child is taught in this way, they will begin to become aware and understand what it means to be a good human being. Joan & Sabine As you have explained earlier, it is essential to maintain traditional protocols and ethics when engaging in cultural activities. In Sara’s work, both boys and girls were taught using yaaruiq, which you have explained as a cultural activity traditionally involving only girls. We were wondering how teachers should use cultural activities that are traditionally gendered in a classroom that has both boys and girls. Arevgaq That’s a very good question. The boys should be given an activity that does not break the traditional protocol or ethics of yaaruiq. They probably should be taught how to make bows and arrows, or how to make a hunting kayak or hunting boats,

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and how to identify the good hunting tools for marine mammals versus for land animals. Joan & Sabine Sara’s students were in kindergarten. Because of their age and developmental levels, how would a teacher adapt these activities for age appropriateness? Would all of them be ready to do this? Arevgaq It depends on their mental growth. The quickness of their mental and physical condition. That’s why all the adults had to be observant of who is qualified enough to move over to the men’s house. Some boys moved to the qasgiq at a very young age, maybe three, four, five years old, whereas some had to wait until seven, eight, nine, ten. It depends on the mental health of the child, and their mobility. If they’re strong enough to handle hardwood or tools, or whatever, then they become qualified to move on to another level of learning. Joan & Sabine We understand, as you have stated previously, that the traditional ethics and protocols must be maintained. At the same time, the activities are carried forward into the contemporary world. For example, you have explained that during yaaruiq, children might include modern items, such as TVs and ipads in their stories. And, in her work, Natalie relied on Elders’ knowledge and the traditional protocols of building a physical shelter. At the same time her students used modern technological tools. So how can teachers bring these two together and still maintain the traditional ethics and protocols? Arevgaq The traditional ways of storytelling or dance, have to always remain in place. And you can use different tools to sort of carry them forward, but the essence has to be maintained. Like giving appropriate credit to the composers, and having appropriate people perform dances. In ancient times, the composers created family and social story dances to be performed by their relatives, male and female, that know and understand dance ethics and protocols. The appropriate performers had to have their rite of passage through the first dance ceremonies. Qasgiq law was that the only members who were formally initiated to become dance members through the first dance ceremony could dance in public performances. Men are the designated drummers that practice new and old songs together. In contemporary times, the modern groups who are not aware of the traditional rules allow everyone to dance ciuqitet, or the common dances. We need to make teachers aware that they need to reflect on and follow traditional protocols and ethics. This is essential, still, even in the contemporary life. We have this great opportunity to bring in yuuyaraq and traditional ecological knowledge into modern life. Indigenous ways of knowing bring a wealth of knowledge to the classrooms with the help of the local experts, the Elders, the tribal leaders and traditional healers. Especially with the few Elders that we have left. We need to take advantage of their knowledge and consult with them. There are great opportunities

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for the school district to help identify the expertise of the local Elders. Each school district could create an Elder academy that would provide knowledge and resources that teachers could use in their classrooms. And when everyone works together (the certified teachers, teacher aides who are experts of their own people, the tribal leaders, the tribal Elders, school administrators) it will make a huge impact on the children’s learning. I know that in modern life this knowledge and wisdom is not in the curriculum or shared in classrooms anymore. The curriculum needs to be decolonized. It needs to be Indigenized. Even in the greater sense, the teachers in our graduate programs are leading examples of drawing on past school district curricula (based on seasonal subsistence activities), which had elements of Indigenous ways of knowing that brought the Elders’ knowledge to the table. These culture bearers and the wisdom they provide are so essential. It is critical to create a balanced Indigenous and western pedagogy that will enhance Indigenous literacy praxis, Indigenous Elder oral traditional teaching. Joan & Sabine You have always said that your father taught you it was important to be educated in both English and Yup’ik language, and in western and Indigenous ways of being-­ knowing-­doing. Can you tell us how you have carried this teaching forward in your life? Arevgaq We have to learn English and western knowledge, because we need to learn how others perceive their world to be. That is essential. But this does not mean we have to lose our own Indigenous language and knowledge system. If we learn multiple ways of thinking, multiple ways of languaging, multiple ways of world viewing, multiple ways of making meaning, multiple ways of engineering, multiple ways of sciencing, healing, kinship, ritual, survival counseling, teaching, then we will become wealthier in how we understand our life. We’re going to have a holistic understanding of how humanity shares this global life together. I think the most beautiful part of being human and becoming aware is to have a balanced, solid, foundational life, a life that is inclusive of diverse ways of knowing, speaking, thinking, meaning making. With this solid foundation, children will continue to develop their awareness and consciousness, which will make them so rich in life. They are going to continue to develop an understanding of the ethics and protocols that guide from multiple perspectives in a holistic way and be able to make meaning with purpose in life.

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