A worksheet, a whiteboard, a teacher-learner: leveraging materials and colonial language frames for multimodal indigenous language learning

ABSTRACT

The growing demand for Indigenous language education in the United States often relies on community teachers with widely varying proficiencies as part of local language reclamation efforts. While these English-dominant ‘teacher-learners’ play a central role in the success of classroom-based K-12 language programs, their classroom experiences and practices have received little attention in second language acquisition research. I address this gap in the literature by examining an English-dominant Ojibwe teacher-learner’s pedagogical practices in an English-dominant tribal school. I theorise the use of colonial language and materials by relying on linguistic ethnography’s multi-scalar approach to language in use as well as a focus on sign-makers’ transformations of local resources. Findings show how the teacher-learner’s reliance on relational knowledge and colonial language framing scaffolds translingual practices and opens up discursive space for learners to experiment, play, and learn. This study highlights how one teacher-learner negotiates the ideological and material conditions that shape the learning and use of an Indigenous language within a colonial institution (school) that has long been a tool of assimilation and erasure.

KEYWORDS:

• Materials use
• language learning
• indigenous language reclamation
• linguistic ethnography
• discourse

Acknowledgements

The original creator of the worksheets shown in Figures 2 and 5 is not known. Extensive efforts were undertaken by the author to determine their origin (e.g., inquiring with the classroom teacher, Google image searches, mining Creative Commons images, contacting numerous TPT account holders that use similar clip art). These efforts were unsuccessful and highlight the fluid and adaptable nature of teacher-created print materials which are frequently circulated, modified, and re-circulated online among educator colleagues.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I deliberately use the term ‘teacher-learner’ instead of ‘non-native teacher’ because these teachers tend to identify as Native (i.e., Native American, Indigenous), and have a relationship with their language that does not conform with Second Language Acquisition conceptions of Native/Non-Native Speaker and L1/L2/Target Language constructs. For further discussion of this distinction see White (2006) and McIvor (2020).

2. In keeping with the relational perspective that characterises numerous Indigenous ontologies (e.g., Kimmerer 2013; Simpson 2014; Whyte 2018), materials here can be understood as any phenomena within the perceptual field that are deliberately used to promote language learning.

3. This study was approved by the University of Minnesota’s Institutional Review Board, with informed consent from all participants.

4. Migiziwazisoning is pseudonym for the school.

5. a pseudonym.

6. Adapted from Jefferson (2004).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mel M. Engman

Mel M. Engman is a Lecturer in Education at Queen’s University Belfast. She is a non-Indigenous learner of Ojibwemowin and her research centers on critical approaches to language and sign with a focus on heritage/Indigenous language learning, language reclamation, and language policy in a variety of schooling contexts.