Indigenous stories and common core standards: there’s exposition in those narratives

That tribes have been able to maintain their discrete identities as national groups can be attributed to their steadfast adherence to their mission as a distinct people, as revealed to them in creation or upon one of their migrations… Tribes are, therefore, ultimately guided by internal prophetic instructions rather than external political and economic events, and the success or failure of the tribe in dealing with unexpected problems can be traced to this concern with fulfilling their cosmic responsibilities

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5 thoughts on “Indigenous stories and common core standards: there’s exposition in those narratives

  1. Great post! That is exactly true! LOCL provides great opportunity for inquiry that fully integrates common core history and sciences as well! It would be interesting for the 3rd – 5th grade history standards that touch on native Americans to be addressed from a Native American perspective. And engage in an empathic narrative and exploratory experience. Such empathic and overarching learning experience at most grade levels can be applied to Social Studies standards and help students more deeply understand World History, the Holocaust and Colonialism. Empathy can drive some pretty great prose and thus ELA skills and outcomes.

    • Thanks, Lisa. I heartily agree. Teachers using an approach of “understanding by design” could put the goal of learning from Native American narrative at the top of their planning sheets, allowing their students to meet many academic content standards in ELA, HSS, science, and the arts.

  2. Nice article. There is also a connection to the California 3 Rs Project (Rights, Responsibility, and Respect). The complexity factor in these stories is not in the sentence structure, but the lack of background knowledge of the reader, and the metaphorical nature of the writing. Keep up the good work.

    • Thank you, Marsha. I appreciate your response very much (and I also appreciate the writing of yours that I’ve quoted here!). I have found the important work of the 3Rs Project to be quite helpful as I have written the guides for teaching about creation stories at http://www.LandLessons.org. Regarding the complexity of the stories, yes, the sentence structures are generally uncomplicated, but I think that it’s because they are so simple that they build elegant narratives and exposition. The stories evoke multiple highly sophisticated, logical interconnections at scales broader than the sentence — interconnections established not only through metaphors and other tropes, but also through parallelism, parataxis, and other narrative schemes. I believe the best way to increase student (and adult) understanding of the stories is to continuously build background knowledge (preferably through collaboration with local tribes) and to read or listen to the stories repeatedly, paying careful attention to their rhythms and rhetorical devices — in a sense, “observing” or “examining” them as carefully as one might observe a historical photograph.

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