The U.S. Department of Education has awarded the Alaska Humanities Forum a three-year, $1.92 million competitive grant to expand its Educator Cross-Cultural Immersion (ECCI) program in a concerted effort to boost teacher retention in rural Alaska school districts with predominately Alaska Native students and persistently high rates of teacher turnover.
Most of the teachers hired every year to fill public school positions in rural Alaska are early career teachers who are new to Alaska and lack familiarity with Alaska Native cultures. They are typically recruited through career conferences far removed from the vast tundra and remote villages located off the road system that make up their new homes.
Seventy-five percent of the roughly 145 new to the profession and new to Alaska public school teachers hired in Alaska every year go to rural districts. Many of them quit after a year or two. The average annual turnover rate among Alaska’s 49 rural school districts has exceeded 20 percent every year since 2000.
The new, three-year ECCI initiative seeks to help reverse this problematic trend by providing incoming teachers in the Lower Kuskokwim and Northwest Arctic Borough school districts with a three-day cultural orientation followed by a weeklong immersion in a rural Alaska Native Culture camp. In the camps the new teachers will receive first-hand training in subsistence ways of life in a setting designed for Native elders to pass on knowledge to Native youth. They will learn about Alaska Native language and storytelling as well as Alaska Native worldviews, communication styles and traditional ways of learning. They should come away from the experience with culturally responsive first-year teaching strategies they would otherwise lack.
Later, in conjunction with the University of Alaska statewide system’s Alaska Statewide Mentor Project, the incoming teachers will be paired with master-teacher mentors who will help them apply this learning to lesson plans and in-class activities.
Over three years, the initiative will provide cultural immersion experiences for 60 new teachers in rural Alaska. It will build upon the successes and lessons learned from the current ECCI component of the Alaska Humanities Forum’s Rose Urban Rural Exchange program, established in 2000, which has trained 24 educators from urban districts in Alaska in 25 different Alaska Native culture camps.
“Over the years of working with the ECCI program, we have heard numerous comments from teachers who have taught in the Bush suggesting that a cultural immersion experience is so important for rural teachers who are new to Alaska,” said Rose Urban Rural Exchange program director Laurie Evans-Dinneen.
“In particular, if a teacher is new to the profession of teaching, regardless of age, being thrust into the culture of education as well as the culture of their new rural Alaska community can be overwhelming. This is designed to assist teachers in making these cultural transitions so that they can make and foster the relationship between students and themselves that is so important in student success. Teacher turnover leads to student and community apathy—the students and their families assume the teacher will be gone in a semester or a year, so they don’t see the value in trying to establish a relationship. This project and its network of partners will lead to an enriching experience rather than one of fear and unknowns.”
Summer 2011 ECCI educators Richard Speakman (far left) and Alissa Wardwell sitting with culture camp director Howard Luke on the banks of the Tanana River.
