Visiting Scholar Brayboy Calls for Renewed Focus on American Indian Education in WCER

February 6, 2014

Students should be evaluated not just on their test scores or grade-point averages, but also on their capacity to craft a more democratic society, according to Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy (Lumbee Tribe), who spoke at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on Dec. 11.

Brayboy, the Borderlands Professor of Indigenous Education and Justice and co-director of the Center for Indian Education at Arizona State University, delivered an address entitled “Nation Building as an Institutional Orientation for Graduate Education,” at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER) at UW-Madison. The talk was the culmination of Brayboy’s three-day visit to Madison as part of his designation as a WCER Visiting Minority Scholar.

During his time in Madison, Brayboy met and consulted with researchers, graduate students, and American Indian leaders from across Wisconsin, including David O’Connor, the education consultant for the American Indian Studies Program at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction; Jolene Bowman, the education director for the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans; Adrienne Thunder, executive director of education for the Ho-Chunk Nation; and J P Leary, Director of American Indian Studies, UW-Green Bay.

In his talk, Brayboy discussed his work in building the case for a rethinking of undergraduate and graduate school admissions and education. Brayboy said he wanted to disrupt the notion of determining a student’s worth based on “only limited kinds of knowledge” and criticized the current admissions process as “a merit enhancer, allowing those who are already privileged to continue to enjoy those privileges.”

“Schools are making admissions decisions that affects the future of American Indian students and their communities based on a flawed past,” Brayboy said. 
American Indian tribes promised health and education in longstanding treaties with the federal government have been denied both, Brayboy said. That, in turn, has interfered with their right to sovereignty and self-determination, which according to Brayboy is, “the right of a people to determine their own future and the means to be able to achieve it.”

But one way that the serious harm perpetrated on American Indian people by the U.S. and state governments can be reversed by increasing their access to higher education, Brayboy said. Many American Indian scholars are culturally imbued with a deep sense of commitment to the betterment of their communities, and see their education as a means to accomplish such ends. Helping American Indian communities is as simple as creating opportunities that allow the younger generations of American Indians to pursue higher education and specialized training so they can return to their communities and improve them from the inside-out, a process Brayboy described as “nation building.”

“Indian education is about building local capacity one human being at a time,” he said. “It’s the purposeful use of social capital to build stronger communities.”
American Indian students should be evaluated for admission to institutions of higher education based on their capacity and desire to make contributions back to their communities, rather than test scores or other “merit-based” measures currently used by the vast majority of colleges and universities, Brayboy said.

“Individuals who have promise and capacity for becoming leaders and for giving back to their communities, for creating good and sustainable relationships, are the ones that graduate programs should be recruiting, admitting, and investing in,” he said. “Under this system, an institution would be rated … based on the degree to which their graduates are better off than when they entered the institution—with ‘better off’ assessed by their capacity to contribute to a healthy democratic society.”

Though strongly dismissive of the existence of one set model for success, Brayboy said that it’s vital that American Indian students are provided an environment where they are able to learn without losing their sense of self and community. One idea for improvement currently being investigated by Brayboy is the model of large-scale admissions, where a group of American Indians are evaluated as a unit, rather than as individuals. Such a model would create a natural social support network and would allow students inside the group to work collectively towards graduation, with the end goal of returning back to their communities with the skills they need to provide social structure and services.

In his talk, Brayboy also advocated for other institutional changes at American secondary schools and higher education institutions. Universities should look at adding more classes covering the history of American Indians, and specifically, the history of American Indian education. They should also look at augmenting the level of extracurricular support they currently provide to their American Indian students, Brayboy said.

Pedagogically, secondary schools and universities need to work harder at listening to the needs and solutions voiced by the American Indian tribes in their area, Brayboy said.

“It’s important to listen to the community’s concerns rather than coming in and saying, ‘We know exactly what to do and how to fix it,’” he said.

Educational leaders can start this process by visiting reservations or communities rather than just arranging visits to campus, and by asking how the community might become more involved with school affairs. They also must push their schools towards the adoption of more experiential types of learning, and use tests only as a way to engage, rather than sort, their students, Brayboy said.

A video recording of Brayboy’s complete address can be found here: http://vimeo.com/81753100.

After his talk, Brayboy met with WCER Director Bob Mathieu and other WCER staff, including the research team from WIDA, a WCER project focused on creating instructional guidance and assessment tools for U.S. English language learners (ELLs) and special education students.

WIDA Research Director H. Gary Cook, who nominated Brayboy for the WCER Visiting Minority Scholars Program, has been involved in discussions with representatives of numerous State Education Agencies (SEAs) focused on developing research priorities for American Indian, Alaskan Native, and Native Hawaiian English language learners. During his visit, WIDA staff consulted with Brayboy as part of their efforts to address the diverse and complex English language and literacy needs of these groups of students.

“The team realized that Brayboy’s expertise in Indigenous affairs, particularly the socio-cultural and socio-political contexts, would facilitate an excellent opportunity for WIDA and other WCER staff to enter into a dialogue to understand these contexts, including those that go beyond English language instruction,” said WIDA researcher Rosalie Grant, who led WCER’s efforts in planning Brayboy’s visit.

The visit proved a fantastic success, Grant said.

“(Brayboy) was able to engage on a very personal level,” Grant said. “A number of his ideas seemed to resonate and get the staff to really think about this community in a new and much more informed light. I think he really energized the staff to think and carry forward some ideas they had, not solely for American Indian students, but for the great diversity of backgrounds of all the students we serve.

Following up on the conversations begun with Brayboy’s visit, in March, Dr. Anton Treuer (Ojibwe Tribe), executive director of the American Indian Resource Center at Bemidji State University, has also been named a WCER Visiting Minority Scholar. Treuer will visit UW-Madison and WCER in April 2014.