Dealing with emotional consequences of historical trauma in the language classroom

[Dr. MJ Hardman]

You are quite right & I am glad that you are so doing.  If you can read
Spanish I would recommend < Mark Qillqa TUPE Estudio Histórico-Cultural de
Marka-Tupe Pueblo de habla Jaqaru. Año 750 D.C. - 2010 > Dimas Bautista
Iturrizaga [ 
http://unmsmnoticiasfondoeditorial.blogspot.com/2010_08_01_archive.html ]
Dr. Bautista is a native speaker of Jaqaru.  MJ

On 3/1/14 7:30 PM, "BJG" <egonxti at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> 
> 

Dr. MJ Hardman
Professor Emeritus
Linguistics, Anthropology and Latin American Studies
University of Florida
Doctora Honoris Causa UNMSM, Lima, Perú
website:  http://clas.ufl.edu/users/hardman/ 

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