People have spread the word about Lana DeCoteau and her innovative teaching at her culturally sensitive educational project, DeCoteau’s Dunseith Chugach Model/Reinventing Schools Project. The project focuses on providing a first-rate education for historically disadvantaged Native-American students by shaping student curricula for learning at the academic levels of the students' abilities, not merely their ages. The approach entwines remedial and cross-disciplinary study within a cultural framework that reflects and converges with the Native-American culture of the area.
Dunseith is located in the service area of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Reservation and Rolette County. Currently, the county has the highest unemployment rate in North Dakota. Impacted by high poverty rates and their associated challenges, many Native-American students struggle to make adequate yearly progress in reading as required by the state––and indeed, their future prospects as empowered individuals.
DeCoteau’s Dunseith Chugach Model/Reinventing Schools Project assesses students in word identification, word attack, reading comprehension, and passage comprehension, and then places them according to their levels with their peers. Curriculum and peer progress not only reinforce the students’ sense of agency, but also build a sense of empowerment through the gradual, graded mastery of the subjects in focus. Twenty-seven reading classes run from kindergarten through sixth grade, linked by methodology, strategies, and follow-up, all of which reinforce the sense of continuity and progression in subject matter, learning, and performance. The project has teamed up with the Chugach School District of Anchorage, Alaska, as well. This not only enhances opportunities for comparative evaluations, but also gives a sense of a larger Native-American community reaching out, expanding, and empowering itself through education.
Lana DeCoteau has undertaken a bold, innovative approach to education that at the same time draws upon traditional culture to reinforce its means, ends, methods, and goals. And I know firsthand the power of Lana’s efforts and just what a positive impact they have begun to have in our community. I am, after all, an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians.
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