language and science

[McMillan, Carol]

The discussions of science and language inspired a four-in-the-morning "ah-ha" experience for me.  I'm sending a copy of the draft of its result.  As a non-Indian who works with the Colville Tribes' language program and who also teaches science, I have written this with other science teachers in mind as its audience.  If you can take the time to read it (four pages,) I would greatly appreciate any and all feedback. If you like it, what do you think I should do with it?  (If you don't like it, please don't answer the last question...)   :-)
Thanks,
Carol McMillan



DRAFT

Besides Linearity: Lessons from Native American Languages for
Rethinking Our Science Education Paradigm

Carol McMillan, Ph.D.
March 9, 2004

	Wenatchee Valley College at Omak lies unobtrusively in the Okanogan Valley of Washington State. Nestled between two ranges of mountains, the Okanogan River marks a geologic boundary between colliding continental plates; a place of great drama if viewed on a grand time scale.  From the perspective of us ephemeral humans who live here, the more visible collision is not geologic, but one of cultures.  Rare in our U.S. history, some of the local Native American tribes remain at home, living where their ancestors have fished, hunted, dug roots, and picked huckleberries for many thousands of years.  The culture is ancient, sophisticated, and rich in what’s often referred to as “deep knowledge,” those things that can only be learned through countless generations of observation.
	I am one of the suyapis, those flighty, invasive newcomers whose ancestors, when driven from their native lands of Scotland and Ireland by the invading British, came to America and became the invaders of this land.  As with most cultures, ours tends to be arrogant and ethnocentric, believing that we hold the truths with which we may enlighten others.  
Before our arrival, education flowed from the elders, both human and non-human.  Correct behaviors were modeled rather than preached, silent observation of natural phenomenon led to deep understandings of the workings of nature, and psychological principles were taught through stories told in the darkness of winter.  These were long-evolved paradigms for education; demonstrably successful over thousands of years.
	As a faculty member of the local community college, I am a purveyor of the new system.  Merely a few hundred years old at best, this system has been demonstrably awesome in the manipulation of molecules, forcing them into intriguing categories and shapes. Like a bunch of aging children, we seem unable to resist the temptation to simply try something out and see what happens.  We seem less concerned about ultimate results than we are infatuated by immediate novelties.  While quite impressive materially, the driving force behind this culture does not seem to bode well for sustainability.  Never-the-less, our forefathers (and, yes, also our foremothers) set about eliminating the existent educational systems of this continent, replacing them as completely as possible with one in which captive children are removed from their homes for between six and twenty-four hours each day, imprisoned in a square-cornered building filled with well-meaning adults who require them to think and behave in terms of linear, hierarchical subdivisions. While almost every parent complains about the local schools, we tend to believe whole-heartedly in their basic premises.
	Okanogan County can only be reached from outside by traveling over a hundred miles on two-lane roads.  There was little violent combat between males when the white people arrived; most of the violence was carried out silently by the accompanying viruses, or was visited upon the heads of the children in the mission schools.  This last was literal, not merely figurative.  In the 1980’s, at our college’s first Pow-wow, a woman in her sixties spoke of attending the local boarding school.  If she spoke her own language, the woman reported, the nun’s would strike a match and extinguish it on her tongue.
	Hearing these stories causes us suyapis to flinch in White guilt; we’d rather they were laid to rest.  But if we move past the discomfort and past a bit of our innate ethnocentric worldviews, there awaits an awesome world of wisdom.  Many Native Americans are understandably reluctant to share much of this wisdom, both because they were shamed for it and because of the painfully literal truth of the saying, “Once burned, twice shy.”  But for Indian children to succeed in the imposed school system without being totally subsumed into the white worldview, the cultural paradigms must be incorporated into our understanding of how learning takes place.  Such a shift benefits not only Indian children, but would expand the worldviews of all learners passing through our institutions of education.
	Since all people learn in multiple ways, sincere teachers worldwide have been rediscovering methods that teach holistically.  A generation ago, when linearity reined king, we were asked to outline all papers before beginning to write.  An outline consisted of a linear, hierarchical ordering of our thoughts, deemed necessary before intelligible writing could begin.  Although reared and nurtured in a highly logical, “scientific” family, I have never mastered that art.  My outlines were generated ex post facto, created after the papers were completed.  More recently educators invented “clustering,” balloons of linked concepts placed in no particular order.  Neither lineal nor hierarchical, clustering allows an author to view all thoughts on a subject holistically before organizing them.  Clustering shows an example of the possibilities awaiting us through non-linear thinking.

	A basic precept of anthropology teaches that cultures that build circular structures tend to view time as a spiral, to problem solve by council, and to think holistically.  Cultures that build in squares and pyramids, on the other hand, tend to have hierarchies with coercive powers, to view time as linear, and to think sequentially: a goes to b, b goes to c.  We also read that language and culture interweave, inextricably tied together, both reflecting and shaping a worldview.
	 Since 1999 the Language Preservation Program of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and Wenatchee Valley College have been working together to offer a course of study in which students can incorporate the learning of their native languages into a college degree program.  Through extensive contact with elders, I have begun to glimpse the magnitude of a parallel universe in which I was not raised.  Most of the languages taught in our schools are Indo-European, sharing an ancestry and structural similarly.  We have textbooks and dictionaries with lists of words to memorize and incorporate into increasingly complex dialogs.  Most of what challenges the reciprocal learners of these languages is the conjugation of verbs.  For these we must learn to recognize various affixes, small units of meaning attached to the root words, indicating person and tense.  Trying to consciously dissect a verb when hearing a language spoken leads to ones comprehension falling behind the words; the learner becomes lost.  Only when these verbal affixes become “second nature” to us can we begin to understand and to speak, automatically recognizing the meanings of the conjugations without trying to translate.
	Now try to imagine a language made up primarily of affixes.  With fewer separate words standing on their own, the majority of meaning in a given sentence lies in a string of what linguists refer to as “bound morphemes,” small units of meaning that cannot stand alone.  Using English, one can say, “Suddenly he decided to walk along the river, quickly moving upstream.” In the native languages of the Pacific Northwest, however, one encounters a single word constructed from multiple affixes:  “Person not oneself or the person being spoken to – alone – going – in an upstream direction– along a small river - deciding suddenly to do this – moving quickly – in the past.”  
	Haruo Aoki’s monumental dictionary of nimiputimptki, the Nez Perce language, is organized by word stems or roots.1  These can act either as nouns or verbs, depending on the affixes. To look up a Nez Perce word, one must be able to recognize which section holds the primary unit of meaning, a feat involving considerable knowledge of the language.  The word "hiwacaptka?ykima" translates as “He ran back and forth with his, through the length of the longhouse.”2  One can find it listed under the stem “capati,” meaning “to lie or move lengthwise,” with the subheading “we,” meaning “to run.”  Also under capati one finds the command “?inahicilcaptx,” meaning “Climb on a branch with it.”  The reader must recognize “capt” as the root section in each. 
 	One can see that our brains must approach the Nez Perce language differently than Indo-European languages.  In English we can say, “They collectively took down each one of the items he was carrying for him.”  But in nimiputimtki the same meaning is conveyed with 
“pewi?nekehneysene.”  The latter cannot be deciphered in the linear manner one would use on the first.  Listening to an Indo-European language one tracks the words sequentially, unconsciously knowing when to expect each part of speech.  One’s brain can follow the flow of words, ticking off subjects, verbs, and modifying phrases as they are spoken.  But, even unconsciously, a listener cannot use the same heuristic to decipher the second sentence.  The brain must wait for all the affixes to present themselves, and then organize them into a meaningful whole.  Martina Whelshula, a tribal educator who is seeking to become fluent in her heritage language, verbalized this shift beautifully.  Her face lit with joy as she exclaimed, “My language paints a picture in my head; I just watch it!”3

	How the brain is utilized may differ somewhat depending on the language one speaks. The implications of this difference for science education may be quite large. Through language itself, Indo-European speakers practice sequential thought, while speakers of Native Languages process language more holistically.  Logical, sequential brain functions may be consciously controlled; one can use “critical thinking” inductively to reach conclusions.  Holistic thinking, on the other  hand, seems to be based on less conscious processes.  One feeds the brain information and waits for the “ah-ha” to be supplied to one’s conscious awareness, one must wait for the picture to be painted.
  	Neuroscientists continue to make great strides in understanding learning and memory.  Although the pre-frontal cortex appears to be the site of conscious, analytical thought, it is not the primary recipient of incoming sensory data.  The thalamus and amygdala, tied more to our emotive processes, have first decision-making rights as to how data will be processed.  Depending on our previous experience with a situation, these unconscious areas of our brains can choose to send impulses to our conscious minds for processing, can cause us to flee or avoid a situation, or can even shut down all neural channels to our frontal cortex, causing our minds to literally “go blank.”4  Even if our frontal cortex receives the sensory data, it must rely on the unconscious processes of the hippocampus to retrieve bits of relevant stored memory from various sections of the brain and, after processing, to return the data for storage. By far the greatest amount of brain function in learning and memory are unconscious processes.
Despite this fact, our educational systems continue to deify conscious, logical processes as the only valid method of learning.  Controlled, sequential thought fits well with the linear paradigm of Anglo-American culture.  Holistic thought, on the other hand, requires a great deal more trust and the release of conscious control.  The unconscious mind must be trusted to be the bastion of learning and memory that it actually is.  In the Anglo paradigm we tend to identify our “selves” with areas of controlled consciousness.  I would argue that Native Americans tend to have a broader definition of “self,” encompassing more of the unconscious connections.

	This paper itself is based on a four-in-the-morning “ah-ha” experience.  Each winter for the past twenty years I have taught a course called “Life Continuity” at Wenatchee Valley College.  During those years I have refined and fine-tuned the class until I will admit to being quite pleased with my method of instruction; years after being in the class, students often contact me to say how it has stayed with them.  These are the outcomes an instructor strives for.  Yet this year, as I taught it again, my conscious mind registered a pattern that I’d been unconsciously observing throughout the history of the course.
	For the first half of the quarter I teach the processes of genetics.  My goal is to have students become “fluent” in the language of genes: what genes actually are, how they are created, how they work in the body, and how they are passed on.  The second half of the quarter covers population genetics and evolution.  Once students truly understand genes, we look at what happens to them in ecosystems, how the genes of various organisms affect each other.  The two halves of the course are taught and assessed quite differently.  I teach the genetic processes in a neat, organized, linear fashion: e.g., in “transcription” there first comes a recognition of the allele on the DNA, then the chromosome “puffs,” then RNA polymerase begins putting in matching nucleotides along the DNA bases . . . etcetera, etcetera, and so forth.  Linear, sequential me and most of my linear, sequential-thinking students love it.  I make it funny and fairly hands-on.  But fairly quickly most of the Native American students in the class tend to begin losing the sparkle in their eyes.  I must leap in with extra encouragement, convincing people they can understand it, re-explaining in my linear, sequential fashion.  And somehow we muddle through to reach the second half of the quarter.  Once we begin discussing ecosystems, how populations holistically interact, the Native students tend to blossom.  Students who tended previously to be silent in class offer examples of complex adaptations and interactions.
	My morning “ah-ha” that inspired this writing stemmed from a student who came to my office to do her “check-off” for one of the genetic processes, her third attempt at explaining it to receive the requisite points for her grade.  As she started drawing out the “steps,” I attempted to intervene where I perceived she was leaving something out.  To my way of thinking she was about to “miss a step.”  She pushed out her arm toward me, gesturing away my attempt to interrupt, saying, “Just wait till I’ve got it all.”  She then proceeded, in a non-linear fashion, to cover the paper with the appropriate drawings.  Sitting back, obviously satisfied, when they were all drawn, she said, “Now,” and proceeded to explain the process perfectly, pointing to each element and identifying its role, and thus receiving her points.  She was using clustering, as opposed to outlining, to organize the material.  The immediate response for both of us was relief and happiness.  She tearfully hugged me and said, “Now I can do the others.”
My understanding of her process arrived at four the next morning, waking me up both literally and figuratively.  While in my mind mRNA transcription and all the other processes I teach must go from a to b to c to d, in actuality they are circular and simultaneous in the body.  Everything truly is happening at once.  My dentist has a paper that he authored mounted on the wall of his office; it argues that time is merely a mental construct we use in order to explain motion.5  Time is not perceived as linear in all cultures.  Sequencing is not the innate reality of all things.  Linearity is a cultural concept. Ah-ha.   I have taught these ideas for years in anthropology classes, but on that day I “got it.”
	I approached my native students the next day, seeking their thoughts about my insight.  The response was immediate and almost palpable, as if each person exhaled a breath she’d been holding for the entire quarter.  Yes, the second half of the class is much easier.  Yes, explain the processes of the first half in a more circular fashion; try to let all the elements be viewed.

	This way of thinking and teaching will take some adjustment.  Linearity is useful as a mode of thinking and understanding; but it is not the only method, and possibly not even the most effective.  It is an aspect of the culture into which I was born, and a fits glove-like with the language I speak.  To serve all students we must venture into ways of thinking, knowing, and teaching that require conscious reliance on less conscious brain functions, quite a stretch for those of us who gain most comfort from a feeling of control.  Although science purports to recognize the necessity of both inductive and deductive reasoning, and although many great scientists report that important ideas seem to arrive unbidden in their minds, our scientific educational systems mostly remain locked in linear methodologies.  In an increasingly multicultural world where more recognition is being given to the power of diverse ways of gaining and processing information, perhaps it is time to venture out of the comfort zones.  Many of us succeeded in the educational system because it was designed by and for our languages and our ways of thinking.  By seeking and experimenting with holistic paradigms, inestimable benefit will be derived from the inclusion of diverse minds in the educational pool.

1Aoki, Haruo, Nez Perce Dictionary, 1994.  University of California Press. Berkeley.
2 ibid. p. 7.
3Whelshula, Martina, personal communication.
4Passer, Michael W. and R.E. Smith, 2004.  Psychology: the Science of Mind and Behavior, 2nd                 ed.  McGraw Hill, New York. p. 89.
5Loudon, Merle, unpublished document.