Written by Dr. Sandra Garner and Andrew Sawyer, Myaamia Center Outreach Team
In May, 2023 faculty from Miami University’s College of Education, Health, and Society (EHS) presented course modules to staff from the Myaamia Center that they developed during their participation in a year-long pilot program, Indigenizing the Curriculum. The workshop and projects exceeded the expectations of all involved.
How did the idea of an Indigenizing the Curriculum training program emerge?
In 2021, several milestones in the relationship between the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma (MTO) and Miami University (MU) brought increased visibility to the work of the Myaamia Center (MC) and presented new opportunities for further collaboration with Miami University. The Myaamia Center serves as the research and education arm of the MTO. The language and cultural revitalization work of the Center has received international recognition and played an important role in building an educational structure for tribal citizens of all ages, including the support of the Miami Heritage students attending Miami University. The MC generously shares their research with MU, non-profit organizations, the general public, and MC staff support faculty interested in their work. The time and resources of the MC, however, are limited. The Office of the Provost recognized the need to deepen the relationship and committed to invest in these efforts. As a result, new positions to support these efforts were funded. Among these are the Education Outreach Specialist, Andrew Sawyer, and a faculty fellowship, the Chief Floyd Leonard Faculty Fellow. Dr. Sandra Garner, an Associate Professor in Global and Intercultural Studies is the inaugural fellow.
The first year Sawyer and Garner formed an outreach team reporting to Kara Strass, Miami Tribe Citizen and Director of Miami Tribe Relations at the MC. They were charged with the task of familiarizing themselves with the staff and resources of the MC and to identify opportunities to build and strengthen relationships across campus. Several insights arose. First, many MU faculty members were interested in learning more about the work of the MC and reaching a level of confidence about the incorporation of Myaamia and Native American materials into their courses from a position of cultural competency and sensitivity. Additionally , education about Native histories, cultures, perspectives, concerns, issues, cultural revitalization efforts, and methods is virtually nonexistent. Thus, the learning curve is steep and the time needed to learn about the MTO and MC required a deep dive into context–an understanding of settler colonialism and its effects, the diversity of Tribal Nations, issues of identity, citizenship, and sovereignty to name just a few.
The outreach team proposed a faculty development opportunity, a community of learning. A pilot of the program was launched in the fall of 2022. The outreach team proposed that faculty from EHS comprise the initial cohort. There were several reasons for this choice: a well-established relationship with the college; the need for educators of future teachers to have a level of expertise to share with their students; and the fact that Ohio only has 5 education standards related to Indigenous peoples and they are all related to pre-1900 content. In a 2015 nationwide study, Ohio ranked 46th out of the 50 states and Washington D.C. in the U.S. for the number of Native American content standards.[1] While teachers in the field could be exposed via CEU opportunities (pilot programs are already being conducted), the outreach team proposed a window of intervention at the university level–working with faculty to strengthen their knowledge base so they could reach future K-12 teachers.
Why Indigenizing the Curriculum?
The goal of creating this type of community was to bring together a small group of faculty that would examine ways to incorporate Indigenous perspectives, knowledge, and experiences into their course curriculum. The name for this community, Indigenizing the Curriculum, expresses the intent to enrich faculty member’s understanding of the diversity of thought that can be explored through Myaamia and other Indigenous knowledges.
Indigenous approaches, methods, and perspectives would also contribute to MU’s DEI and Intercultural Consciousness requirements, pillars of the new Miami Global Plan. As Native scholar Bethany Hughes observes, a Native “model of thought and practice that centers relationality, obligation, and active caretaking” is positioned as “for something, not against something.”[2]
Goals of Indigenizing the Curriculum:
- Create communities of learning to support faculty development of Myaamia, Native, and Indigenous content for MU courses with the following learning outcomes.
- Increase awareness of MC and the resources available
- Critically examine resources about Native Americans, MTO in particular
- Utilize Native frameworks (methods, approaches, values, perspectives)
- Archives
- Build an archive of lesson plans (Canvas)
- Build an archive of approved, culturally sensitive resources
- Build capacity
- Train scholars to utilize Native resources and frameworks to address and explore American Indian/MTO topics and perspectives
- Trained scholars can network with their colleagues
- Maximize MC staff time
This initial cohort included faculty from various departments in EHS including Educational Leadership; Educational Psychology; Family Science and Social Work; Kinesiology, Nutrition, and Health; Sport Leadership and Management; and Teaching, Curriculum, and Educational Inquiry. A total of nine EHS faculty members met with Sawyer and Garner six times (about every other week) throughout the fall semester of 2022 to review and discuss resources covering Native American approaches, methods, and perspectives. During the spring semester of 2023 community members were tasked with developing a lesson or module that they planned to incorporate into one of their courses that would integrate some of those Indigenous resources and topics into their curriculum. Individual members also met with an advisor(s) from the MC throughout the spring semester to receive feedback and to help them flesh out their project. At the end of the semester all of the members met as a group one last time to present their final product to the staff from the Myaamia Center. The lessons and modules that the community members produced will be archived by the Center and accessible to others as models that can be used in their classrooms as well.
What are some of the projects developed by Miami University faculty?
The projects were impressive and we describe three here that reflect different faculty approaches to the creation of teaching modules. Myaamia Center Assistant Director George Ironstrack said of the presentations “All the projects demonstrated a high level of commitment and interest from the participating faculty. The presentations highlighted the transformative impact of the mentorship, discussions, and exposure to vetted sources provided by Indigenizing the Curriculum.”
Photo by Jonathan M. Fox
Megan Kuykendoll, Director of the Sexuality Education Studies Center as well as an Instructor and eLearning Coordinator for the Department of Family Science & Social Work (FSW), designed modules for their FSW 365: Family Life Sexuality Education course. She chose an approach that wove Native experience into the thematically designed curriculum. Thus each theme, such as Feminism, Reproductive Justice, The Right to Parent, Menstrual Health and Care, Two-Spirit People, and Sexual- and Gender-based violence include Native perspectives.
Dr. Callie Batts Maddox, Associate Professor of Sport Leadership and Management (SLM), developed a stand-alone module for her upcoming course SLM 279: Race, Nation, and Sport. This module was designed to explore the lived experiences of Indigenous people in sport, to examine the tension between assimilation and resistance in sporting contexts, and to use sport as a lens to examine Indigenous sovereignty and national identity. Topics covered include Historical and Contemporary Indigenous Sport, Sport as a tool for Assimilation and Resistance, Reimagining Indigenous Imagery in Sport, and Sovereignty and National Identity. To explore these topics Dr. Maddox included discussions of athletics at boarding schools like Carlisle Indian Industrial School in PA, the history of Native-based mascots, including at Miami University, and how international athletic competition, like the Olympics, have interacted with Indigenous nationhood.
Dr. Karen Zaino, Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Teaching, Curriculum, and Educational Inquiry (TCE), created modules for the department’s TCE 191: Threshold Concepts in Teaching, Curriculum, and Educational Inquiry course. Dr. Zaino is just one of the instructors for this course and her goal was to add modules to the course that all of the instructors for this course could use. Her reason for working on material for this course in particular is that it is required for all students majoring in Teacher Education, so it will have a direct impact on future teachers in PK-12 schools around Ohio and beyond. Her goal is to introduce students to the history and continuing impacts of boarding schools as well as contemporary tribal revitalization efforts, which are themselves significant educational movements that teachers can learn from. The lessons she put together were designed to increase student understandings of schooling while also providing a background in Indigenous histories and efforts related to education focusing on the work of the Miami Tribe and the Myaamia Center. In highlighting this work being done at Miami University, Dr. Zaino suggested that “we have a very specific obligation to the nation whose land we have settled and whose cultures and communities have been uprooted and harmed in the process of settler colonialism.”
What did assessments of the program reveal?
Three assessments were conducted as part of the seminar. Prior to the workshop participants were asked to complete a survey that provided some background information on their tenure at Miami University, their familiarity with the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and its history, the work of the Myaamia Center, if and how they address Indigenous topics in their courses, how comfortable they feel discussing those topics in the classroom, how familiar they are with contemporary Tribal Nations, and the resources available for reference when discussing contemporary topics related to Tribal Nations. Participants were then asked to respond to these questions again at the midpoint and end of the workshop to see how their responses may have changed.
The responses to both the mid-workshop and final surveys indicated that throughout the workshop the familiarity, understanding, and confidence in discussing the history of the Miami Tribe, the work of the Myaamia Center, and topics including contemporary Tribal Nations increased significantly for all participants. As a group, awareness of the contemporary presence of Indigenous Peoples in the United States went from 3.56 at the beginning of the workshop to 5 (on a scale of 5) at the end of the workshop. This indicated to us that all participants learned a great deal about modern Tribal Nations during the course of the workshop.
At the conclusion of the workshop many of the participants indicated that as non-Indigenous people they still felt some level of discomfort in their ability to appropriately cover topics of concern to Indigenous peoples. They overwhelmingly indicated that they were much more familiar with Indigenous methodologies, with the overall assessment rising from 2.44 to 4.43, and confident in their ability to recognize appropriate information and resources about Indigenous people, with the group’s level of confidence increasing from 3.33 at the beginning of the workshop to 4.86 at the end. They also felt more confident in their ability to identify legitimate Indigenous people to work with.
What are our future plans?
Based on the success of the pilot program, Miami University’s Office of the Provost has agreed to sponsor more workshops for the upcoming academic year. When the original call for proposals to participate went out to the faculty at-large, we received thirty applications for a workshop with a planned cohort of ten to twelve. We will hold one in-person workshop beginning fall semester of 2023 for faculty on the university’s main campus in Oxford, and we will begin another, remote workshop spring semester of 2024 that will allow us to include faculty from the regional campuses in Hamilton and Middletown. As we hold more workshops and involve more faculty from different departments across campus we look forward to building an archive of modules that instructors can draw from to use in various classes and disciplines.
References:
[1] Sarah B. Shear, Ryan T. Knowles, Gregory J. Soden & Antonio J. Castro (2015) Manifesting Destiny: Re/presentations of Indigenous Peoples in K–12 U.S. History Standards, Theory & Research in Social Education, 43:1, 68-101, DOI: 10.1080/00933104.2014.9998492
[2] Hughes, Bethany. “Oka Apesvchi: Indigenous Feminism, Performance, and Protest” in Theatre Journal, Vol. 72, No. 2, June 2020 (128).
Aacimotaatiiyankwi 