Cross-cultural Anxiety and the Hybrid Classroom

Description

Tribal college students often feel anxious and insecure in classrooms where they are expected to ask questions and express opinions, especially under any of these three conditions: (1) they are in fact or perception competing with each other; (2) there are non-Native students and teachers present; (3) the class is being filmed, recorded, or is online.

All three conditions existed in a hybrid, team-taught online course that connected two geographically and culturally diverse classrooms at a North Dakota tribal college and at MICA, the Maryland Institute College of Art, in Baltimore. In this presentation we will describe our pedagogical and technical approaches to ensuring tribal college students’ full participation in our online classroom.

Takeaway

American Indians are the least represented minority in American higher education. In order to increase their college recruitment and retention, the U.S. Department of Education recommends that tribal community college students take courses from four-year colleges while still in community college. Distance education is one way Indian students on remote reservations can take such courses. The ideal college for them to take online courses at and later transfer to is an art and design school because, like art and design students, tribal community college students tend to be non-traditional learners in the sense that they mainly learn from performing, practicing, and participating rather than passively absorbing. They tend to be “makers” and not just spectators or consumers. One takeaway of this presentation will therefore be to help art and design college faculty and administrators recruit and retain tribal community college transfer students.

Abstract

MICA Director of Instructional Technology Pam Stefanuca will present the technical challenges—and MICA Professor of Native American Studies John Peacock, the pedagogical challenges—of a hybrid Native studies course that he team-taught from MICA with a tribal elder teaching from Cankdeska Cikana Community College (CCCC), the tribal college of North Dakota’s Spirit Lake Dakota Nation.

For tribal college students, the course objective was to learn about their dual status as tribal and US citizens by interacting online with non-Native US citizens their own age. For MICA students, the course objective was to challenge their prior stereotypes about Indians living in the past by interacting with their tribal college peers in the digital present.

The biggest challenge was that in both asynchronous and synchronous discussions, conversations were often very one-sided. MICA students asked far more questions than did tribal college students, who felt uncomfortably singled out if and when they did speak up in the videoconferences. Asynchronous discussions were also one-sided in the same way. However, regular meetings with facilitated online and in-person discussions helped foster a slow collaborative relationship between students in both classes and certain learning breakthroughs became evident.

In face-to-face classrooms, American Indian students’ reserve has long been understood as partly a positive sign of respect for elders to whom they are expected not to ask too many questions, and partly a negative legacy of boarding schools, which punished Indians for expressing opinions in class.

Taking as a clue African American educator bell hooks’ observation in Teaching to Transgress that “non-white students talk in class only when they feel connected via experience,” we assigned both tribal college and MICA students to watch MICA’s 2015 Constitution Day symposium on “Black Lives Matter” online and then to compare and contrast tribal college students’ experiences on the reservation with experiences of African American Baltimore residents.

Tribal college student Jeffrey White Buffalo broke the silence by asking if any MICA students had been racially profiled by Baltimore city police during riots that closed the school after the death of Freddie Gray. MICA students later asked whether any tribal students had been racially profiled. MICA student Iraida Santiago posted a link to a Lakota People's Law project article entitled “Native Lives Matter,” which quoted data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention for the period 1999-2011 showing that “the racial group most likely to be killed by law enforcement is Native Americans, followed by African Americans, Latinos, Whites, and Asian Americans.” MICA student Austin Beach wondered: “How can we create more connectivity between Native people and those off the reservation? How can we as non-natives be a part of spreading the word about Native experiences?”

Because of the developing connection between classrooms and the engaging and relevant themes being discussed, our last video conference, which was scheduled to last fifteen minutes, continued for an hour and a half, at the end of which students started a Facebook page for the two groups to keep in touch online. They suggested that, in future years, the course pair tribal college and MICA students in service learning projects. They also suggested a face-to-face “cultural exchange” in future years of the course between MICA and the tribal college based on MICA and tribal students’ common understanding of culture as something less to be studied academically than to be performed, practiced, and participated in through music, dance, storytelling, and visual art. These art forms have never been as separate from one another in American Indian cultures as they have been in Euro-American cultures—one of the many reasons that contemporary multimedia MICA art students loved studying with tribal college peers.