Dealing with emotional consequences of historical trauma in the language classroom

[BJG]

I believe that language loss not only should be related to historical
trauma, but that it is a part of historical trauma, and cannot be
addressed/revitalised/reclaimed/revived/maintained without being a part of
a larger response to historical trauma. I am currently trying to do a
literature review on exactly this topic, and would be eternally grateful
for any suggestions.

Bryan James Gordon


2014-03-01 12:43 GMT-07:00 Evan Gardner <evan at whereareyourkeys.org>:

>  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
>>
>


-- 
Bryan James Gordon
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