Educational Psychology Within the Work

Educational Psychology

Within the work "Someday My Elders Will Be Proud" is an intimate description of the struggles and challenges that many Native American youth face when they attempt to adjust to non-native education. The work expresses one Native American young woman's attempts, both successes and failures that are indicative of challenges of disenfranchised groups and individuals. Educational psychology has done much to isolate and analyze the challenges that individuals face to adjust to altered expectations that are present in non-native education as apposed to native culture. The greatest conflict clearly demonstrated by the author of this autobiographical work is that there is a clear disconnect between the expectations of the maintenance of native culture and that of non-native educational attainment. The culture is aware that the individuals within it must adjust to the expectations of the dominant culture, with regard to what is important to children who are not members of the disenfranchised population as well as the absorption of academic knowledge as crucial to economic success. The ideas of one of the first recognized educational psychologists, Dewey, are clear in their implication for disadvantaged children, yet disadvantaged children, like Jean must bridge a wider gap, as they navigate the poverty of their lives with the relative affluence of other children.

The "struggle of adjustment" of stimulus and response was a matter of finding an interpretation of the stimulus that evokes a coherent response and finding a response that clarifies the stimulus. Emotion and "will" were also interrelated, with "will" reconceived as "habit" (Dewey, 1922) or as practical activity because emotional responses and feelings are intimately related to the "activity of which it is the consequence (Dewey, 1934, p. 49). The educational implication is that one needs to introduce activities in the classroom that students value or in which they have a stake or interest. Participating in valued joint activities helps students learn to regulate their acts in cooperation with the activities of others, rather than experiencing a split between their own "internal" desires and "external" control by others. (Bredo, 2003, p. 98)

In short the dissonance between Jean's life at home, culture and social needs, which were not met in school had to be reconciled with the desires and needs of those she attended school with. She understood depravity, abuse and challenges like no other child she attended school with and to her these issues were not congruent with the "game" she witnessed as necessary to obtain success. The gap between those she attended school with and her own understandings of what was really important in the world, joy, struggle and climbing out of abject poverty was far wider for her than for any other child (or adult) she knew in school.

Bandura provides a theory associated with the need to develop modeling skills, had the teachers and administrators in the school understood the extreme dissonance of base knowledge in the case of Jean, she would have likely felt more allied to the situation, at every educational level.

A student may fail to learn a complex computer software program through modeling because of inattention to key features of the demonstration. Or the failure may be due to the observer's inability to analyze and encode the model's strategies. Or perhaps the failure resides in difficulty in converting the knowledge into proficient performance. Or finally, students may have insufficient motivation to put into practice what they have learned, such as fears of making a serious mistake. (Zimmerman & Schunk, 2003, p. 444)

In the case of Jean she frequently failed because the motivation to achieve was undefined, and her inability to understand the connection between academic knowledge and achievement, through the modeling of her historical culture plagues her throughout her education.

People in the lower-lower class are largely unskilled laborers and the chronically unemployed. Life for them is a continual struggle for survival, a struggle that many of them feel they cannot win without outside help. Hollingshead says that they "give the impression of being resigned to a life of frustration and defeat in a community that despises them for their disregard of morals, lack of 'success' goals, and dire poverty" (25). (Lindgren, 1962, p. 102)

The value of her culture did much to address the goals Jean aspired to but the "game" as she calls it was different than the values that her early life had taught her. She was challenged by an inability to achieve success through a system that was entirely unwelcoming to her and did not contain cultural modeling, that had been her impetus at home. She was degraded for her history, and therefore reverted to bad behavior and lying to attempt to achieve acceptance and this not only didn't work it also went against her core cultural values.