Volume X Spring 1999 Issue #3

Educating the Native student at distance

By Marjane Ambler

Few subjects elicit as much heat in educational circles as distance education. While most educators value computers, many object to the idea that technology can solve all of our educational problems. Titles of recent books reviewed in this issue's resource guide by Jim Ereaux indicate the depth of the emotions regarding technology in general: High Tech Assault On Reality, Absence of the Sacred, Dancing With the Devil, Silicon Snake Oil.

The tribal colleges featured in this issue have approached distance education thoughtfully. They are creating models for reaching Native students at distance using Internet-based learning and interactive video. Their work is remarkable, but even more remarkable is the time being devoted by some of them to methodical planning. Their hesitancy does not result from being tradition-bound to old ways as some might think. With limited resources, they cannot afford to follow the siren of technology and rush blindly into major expenditures. They must scrutinize their missions, their students' needs, and their institutional capacities. The revolution occurring in the delivery of education poses a competitive threat to the future of tribal colleges, but if they can utilize it appropriately, they can extend their services to effectively reach thousands more students.

Rather than having technology drive their pedagogy, the good tribal college models start with the pedagogy. Tribal colleges in the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) began planning a national telecommunications project in 1991. To keep the project focused upon desirable curriculum instead of simply baud rates and satellite signals, the academic deans were involved with the technicians designing the project from the beginning. They adopted a guiding philosophy for the network that reflected the guiding philosophy of the colleges themselves: "preserving the traditional values and philosophy of Native Americans." The AIHEC colleges subsequently shifted their focus to regional distance education networks, but their early brainstorming benefited individual colleges' planning.

As one of their first acts, the academic deans asked eminent tribal scholars for counsel. At a video conference in 1993, the elders embraced the technology. Tobacco was offered to bless the telecommunications project by a tribal elder who then chaired the Native American Studies Department at Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa Community College in Wisconsin. More recently, doctoral student Carol Davis turned to 18 North Dakota spiritual leaders for their advice on distance education. To her surprise, they too embraced the technology although they specified material that should not be shared. The results of her research are included in this issue.

When designing distance education, too many colleges and universities try to replicate the old, familiar, factory-style education, which is centered around the teacher as lecturer, according to Jim Ereaux of Salish Kootenai College (SKC). The student-centered SKC model is being watched by other tribal colleges. Tribally-designed distance education programs may resemble traditional Native American ways of educating the young, with teachers acting as mentors and guides.

Effective teaching is difficult. Teaching students of a different culture is even more difficult. Over the past 30 years, the tribal colleges have built their success on their administrators' and instructors' passionate, personal commitment to their students. Legends abound of tribal college presidents-one loaned her personal car to a student to drive to a job interview, another took a midnight flight back from Washington to see his students' championship ball game. How do you preserve this type of student-centered, supportive interaction at distance? For asynchronous, Internet-based distance education, students participate individually, from their homes, whenever they can, not necessarily synchronous with their instructor or classmates. This technology requires highly motivated students who have strong writing ability. Will it exclude many of the students the tribal colleges want to serve?

The article in this issue by Dr. Deborah Wetsit describes the efforts of the Montana Consortium to keep the "human being" in distance education. The Montana system and some tribal college distance education systems in North Dakota and South Dakota rely upon interactive video to connect instructors with students congregated in distant classrooms. Cultural gulfs can endanger any non-Indian instructor trying to reach Indian students, especially when they are separated by not only culture but also geography. Based upon solid scholarship about Indian student learning, the Montana Consortium has carefully designed its system to bridge these gulfs. For example, the Montana Consortium encourages instructors to travel to reservation tribal colleges and visit their students in person. The value of this cultural bridge was demonstrated earlier by the University of Alaska-Fairbanks off campus Bachelors of Education degree. Starting in 1974, the university has placed faculty members in Native communities to reduce the cultural distance and to give the faculty the opportunity to learn about indigenous knowledge.

Committed to reducing isolation

Distance education requires the commitment of people throughout the institution to devote their time and effort to change. Salish Kootenai College received a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to develop an associate degree program that will be delivered at distance. Before starting, SKC took a busload of its faculty and administrators to tour distance education centers in Canada to evaluate whether distance education would work for them or not. Faculty met with faculty, registrars with registrars, student services with student services. On the long trip homeward, SKC Vice President Gerald Slater asked the group whether the college should return its distance education grant to the Kellogg Foundation or proceed. After hours of debate, the group reached consensus. They wanted to build degree programs to serve reservations that had no tribal colleges.

Building upon their shared vision, SKC has developed courses that have received international attention. The Commonwealth of Australia has nominated SKC's innovative distance education health care education for a World Health Organization prize. By the year 2002, SKC expects to have developed at least two Internet-based degree programs and possibly as many as eight, three of them bachelor degrees.

The SKC research team and others see obvious advantages to distance education. It is unlikely that every reservation in the country can develop a tribal college, but most of them potentially could receive courses from tribal colleges and universities. Many tribal colleges cannot grow because they do not have dormitories, but distant students live in their own homes. Tribal colleges attract students who cannot leave their communities because of family and cultural responsibilities. Distance education can reduce the their isolation.

Some of the advantages are already being realized by tribal colleges. Students at Little Big Horn College have conversed with renowned scientists from around the world whom they could not otherwise meet on the Crow Reservation in southern Montana. Using technology, the students at tribal colleges such as Leech Lake Tribal College in Minnesota and Fort Berthold Tribal College in North Dakota now can stay in their communities, surrounded by their cultural teachers, and access four year degrees from other universities, some of them tribal universities.

By attracting distant students, tribal colleges can increase their pool of resources for developing curriculum. Haskell Indian Nations University is offering a telecourse in American Indian history through the AIHEC Telecommunications Project this spring, which includes interviews with Native elders who lived through key periods in American Indian history. Tribal colleges' federal funding is allocated on the basis of Indian student count, meaning (theoretically)that when they attract more Indian students via distance education, they could get more federal support.

Tribal college faculty, other teachers, and health care providers in the communities can get in-service training and continuing education without traveling. Tribal colleges can reach out to their urban tribal members with language and government courses, making them feel part of the communities. Distance education courses build bridges between Indian and non-Indian students who learn together, hundreds of miles apart. Tribal college cultural scholars could offer courses to mainstream universities with much more credibility than the Native American studies courses some universities now hire non-Indians to teach.

Caution in proceeding

The tribal colleges must exercise care, however. All the advantages listed above have their counterpoints. Distance education potentially can undermine the tribal colleges' most basic reasons for being. One of the pioneers in video distance education, Bay Mills Community College has launched a distance education program in the Internet-based, asynchronous learning environment, as discussed in an article in this issue by Bay Mills President Martha McLeod and the program director, Thomas Davis. When they offer classes to students around the world, must Bay Mills administrators consider how long they can maintain their current open enrollment policy and remain a tribal college? Tribal colleges now serve all students in their community, Indian or non-Indian. However, their mission is to serve primarily Indian students, and their federal funding is allocated on the basis of Indian students only. If their non-Indian students outnumber their Indian students, who will pay for the colleges' core operating costs? If one tribal college attracts thousands of new, distant students, this would take federal funding away from their sister colleges.

Several tribal colleges have already expressed their reluctance to share culturally sensitive material with non-Indians or members of other tribes. In addition to cultural privacy concerns, they must also be concerned about their intellectual property rights, which are still being defined in the new media. For example, a mainstream university could pirate their course materials after using them one year without compensation. Nor do the tribal colleges want to be a conduit for curriculum produced by mainstream institutions. Tribal colleges were created in large part because other institutions have failed to educate Indian students. Offering too much mainstream curriculum would degrade their ability to fulfill their mission.

Using technology can be very expensive, especially in the rural areas where most tribal colleges are located. Colleges must invest in computers, technicians, training, access lines and/or satellite time. On the Crow Reservation in Montana, for example, Little Big Horn College manages its own website and does not have to pay an Internet service provider. However, the college would have to pay $1,500 a month for the large capacity T-1 line that it needs. Currently they pay $400 per month for a small, 56K line, which has 100 computers instead of the recommended 10-15, according to Randy Falls Down, head of Little Big Horn College's Information Systems Department.

The best technology can fail, and early efforts at distance education have suffered from technology problems, including the Galaxy satellite that the AIHEC telecommunications project depended upon to deliver its courses before the satellite was damaged.

Danger in delaying

While the tribal colleges must be cautious, they cannot wait too long to act. Education is increasingly becoming a competitive marketplace, and the tribal colleges could be shoved out of the market, as Tom Davis and Martha McLeod discuss in their article in this issue. When the Salish Kootenai College team researched distance learning in Canada, they discovered an empty university. The offices of the Open Learning Agency had no classrooms, no faculty, and no students, according to Jim Ereaux and Mike O'Donnell of SKC. Instead they saw a large warehouse with huge, 40-foot copying machines that produced classes that were sent to students in a box. Faculty were hired individually for a fee to prepare a class and then give up their rights to it. At the time of the visit, the Open Learning Agency was reaching out to Native students.

The OLA is just one of the many corporate educators that are not burdened by tenure, facilities, or faculty involvement in curriculum planning. Microsoft now is one of the largest "universities" based upon student count. A corporate educational system will be motivated by the bottom line, not by a mission to properly serve Indian students. Funds will be spent for "edu-tainment" to attract the largest number of students. It is hard to imagine such a system making the efforts that the tribal colleges have made to help their students succeed. Such corporations produce students who are competent in certain areas. But are they educated?

Many state universities are also building distance education programs. Some tribal college administrators fear that their neighboring universities may become reluctant to accept tribal college classes for transfer; the universities could make more money by providing their own courses at distance to the reservation communities. It is important to the students, however, that the tribal colleges continue to exist. The tribal colleges' success with Indian students results not just from geographic proximity. They also offer a firm, tribally-specific cultural foundation that mainstream schools cannot provide. One of the most ambitious regional efforts at distance education is the Western Governors University. This multi-state effort immediately received much attention from the federal government and the press but not initially from students.

The tribal colleges' important distant education initiatives have not received the recognition they deserve. A few foundations have provided support for tribal colleges as they venture into distance education. However, a "digital divide" is growing. Despite the importance of telecommunications, limited public funding has been made available for the tribal colleges' efforts. "We would love to have the respect and the resources that the Western Governors University has," AIHEC President Dr. Janine Pease-Pretty on Top said. Pease-Pretty on Top said Indian people have always been ready to adopt new technology when it meets their needs. "Euro-American culture is remarkably preoccupied with technology and actually defines itself and its relative greatness in technological terms. Human relationships and the organization of the cosmos are less well defined," she said. While tribal cultures continue to emphasize human relationships and our beliefs about the organization of the cosmos, we do not ignore the importance of technology today, she said. "Those who adapt survive."

For further reading:

Barnhardt, Ray. (1994). The domestication of the ivory tower: institutional adaptation of cultural distance. (Unpublished paper: University of Alaska -Fairbanks Center for Cross-Cultural Studies)

Ereaux, Jim. The impact of technology on Salish Kootenai College. Wicazo sa review: a journal of Native American Studies, 13 (2). Special Issue on Technology and Native Culture.

Marjane Ambler is the editor of the Tribal College Journal. Thanks to Dr. Janine Pease-Pretty on Top, Dr. Deborah Wetsit, Jim Ereaux, Tom Davis, Michael O'Donnell, Caitlin Racine-Myers, and Carol Davis, whose thoughts contributed to this essay.