Native American Blog on Just About Everything

The real thoughts and philosophies of a Lakota educator after 20 years in the trenches... By Lynne Colombe I consider myself a survivor of the Reservation education system because somehow, even though most statistics to date purport that the Native American child is years behind his non-Native counterparts across the United States, I managed to score in the top percentiles of any test I ever took as a child, on and off the Rosebud Reservation. Therefore, when students grow into their high school years and ask me for my personal advice on what to do in high school to prepare for college; if the student is one living on the Reservation, for years I have only been able to offer the advice, “Teach yourself.” I realize that my response is an apathetic one; reflecting my preference for the education I received off-Reservation in Apple Valley, MN during my freshman and sophomore years in high school, to the indifference of my junior and senior years at the Todd County H...

Hidden Curriculum: Notes of a Lakota Mother As part of my graduate studies at the University of Arizona, I took a course in Curriculum, and expected to do curriculum writing, look at models of set curriculum, learn about state standards, etc.  What I did not expect was a course that would divulge me into the study of not just curriculum on the surface level, but curriculum as a CONCEPT of the reality that we construct for students as we teach in classrooms.  More importantly, how the "banking concept of education," (Freire, 1983) was widely practiced still, and I began to relate as both a student and teacher to the concept that there were clear distinctions yet to be made in the discipline of Native American education, especially to reservation education.  I came to the conclusion that a different concept of education was needed (Friere, 1983): In problem posing education, men develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with whi...