This paper examines the educational and psychological challenges faced by Native American youth — particularly as illustrated through one young woman's autobiographical account — when they attempt to navigate non-native educational systems. Drawing on the educational psychology frameworks of John Dewey and Albert Bandura, the paper explores how cultural dissonance, poverty, and the absence of culturally relevant modeling contribute to academic disengagement. It further considers how transition policies rooted in Anglo-American values of independence and competition conflict with Native American communal values, leaving students like Jean struggling to reconcile personal identity with academic expectation.
Within the work Someday My Elders Will Be Proud, there 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 the challenges faced by disenfranchised groups and individuals. Educational psychology has done much to isolate and analyze the challenges that individuals face in adjusting to the altered expectations present in non-native education, as opposed to those of native culture.
The greatest conflict clearly demonstrated by the author of this autobiographical work is a stark disconnect between the expectations of maintaining native culture and those of non-native educational attainment. The culture is aware that individuals within it must adjust to the expectations of the dominant culture — with regard to what is considered 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, John Dewey, carry clear implications for disadvantaged children. Yet disadvantaged children like Jean must bridge a far wider gap as they navigate the poverty of their lives alongside the relative affluence of their peers.
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 actions 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). The Deweyan framework thus highlights the importance of culturally meaningful engagement as a prerequisite for genuine learning — something that was largely absent in Jean's schooling experience.
In short, the dissonance between Jean's life at home, her culture, and her social needs — none of which were met in school — had to be reconciled with the desires and needs of those she attended school with. She understood deprivation, abuse, and hardship like no other child in her school, and to her these realities were not congruent with the "game" she witnessed as necessary to obtain success. The gap between her classmates' worldview and her own understanding of what was truly important — joy, struggle, and climbing out of abject poverty — was far wider for her than for any other child or adult she encountered in the school environment.
"Absence of cultural modeling limits motivation and achievement"
"Lower-class struggles undermine academic engagement and identity"
"Anglo transition policy conflicts with Native American communal values"
Values of truth and the expression of native culture, as opposed to the independence stressed in academic education, challenged Jean to assimilate into such a system. She felt alone, separated from family, joy, and culture, and found little to reconcile these feelings. Jean developed a sense of being an outsider — one that is likely still persistent in her life.
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