Dealing with emotional consequences of historical trauma in the language classroom

Sat Mar 1 19:43:52 UTC 2014

This is Evan Gardner from "Where Are Your Keys?"

When I first started in the native language revitalization effort I realized (to my surprise) the problem of language loss was not primarily due to poor pedagogy or teaching strategy. I realized, through many difficult moments in community learning events, that the real issue is creating a safe community of learners who have the capacity to handle moments of healing through, during, and because of language learning. These healing moments happen across age groups, ethnicities, identities, and income. 

I have found that now 90% of my work is community revitalization and the building of a supportive language environment. Finding techniques for dealing with politics, lateral oppression, historical trauma, childhood sexual trauma, adult sexual trauma, intergenerational trauma, learned helplessness,  poverty, scarcity, discrimination, reverse discrimination, lateral discrimination (who is Indian enough to be worthy of learning and teaching the language), fraud, corruption, educational discrimination, low graduation rates, Book Indian, red apple, colonization, decolonization, religious corruption, kidnapping by various governmental and non governmental agencies, the rewriting of history by everyone... native, non native, locals, academics, and newspapers not to mention all the Facebook "friends" tearing each other apart. This list goes on and on... And is nothing new for anyone working with endangered languages worldwide.

But I firmly believe a healthy approach to all this is through the language. That is where the other 5% of my work is done. The other 5% is logistics!

Now whenever I am asked by a community for language support my first question is about the health and capacity of the "mental health" "behavioral health" "family counseling" departments of the tribe (even they are not immune). I have found that having the mental health departments involved right from the beginning has made a huge difference in perspective and the ability of the community to effectively collaborate. 

I have taken a core team of language workers to a family counseling session to ask for tools in creating and managing a healthy community language night. The health professionals were very willing to offer anything they could. They told us a good starting place is learning debriefing tools and managing "talking circles" within your local cultural custom. Learning a variety of ice breakers will also help build a strong learning community. The counselors also recommended we learn who manages which specific programs so conversations between learners and teachers can be debriefed in confidence with the appropriate counselor until the person searches out their own help. After having this conversation with the local behavioral health manager our core team left the building feeling more empowered, supported, and capacitated than ever.

We asked the behavioral health office if there were any basic trainings they could offer for "lay counseling" or advice they could give us for when a community member feels so safe at our community language night that they begin to open up about a past trauma. We don't know how to deal with all that as language teachers. But the language circle is where community members have found support... The "language" door is easier to walk through that the "survivors of childhood sexual trauma" door. The parking lot outside that meeting is empty. The parking lot outside the weekly language circle if full. Where would you park if everyone in town knew which car you drove?

If you are a language teacher in your community, my best advice is to call the local mental health and addiction medicine office and ask for help. They are very willing to give it.

I would even invite the local behavioral health team to come to your classroom and offer a presentation on what they experience in the mental health field and how your programs can support each other.

Language teachers are often looked to as community leaders. I feel very strongly that as language teachers we must accept that role and be prepared for it. If we are doing our jobs as language and cultural teachers then soon our students will be considered community leaders as well. They must be prepared and capacitated for that responsibility from day one. 

Capacitated, strong, healthy, AND fluent!

Hope this helps or at least offers another perspective.

Evan Gardner
Original Developer of "Where Are Your Keys?" 

On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 7:21 PM, Troike, Rudolph C - (rtroike) <rtroike at email.arizona.edu="mailto:rtroike at email.arizona.edu">> wrote:

Some years ago I read that the Oneida had launched a (then-)successful campaign to revive the use of the language based on the need to have participants in certain ceremonies. This of course would not work as well in an urban setting, but embedding the language
 learning in a context of honoring and perpetuating significant aspects of historical culture might help motivationally, as conversely might applying it to modern technological use as a challenge (being able to share information within a knowledgeable peer
 group, so that the language is relevant, and not just a difficult learning exercise).

Methodologically, the teaching model we created for a course in Bolivian Quechua at the University of Texas some years ago might easily be adapted. By the middle of the second semester, students were able to communicate with a visiting student from Peru
 who spoke a radically different dialect (considered by some linguists to be a separate language), discussing differences in education in the U.S. and Peru. (Most modern language courses I know reach this level of proficiency after 4 semesters, rather than
 1 1/2!) The textbook, by Garland Bills, Bernardo Vallejo, and myself, is available on the web, and I am told that the lab lessons are also.

The crucial aspect of the success of the model was in the lab lessons, which (at the outset) had students memorize conversations and practice sentences by listening to them being repeated 3 times before being provided a space to say them, then hearing another
 repetition followed by a space, and then hearing a final confirmation. After about the 5th lesson, memorizing a constructed conversation becomes burdensome, so we dropped that requirement in favor of using the patterns for expanded and innovative use in the
 classroom. But the key is building up hearing/listening (receptive) ability first.

In a heritage language setting like this, I would add engaging the students in the creation of novel conversations, jokes, playlets, etc., as soon as a minimally adequate level of competence had been reached. In many native communities, being able to turn
 a joke in the language is a socially desirable skill. Finding ways to engage learners in their own learning could be a key. Writing first and reading aloud rather than being forced into impromptu speaking can make things easier.

A great mistake in much of modern language teaching ideology is pressing students for informal conversational competence, without developing an adequate receptive foundation. I have queried college seniors who had taken a required 2 years (4 semesters) of
 Spanish, and found that they had already forgotten most of what they studied, thus almost totally wasting that much of their lives. (By contrast, from a reading/grammar-translation approach with no speaking whatsoever, I was successfully able to take graduate
 courses taught entirely in Spanish in Mexico.) Overemphasis on production without sufficient receptive hearing/listening development can be counterproductive. So one must be wary of what the "experts" in language teaching prescribe.

    Good luck,

    Rudy

    Rudy Troike

    University of Arizona

    Tucson, Arizona

From: ilat-request at list.arizona.edu [ilat-request at list.arizona.edu] on behalf of Tanya Slavin [tanya.slavin at gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, February 28, 2014 6:08 PM
To: ilat at list.arizona.edu
Subject: [ilat] Dealing with emotional consequences of historical trauma in the language classroom

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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