Dealing with emotional consequences of historical trauma in the language classroom

[Bernie]

Hey Con,

Unfortunately much of what you write is true. What hurts most in the Nova Scotia area is when fluent speakers knock the ones who missed out on the language because of the residential school experience. Some of these victims are lawyers today who are accused of not having/or told will never have an accurate understanding of the Mi'kmaw culture and therefore will NEVER be good representatives of our nation. Being told that due to their lack of facility in the Mi'kmaw Language, they're just not Mi'kmaw enough. This stings them very badly.

I set the wheels in motion to repair this erroneous way of thinking. Those lawyers will be my future students this summer coming. I'm hoping I will be able to get them to see things differently simply by lecturing on the conceptual differences between English and Mi'kmaw at least for starters.

It kind o' reminds me of Obama's plight with many people in the U.S. when it was stated that he just "wasn't Black enough."

Hasta luego mi amiguito.

berni

 

Sent from my iPad

On 2014-03-02, at 2:47 PM, "Conor Quinn" <conor.mcdonoughquinn at MAINE.EDU> wrote:

> Dia dhaoibh, a chairde!
> 
> One of the harshest aspects of language endangerment that I've seen is that each generation gets slapped with shame no matter which way they go.  The speaker generations get made to be ashamed for speaking their supposedly inferior (etc.) language, while the non-speaker generations get made to be ashamed for not being able to speak their heritage language.  And people who are somewhere between completely fluent and completely non-speaker get shame(d) for not speaking it well enough.
> 
> The first kind of shame is the one that gets the most attention in language revitalization circles, but the latter two are just as pervasive and painful for those who experience it.  And it's quite possible to experience all three at once, and/or in different combinations.
> 
> The last two strongly influence learner success and persistence.  If you feel that (despite all the historical, social, etc. pressures outside of your control), you somehow "should" already know language, then it puts an enormous amount of pressure on you: "If I don't learn the language, I won't be [fill-in-the-blank] enough...AND it will disappear."  This makes every stumble in learning the language even more fraught than it already is for any second-language learner.  Which very often can be overwhelming, and drive people away completely.
> 
> So it's probably helpful to have these three kinds of shame brought up and out front, so that everyone  can feel a lot safer.  
> 
> Particularly since these feelings are most often experienced very individually.  That there's something wrong with ME, that it's MY deficiency.  Having that public/group acknowledgement that all of us are also going through one or more of these shames can help a lot.  We're no longer individually isolated in them, and can work together to help each other find good ways to keep them from holding us back.
> 
> This also helps these three different groups work together better.  If I'm a speaker with shame type #1, and you are a learner with shame type #2, we both might not fully understand what's worrying the other person when we go to speak the language.  Since what holds us back might be really quite different.
> 
> This public acknowledgement is perhaps most important for intermediate-status speakers.  It gets mentioned, but it still doesn't really get addressed nearly enough how often people who are not 100% perfectly fluent get shamed and scared out of speaking by the more fluent speakers.  Not just the really harsh language policers---who very often call those speakers lazy/inattentive, not realizing that they were never given the same degree and quality of exposure to the language---but even people who just let themselves laugh at these speakers' errors.  
> 
> These reactions terribly reliably drive great potential speakers back to the safer space of the dominating language.  We can't ask all the fluent speakers to "please be nicer to and less judgmental of the less fluent speakers", but precisely because of that, it's that much more crucial to set up and constantly work to maintain safe places for them to speak what they can.
> 
> Public/group discussion of this range of feelings---helping people work their way to finally feeling that they really do have nothing to be ashamed of, and in fact plenty to be proud of---is, as far as I can tell, probably not just a good idea, but really essential.
> 
> Till later, keep safe and sane.
> 
> Slán,
> do chara
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Sun, Mar 2, 2014 at 12:19 AM, Tanya Slavin <tanya.slavin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ben, thank you so much for the links. I'm definitely going to suggest this documentary to the workshop participants.
> Tanya
> 
> 
> 2014-03-01 14:20 GMT-05:00 Ben Levine <watchingplace at gmail.com>:
> 
> Hi Tanya - We made the documentary Language of America (languageofamerica.com) with just this use in mind. We show the film ( it’s 80 minutes divided into 12 minute chapters) or parts of it and use it to trigger an emotional response which then let’s students own their family and tribal experience and identity.  We facilitate the discussion which is to say give the responder the support they need whether it be encouragement or connecting their experience to an other’s or even balancing conflicting responses, basically creating a safe space where the fragmented pieces of experience can come together. There’s more on the web site and also more about our work at speaking place.org.
> Please be in touch if you wish more information.
> Ben Levine and Julia Schulz
> 
> On Feb 28, 2014, at 8:24 PM, Tanya Slavin <tanya.slavin at UTORONTO.CA> wrote:
> 
>> Dear all, 
>> 
>> [I just sent this message to another mailing list, but I figured I'd send it here as well, apologies if you're getting it twice!]
>> 
>> We're having a local workshop on indigenous language teaching at the University of Toronto, an event organized for school and university language teachers to share ideas on some of the challenges specific to native language teaching in an urban setting. One of the topics that we hope to address in some way (perhaps as a roundtable discussion) is the question of how to deal with emotional consequences of historical trauma in the language classroom. One of the biggest obstacles for aboriginal students wishing to regain their language is the painful history of their relationship with it (e.g. their parents were forbidden to speak the language, they may have grown up discouraged speaking their language or feeling that their language was somehow inferior). All that baggage influences negatively their success in the classroom: they either reach a certain plateau or can hardly progress at all, or are unable to start speaking the language. As a result, the drop-out rate of native students in a university language classroom is much higher than that of non-native students wishing to learn a native language. I witnessed it myself when I was teaching Ojibwe in a university setting, and I'm seeing it now teaching it in a community setting. The question is how to deal with that and help these students succeed (also keeping in mind that they don't necessarily have the support of their community in an urban setting). Is it a good idea to actually raise this issue in the classroom, in order not to ignore the elephant in the room, so to speak? Would having separate classes for native and non-native students help the issue?
>> So I wanted to ask if anybody had any ideas about this they would be willing to share, or experiences they had, or any stories they have about students that were dealing with this obstacle. If that's ok, I'd love to share your ideas and experiences at the workshop (obviously, giving everybody credit for them), which would also hopefully generate a productive discussion. I would appreciate any ideas you might have, and thank you in advance!
>> 
>> Tanya
>> 
> 
> 
> 


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