Dealing with emotional consequences of historical trauma in the language classroom

[Tanya Slavin]

Dear all,

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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