Education

'They will learn'

Rock Point immersion program helps students take pride in their culture

By Cindy Yurth
Tséyi' Bureau

ROCK POINT, Ariz., Nov. 23, 2011

The year was 1967, and the tiny BIA school at Rock Point was foundering.

Test scores were abysmal. Some teachers didn't even last a year. Student morale was low.

The BIA officials at the time - all Anglos - concluded that children in the remote, traditional community needed more pressure to adapt to mainstream education.

But some elders suspected just the opposite was true: the kids were being made to feel it was not OK to be themselves and that something beyond their ken was expected of them, and so they were foundering.

Way before it was cool, the group of elders proposed something different: Let the kids be taught by Navajo teachers whenever possible even if it meant hiring some people without degrees.

Let them speak Navajo, but learn English as a second language, which it was. Let them use locally developed textbooks and materials that made sense to them. From there, they could transition to English - but always with their cultural values in mind.

At that time, "assimilation" was still the buzzword. The BIA balked, but the elders stood firm. In 1972, they formed a school board and contracted with the BIA to build and run a school themselves - one of the first-ever "contract schools."

Surprisingly, the BIA relented.

The new school - the one still in use today - was built with a hogan at its heart. To this day, the school board meets there.

Fast forward to 2007. While once the problem was kids not wanting to learn the Anglo way, suddenly it was that kids no longer knew their tribal tongue and traditions. But the effects were the same as they had been in the 60s: test scores were plummeting; students had low self-esteem and little interest in school.

"We were drifting away from what our founders wanted," said Matilda Descheny, the school's language and culture specialist and daughter of Ralph Descheny Sr., one of its founders. "We were under so much pressure from the AIMS (Arizona's Instrument to Measure Standards, a by-product of No Child Left Behind) we had stopped focusing on our language and culture."

Where once the challenge had been teaching English to Navajos, the new challenge was teaching Navajo to Navajos.

The school board decided on a radical approach: rather than gradually increase the amount of Diné bizaad the students were exposed to, they would enter a kindergarten entirely taught in Navajo.

That would continue through first grade. After that, the amount of Navajo spoken in the classroom would gradually decrease: 80 percent in 2nd grade, 60 percent in 3rd, 50 percent in 4th.

By 7th through 12th grade, only 20 percent of teaching (Navajo government, culture and language classes) would be done in Navajo - but by then the kids would be fluent.

"For the first couple of days, we had parents really resisting, students who were really freaking out," Descheny recalled. "We had students who only knew 'aoo' and 'ndaga' suddenly having to hear everything in Navajo."

The school board stood firm.

"If you really believe in the program like I do, if there's no interruptions, it will happen," Descheny assured them. "They will learn."

Fast forward again to today. Walking the halls at Rock Point, you will hear teachers talking to each other in Navajo, students talking to teachers in Navajo, and even students talking to students in Navajo.

Immersion worked all too well to teach Navajos English. Now it's working to teach them Navajo.

There's also a popular Navajo Culture Club, coached by Descheny's nephew, Reeverson Descheny, that helps students gain performing experience and take pride in their culture.

A recent innovation in the bilingual program is the three-year-old Navajo Culture Fair, which took place last week. Students do research and make presentations similar to those at a science fair or a history fair, and their efforts are judged by a panel.

Some of the presentations are lighthearted, like a blind fry bread taste test that actually revealed people prefer fry bread made with Red Rose flour to that made with Blue Bird.

"But that's a really good example of using real social science" to challenge common knowledge, Descheny said.

Other students polled their classmates on whether they have a hogan on their compound and what it is used for, gathered prairie dog recipes from their elders, or learned how to harvest yucca root to use as shampoo.

The Culture Fair has grown from just a few entries to about a hundred from all grade levels this year.

Descheny's daughter, Rhonda Joe, entered. Her project? To find out how much people know about their school's founders and history. Not much, as it turns out. But they're reaping the benefits of those courageous elders every day.