Julianne Jennings: End language discrimination in our schools

Looking back on language conversion efforts, the Carlisle Indian School, which opened in 1879, encouraged the use of English through an English language student newspaper and frequently praised and rewarded students for speaking English. At the end of the nineteenth century, the “object method,” which used objects and regalia to help provide comprehensible input, was adapted for use in BIA schools. During the 1930s-40s elements of progressive education, which placed emphasis on the child rather than the subject matter, were used in BIA schools. Local material and daily experiences were used in teaching, early primary reading and was based on words that children were already familiar with, and games and activities were used to teach vocabulary and engage students. English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) programs were initiated in Navajo-area BIA schools in the 1960s, and their success was bolstered by the addition of bilingual programs and bilingual teacher training programs. The problem with the all-English immersion teaching methods used in Indian schools were to replace the children's Native languages rather than to give them an additional language. Indigenous language activists strongly support immersion language programs for indigenous language revitalization, and most of the techniques the BIA adapted or developed to teach English are adaptable to teaching Indian languages as second languages today.

As an American Indian anthropologist and ESL instructor, I was inadvertently using the same BIA methods using objects to teach English to brown and olive skin tone students. These are the same students recently pushed from an existing classroom with white/light students and a white teacher. It was obvious the brown students were taken out of the white classroom and put with a brown teacher because I/they would not “measure up.” Some of the students stated “How come there are no more brown students in the white classroom?” Their line of questioning was smothered by others defending the teacher in question. A 2011 analysis of U.S. Department of Education data showed teachers of color made up 17 percent of the teaching force nationwide, though minority students accounted for 48 percent of the classroom population. Based on this statistic we were being set-up for failure.

Opposite this scenario, primary-grade white students are denied the opportunity of learning a second language in the formative years when this learning would come so much easier and more in depth. The practice of relegating white students to second place in the international world is a correlation to relegating students of color to second place in first world countries. No matter the race, color, national origin, or any other means of dividing people, all students need to learn at least one other language to function effectively on the international world stage.