Teaching Writing To Children In Indigenous Languages

This volume brings together studies of instructional writing practices and the products of those practices from diverse Indigenous languages and cultures. By analyzing a rich diversity of contexts—Finland, Ghana, Hawaii, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, and more—through biliteracy, complexity, and genre theories, this book explores and demonstrates critical components of writing pedagogy and development. Because the volume focuses on Indigenous languages, it questions center-margin perspectives on schooling and national language ideologies, which often limit the number of Indigenous languages taught, the domains of study, and the age groups included.

Exploring writing and literacies across five continents, this volume celebrates the resilience of Indigenous languages. This book contributes to an understanding of contemporary challenges, while also demonstrating innovative and creative ideas for the future of Indigenous writing and literacies.

This volume showcases latest developments and innovations in teaching and learning materials in, about and for endangered languages, as well as discusses challenges in the production of such materials.

Dominant assumptions about place tend to be defined in relation to urban communities. To assume a singular construction of urban places misrepresents the experiences, perspectives, and identities of urban children, making their identities become invisible to researchers, educators, and curriculum developers. Sharing a wide range of perspectives, Role of Place and Play in Young Children’s Language and Literacy sheds light on language and literacy learning in play-based early childhood settings where place plays an important role in teaching and learning. Drawing on geographic contexts, including northern rural and Indigenous communities, and giving voice to educational leaders in Indigenous professional learning contexts, as well as speech-language pathologists, this book joins forces with literacy and early childhood education researchers to create an interdisciplinary collage of theory, research, and practice. Bringing play and place together, a concept Shelley Stagg Peterson and Nicola Friedrich call playce-based learning, this book provides new and compelling ways to think about equity and educational opportunity in the language and literacy development of young children, and offers spaces for them to construct their own identities in positive ways.

This book draws on both in and out of school literacy practices with teachers and families to enhance the numeracy of early learners. It provides highly illustrative exemplars, targeted for learners up to approximately eight years of age whose home language differs from the language of instruction. It identifies the challenges faced by these learners and their families, and shares ways of building both literacy and numeracy skills for some of the vulnerable learners nationally and internationally. The book shares the outcomes and strategies for teaching mathematics to early years learners and highlights the importance of literacy practices for learners for whom the language of instruction is different from their home language. Readers will gain a practical sense of how to create contexts, classrooms and practices to scaffold these learners to build robust understandings of mathematics.

On Indian Ground: The Southwest is one of ten regionally focused texts that explores American Indian/Alaska Native/Native Hawaiian education in depth. The text is designed to be used by educators of native youth and emphasizes best practices found throughout the state. Previous texts on American Indian education make wide-ranging general assumptions that all American Indians are alike. This series promotes specific interventions and relies on native ways of knowing to highlight place-based educational practices. On Indian Ground: The Southwest looks at the history of Indian education within the southwestern states. The authors also analyze education policy and tribal education departments to highlight early childhood education, gifted and talented educational practice, parental involvement, language revitalization, counseling, and research. These chapters expose cross-cutting themes of sustainability, historical bias, economic development, health and wellness, and cultural competence. The intended audience for this publication is primarily those educators who have American Indian/Alaska Native/Native Hawaiian students in their educational institutions. The articles range from early childhood and head start practices to higher education, including urban, rural and reservation schooling practices. A secondary audience: American Indian education researcher.

Through analysis of case studies of young children (ages 3 to 8 years), situated in different geographic, cultural, linguistic, political, and socioeconomic sites on six continents, this book examines the interplay of childhoods, schooling, and, literacies. Written language is situated within particular childhoods as they unfold in school. A key focus is on children’s agency in the construction of their own childhoods. The book generates diverse perspectives on what written language may mean for childhoods. Looking at variations in the complex relationships between official (curricular) visions and unofficial (child-initiated) visions of relevant composing practices and appropriate cultural resources, it offers, first, insight into how those relationships may change over time and space as children move through early schooling, and, second, understanding of the dynamics of schools and the experience of childhoods through which the local meaning of school literacy is formulated. Each case—each child in a particular sociocultural site—does not represent an essentialized nation or a people but, rather, a rich, processual depiction of childhood being constructed in particular local contexts and the role, if any, for composing.

Stabilizing indigenous languages is the proceedings of two symposia held in November 1994 and May 1995 at Northern Arizona University. These conferences brought together language activists, tribal educators, and experts on linguistics, language renewal, and language teaching to discuss policy changes, educational reforms, and community initiatives to stabilize and revitalize American Indian and Alaska Native languages. Stabilizing indigenous languages includes a survey of the historical, current, and projected status of indigenous languages in the United States as well as extensive information on the roles of families, communities, and schools in promoting their use and maintenance. It includes descriptions of successful native language programs and papers by leaders in the field of indigenous language study, including Joshua Fishman and Michael Krauss.