September 2017 - Johnson Scholarship Foundation

Connecting Past and Future: Indigenous Business Leaders in Context of Community

September 29, 2017/in News, Prairie Bighorn

Community is the key. Our identity, our sense of belonging and sense of self all start with community. We grow up understanding ourselves in reflection of, and react to, community. From our families, to extended families, to other families that walk and talk like us, to other groups that are completely different, community defines who we are, and who we aren’t.

Most Americans take for granted their community. For the majority, community is an ever-present supportive source of what we can be. But for some Americans — like our grandparents, who weren’t allowed to speak our languages or pray the way their grandparents prayed — the support may be harder to find. So for some of us, education about community is a place to begin.

The emphasis started with Indigenous inclusion in the social sciences where sociology and anthropology field researchers worked directly with Indigenous community members, and eventually those community members went to school. Then political studies, law school, and eventually medical schools, recruited in underserved communities, including those whose millennia old political systems, sovereign institutions and medical practices were discouraged and replaced.

Now, as technology brings the world ever closer, our communities balance lands and resources against global markets and scarcity. Today education is the bridge for Native peoples, connecting a past of disempowerment and dispossession with a self-sufficient future. From tech to data driven decisions to digital marketplaces, education is that tool to engage difference and disparity, while respecting a history of diversity among Indigenous communities: education to temper diversity in an ever shrinking world; education not informed by anger, or motivated by guilt, or centered on frustration; education about “thinking forward”; education about inclusion.

Commerce USED TO BE in terms of arrows and baskets, it IS NOW marketing, advertising, planning, and budgeting. Marketing yourself, not because you are broken but because you are valuable. Advertising what you have not because you have to sell it to survive, but because you know its worth. Understanding change not because difference is bad, but because you have something others don’t. Budgeting so every dream is invested in, and planning because those dreams that were taken away are here again, and offer us strategies our parents, our grandparents, and their parents didn’t have.

Native people have lost so much we can’t afford to disenfranchise even one Indigenous community member. Every community member is a potential social leader, political leader — and of course — a business leader. The challenge for our generation is to reach into community, identify skills and propensities each person has, and strategize ways to best support their development as a leader.

This is very much the same problem every generation has faced; who will make the best arrow shafts, flake the sharpest stone edges, weave the strongest baskets, learn the most trade language words, remember past trades most accurately and invest resources with the greatest return. And we continue to ask this question today … How do we connect our resources in the most efficient way to creating the most effective business leaders?

Summer Youth Program Empowers Students to Confront Important Social Justice Issues

September 22, 2017/in News, Patricia DeMarco

City Music, Berklee’s youth development and outreach program, delivers tuition-free, high-quality contemporary music education to young people in grades 4-12 who are from underserved communities.

Man singing at berklee city music social justice

This summer, City Music students used creativity to tackle social justice issues. JSF has been a supporter of this program. Photos by Mike Spencer.

During this past summer, City Music brought together 15 at-risk teens, who were referred by the City of Boston’s Department of Youth Engagement and Employment, for a summer of learning and self-actualization. These students, most of whom were new to music and the program, were tasked with exploring prevalent social justice issues through small group discussions, activities for connecting, sharing and self-reflection, and research. Students chose topics they felt were important and formed groups around those issues. Former City Music students, now Berklee college students, facilitated the groups.

At the end of the summer, the young people performed onstage before an audience of peers, as well as adults. They used their original music, spoken word performances and song arrangements to express their personal stories and experiences on prejudice, racism (structural oppression), body image, bullying and peer pressure. After each presentation, the audience was asked thoughtful questions to prompt discussion.

What had transpired between the first day and the last was amazing. On the outset, some students were quick to react—to anyone’s words, a situation or in discussion. Some students preferred talking over listening (and vice-versa). However, as students began researching the social justice issues using the iceberg model (M. Goodman, 2002), they began to see how they could use this same analysis to everyday things.

This systematic approach teaches students to go beyond the “tip” or the visual part of the iceberg to become aware of the many causes that can feed into an issue (or what is beneath the water’s surface that is unseen and needs to be chipped apart for examination). The iceberg model has five levels, from top to bottom: 1) an easily seen event or incident happens and is a symptom of a bigger problem, 2) similar events happen again and again, 3) physical barriers, policies, rituals and organizations enable events to happen, 4) conscious and unconscious thoughts drive people’s behavior and 5) society’s core beliefs and values either shape or constrain people’s assumptions and behavior.

This process helped students to broaden their perspectives beyond themselves and consider other student’s opinions. They began to understand how individual backgrounds and experiences—good and bad—can influence those ideas, which may be different from their own. Rather than taking everything at face value and responding in a reactive, confrontational mode, they stopped and reflected on what was going on behind the words and actions. All of this helped build empathy and compassion, empowering students to share their thoughts, words and emotions and to self-express in their art. Finally, this understanding enabled meaningful participation that let students feel hopeful that their voices were being heard, as well as understood, formally on-stage and informally in everyday life.

Improving Canadian Indigenous Student Success: Three Martin Family Initiative Projects

September 15, 2017/in Carlana Lindeman, News

Of the approximately 1.5 million Indigenous People in Canada, 50 percent are under the age of 25 — they are the youngest and fastest growing demographic in the country. A real concern for Canada is the low Indigenous high school graduation rate; the non-Indigenous high school graduation rate is about 90 percent while the Indigenous rate is about 50 percent.

The Martin Family Initiative (MFI), a charitable foundation, was established in 2008 to address this crisis. Three of MFI’s key strategies are:

Educating principals:

Thanks to the support of the Johnson Scholarship Foundation, MFI collaborated with the University of Toronto and 13 Indigenous education experts to develop an innovative course for principals of on-reserve schools.

Participants learn how to ensure that teaching and learning at high standards are the first priority of every school by participating in learning experiences that develop their instructional leadership skills in order to increase levels of student achievement by developing improved teaching performance. The nine-month, 200-hour program consists of 10 modules plus a 30-hour practicum.

The feedback from participants is very positive: the learnings are unique to on-reserve schools, the course helps principals learn to focus on what is important in their schools, and it inspires them to be better school leaders.

Resources:

A virtual library of over 1,300 Promising Practices in Indigenous Education Website is updated monthly. Contents include curriculum, classroom practices, relevant policies, interesting initiatives and research related to successful practices in Indigenous education.

The focus areas are Kindergarten to Grade 12, Parent/Community Engagement and Early Childhood Education. Educators, researchers and others use the site to enhance learning opportunities and to improve educational success for Indigenous students

Early Literacy:

By the age of 10, children need to read well enough to read and write what they know and think, or they risk falling behind in all areas in school. School achievement relies on the ability to read and write well; reading proficiency by age 10 is the best school-based predictor of high school graduation.

A four-year MFI pilot project showed that with effective teaching Indigenous students can excel as speakers, listeners, readers and writers in two or more languages and enjoy the associated cultural, social, educational and economic benefits.

The pilot project has been expanded and will include 20 on-reserve schools by 2020.

3 Top Myths About Kids with Learning Disabilities (LD)

September 8, 2017/in News, Peter Coll

Learning disabilities are more common than most people think, but widely misunderstood. It is widely believed by educational psychologists that more than one in 10 people in the general population (children and adults) have a learning disability.

Myth: Learning disabilities occur in people with low intelligence. In fact: a learning disability can only be diagnosed in someone who has average or higher cognitive ability. Many famously successful people have had a learning disability including Whoopi Goldberg, Richard Branson, Steven Spielberg and Albert Einstein. Sometimes the LD temporarily prevents people from believing in themselves and demonstrating their true intelligence, but never precludes a person from being successful.
Myth: Learning disabilities are caused by a lack of parental involvement or from a child watching too much television. Reality: Learning disabilities often run in families suggesting there a genetic link between this disability and the person affected. While researchers have found no specific gene that is responsible for either dyslexia (reading issues) or dyscalculia (math issues), findings do show many of the genes associated with dyslexia also seem to be linked to math challenges. This science supports the everyday experiences of teachers and parents who notice that children with reading challenges often have math challenges as well.
Myth: Learning disabilities affect more boys than girls. The truth is that while 66 percent of all children diagnosed with a LD are boys, experts understand that learning disabilities affect both genders equally. Girls often escape identification because they often outwardly show less behavioral indicators of learning struggles.

As Headmaster of Landmark East School, a grantee partner of the Johnson Scholarship Foundation, it is inspiring to me and my staff to work with students with learning disabilities every day; to witness and be a part of the remarkable growth and change that occurs in these young people every day; to see bright futures and capable young people who truly have no limits.