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Alaska Department of Education & Early Development
Implementing the Alaska Standards for Social Studies

Chapter 6: District Curriculum Development Process

School districts in Alaska have the right and responsibility to develop curriculum plans. This allows each district to tailor curriculum to its specific cultural and educational needs, and provides for a great degree of latitude in content and process. However, according to state regulations, curriculum plans for all districts should reflect educational goals and a sense of how each year's instruction builds on the last. They should also be based on the adopted standards.

This chapter augments the suggestions made in Chapter 1 of this publication and focuses on social science considerations in curriculum development.

An Alaskan Example of Curriculum Reform:
Paul Ongtooguk's Northern Odyssey

(Editor's note: the following is an excerpt from Ongtooguk's address to the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting held in Atlanta in 1993. It details a search through various organizational approaches to curriculum in instigating an Iñupiaq studies course.)

When I returned to Northwest Alaska as a certified secondary teacher, I took with me 36 boxes of books and documents about the history of Alaska Natives. I wanted my students to have an informed perspective about the circumstances of Iñupiaq history and of the modern issues that face Alaska Natives.

The Arts and Crafts Curriculum. When I was hired by the Northwest Arctic School District, one of my first tasks was to review the Iñupiaq Heritage Curriculum, a course of study that had been created a few years earlier at the insistence of the Alaska Native school board. The board had argued that since U.S. history was a required course for all high school students, so should Iñupiaq studies be a required and central part of the curriculum.

The Heritage Curriculum had been organized by non- Iñupiaq administrators, teachers, and curriculum specialists who knew little about Alaska Native history. They had been helped by non-certified bilingual aides. The curriculum guide was 186 pages in length, the first 40 of which included newspaper articles about local people and organizations with additional ideas on how to do family and village histories. The second section consisted of "how to make" projects including ivory carving, basket making, baleen model boats, Native foods, skin sewing, and skinning and dying hides. Interspersed among the arts and crafts were brief descriptions of survival techniques including setting a fish net under the ice, snaring rabbits, and how to read clouds for weather predicting. The accompanying materials included more than 100 overhead masters of lecture note outlines, in the classic format of Roman numerals, letters, and numbers. The information was drawn chiefly from two anthropological works.The non- Iñupiaq teachers who were trying to implement the curriculum were having trouble teaching it. They saw its chief difficulty as the materials themselves: ivory, baleen, raw and tanned furs, birch bark, and sinew were essential materials for carrying out the lessons, but none was readily or predictably available to the schools or to non-Native teachers. In addition, the expertise necessary to produce the crafts, fur clothing, and other objects was nonexistent among the certificated teachers.

I would suggest that the problem with the curriculum was not the availability of the materials. It was what the curriculum did and did not say about Iñupiaq society. Certainly, the crafts and artistic efforts of Iñupiat are notable, but the lifestyle and social structure of the people - indeed the culture that made the creation of the arts and crafts products possible - are invisible, and not represented in the curriculum. In fact most of the issues that were most important had been overlooked: What was the legal and social status of the traditional councils or governments? Were Iñupiaq students members of a distinctive group or tribe? How had village high schools come to exist? What was Village English, and how had it developed? What were common assumptions about "civilization," "assimilation," "being educated," "salvation," and "progress" that had informed the development of education in Alaska? In short, there was no coherent picture of continuity, conflict, and transformation by which to understand the Iñupiaq community, the region, and the circumstances and challenges that Iñupiaq students faced in modern life. Furthermore, the Iñupiaq students realized that they were not traditional or old-time (Ipani) Iñupiat, and they felt the judgment of non-Natives that this somehow meant their lives were devalued.

From Arts and Crafts to Iñupiaq Studies. The vital missing piece in the heritage curriculum was a coherent structure for the course - an underlying recognition that this topic was part of the history of peoples all over the world and should be treated as such. The new "Iñupiaq Studies" curriculum was organized into historical periods, a change that dramatically shifted its emphasis from arts and crafts to readings, discussions, and investigations from a variety of perspectives. Underlying this reconstruction were four intentions:

• I wanted students to begin to speak of "we" and "our" when they talked and thought about Iñupiaq, a shift in language that would indicate a change in perspective. The danger I saw otherwise was that Iñupiaq students might become what Malcom X once described as "a people ignorant of themselves and ignorant of their true history" (p. 253).

• I wanted both students and the rest of the community to recognize Iñupiaq studies as an academic study with challenging texts and ideas. Typically courses about indigenous peoples are marginal to the curriculum. To move Iñupiaq studies to a high status course central to the purpose of education, I built in the discovery of conceptual and historical connections. For instance, to understand our own history, as Iñupiat, we must understand the history of English exploration, the search for the Northwest Passage, Russian Imperialism, British colonialism, the American argument of Manifest Destiny, and the eventual mapping of Northwest Alaska. This class would further give students the tools to examine the trends and assumptions that are embedded in U.S. and world history as well as their own.

• I wanted to challenge the conceptions of Social Darwinism that held European society to be superior in all respects to other societies, the view that there is an ascending hierarchy of civilization from primitive cave people to hunters and gatherers to herders to farmers to city dwellers, and, ultimately, to industrialized and technology-dependent societies. The course argued instead that students needed to explore the distinctive strengths and weaknesses of each society.

• I wanted to help students explore what it meant to be Iñupiaq. If, as some teachers implied, being Iñupiaq meant being traditional (Ipani), then both assimilation and all of modern schooling were essentially cultural genocide in moving students away from the traditional. A central part of the new course was the notion that there were no "good old days" in Iñupiaq society. Students were to realize that they were the latest inheritors of a society in the midst of dramatic transformation.

Why not be silent? Why should a curriculum pay particular attention to a single people and language within the melting pot of American society? It is hardly necessary to make the argument for a single-group perspective since we have had one in American schools for years. In addition, I believe we must challenge the historic policy of assimilation and cultural genocide embedded in the schooling and education of Alaska Natives. We do not wish for schools to be silent about us as peoples, nor do we want a curriculum that is a parody of who we are or represents our culture as having passed. And we are impatient about these things. As a relative of mine, Joe Senungetuk, once wrote, "Give or take a century, how long must we wait?"