AASB’S YOUTH LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE STUDENTS DISCUSS THEIR HOME COMMUNITIES.
PHOTO CREDIT: CONNOR MEYER

Since time immemorial, Alaskans have been teaching their children the skills they need to survive and thrive in our unique environments. Those skills may look different in modern society, but research indicates that connecting to culture, family, and community values is a powerful way to motivate students to pursue training and education. 

Indigenous Alaskans have lived on these lands for thousands of years, and more recently, other families have come to call Alaska home. Students’ families speak more than 100 languages at home and represent cultures from all around the world.

Alaskan educators are trying to find ways to support students and their families to have the best possible educational outcomes. To do this, they are embedding culturally responsive practices in hiring, onboarding, teaching, and preparing students for life after high school.

We at the Association of Alaska School Boards are committed to serving as advocates for all youth. Research indicates that from early childhood to postsecondary, students grounded in their identity and culture have higher attendance rates, connection, and educational outcomes.

The AASB Board has established this long-range goal: Empower our boards to prioritize equity and transform educational systems to increase the academic achievement and graduation rates of students who are grounded in their cultural identity so they have the ability to successfully pursue their goals.

To reach this goal, AASB works with school boards, school districts, tribal entities, and community partners to expand the ways in which our association and our members integrate culture and culturally restorative policies, practices, curriculum, and hiring.

Both through grant-funded partnerships and through the services offered to member programs, AASB has been able to strategically support cultural integration, culturally responsive practices, and meaningful partnerships with tribal entities and other cultural leaders. These services range from data services, tailored strategic and action planning, grant collaborations, community dialogues, curriculum adaptation and delivery, and policies.

Here are a few of the ways that our attention to culture and identity has impacted our roles at the association.

Policies: AASB worked with school board members to review our recommended policies. Through this review, more than 26 policies were recommended for change. These policies ranged from changes in hiring superintendents, onboarding staff, setting school calendars, multicultural education, and curriculum policies.

School board members noted how each policy had a significant implication for their students; one in particular was the food and nutrition policy. School board members and school staff noted that there was higher attendance on days when they served traditional and locally harvested foods. Changing their policy and related nutrition program meant that they had to provide federal nutrition program administrators additional information to advocate for these foods to be offered in the schools. The school board members were proud that they were better serving students and their families with healthy local foods.

Collective impact and collaboration impacts community participation and languages: Many of the AASB grant-funded partnerships build in a collective impact and collaboration approach to addressing educational equity. This includes ensuring that school districts have strong relationships with tribal governments, cultural nonprofits, and organizations. Together, these partners can address challenges. AASB brought together community and district partners to co-host family dialogues or input sessions. These collaborations take time and trust and have positively impacted community participation. At these gatherings, families can be sure that cultural framing, cultural leaders, and cultural protocols will be upheld. They enter a more welcoming and familiar environment where they feel safe to contribute to key decisions. School districts found much higher participation in co-hosted events.

One initiative, funded through the Promise Neighborhoods Grant, has brought together key stakeholders in Southeast Alaska to work more collaboratively on Alaska Native language revitalization. AASB has facilitated conversations with education and organizational stakeholders to develop shared agreements that can help each organization contribute to the language revitalization and curriculum development work. This group has committed to reduce competition, advance collaboration, and identify niche areas to work in to have the most impact on language and cultural heritage in the region. This includes the development of materials, supporting advanced language learners, and educator preparation training.

AASB’S ANNUAL STUDENT AND SCHOOL BOARD MEMBER ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSIONS.
PHOTO CREDIT: LYNX EDUCATION

Measuring cultural responsiveness and cultural connectedness: AASB administers the School Climate and Connectedness Survey, which measures student, family, and staff perceptions of school climate and their relationships within the school. Several of the scales help boards and staff understand how families and students feel about the school. We help boards dig into questions like: “This school is welcoming to families like mine” or “My school represents my culture within the school.” AASB and boards also can look at which families respond to schools communicating effectively or which students believe they will be missed when they are absent. AASB uses this data to help school districts and boards identify their strengths and areas for growth. One school district set a priority this past year to “focus on family involvement and begin by reestablishing site committees for each school.” This school district will actively recruit families representing various cultural groups and rely on this group to help address equity and family partnership in the school.

In Alaska, several school districts have used this data to rethink how they are working with students and their families. They have set explicit goals around a more culturally appropriate approach to thinking about learning, goal setting, and involving families in decision-making.

Dialogue training: Not all family and community members have had positive experiences with Western education and schools. They may not feel comfortable contributing to or navigating the educational landscape. AASB has hosted dialogues with families and trains others to host conversations. These dialogues use facilitation techniques that level the playing field. The dialogues can include educational equity, family partnership, cultural content and curriculum, or other topics. These dialogues have been successful in opening conversations between the school and the community to hear about the cultural and educational needs of families. Some of these dialogues have resulted in new family engagement activities, new protocols in the school, or new partnerships. As an example, families in one community shared that the community was facing a lot of grief and loss. They really wanted more activities at school to help children navigate grief, and they also requested resources to use at home to talk about grief with their children and families.

Linking culture and language into our key initiatives and conferences: Our grant funding and services have allowed AASB to work with districts to develop curriculum like the Pulasaraq curriculum, which is a Yup’ik mental health model that uses the Yup’ik values as the foundation. It is a great way to ground students in the regional culture and help educators gain tools for talking about things in a way that aligns with Yup’ik culture.

AASB has worked closely with Alaska Native language immersion schools, place-based standards and curricula development, and a more place-based approach to postsecondary preparation and dual credit.

Creating learning communities: AASB has worked with leading trainers such as Zaretta Hammond, other in-state experts, and our own team to offer professional learning communities and spaces to reflect on board, educator, and administrator practices.

Educators who have participated in AASB’s trainings stated that they often knew that culture was important, but they had few spaces to reflect on new tools and practices. Sometimes, educators said it was just about integrating a question into lesson plans and building out family learning extension opportunities. One educator stated, “If you do this alone, you have very little space to understand how well it worked and how you can do things even better. I also loved all the tools and examples other educators shared.”

This quote from Hammond’s book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, underpins many of our trainings: “Culture, it turns out, is the way that every brain makes sense of the world. That is why everyone, regardless of race or ethnicity, has a culture. Think of culture as software for the brain’s hardware. The brain uses cultural information to turn everyday happenings into meaningful events. If we want to help dependent learners do more higher-order thinking and problem solving, then we have to access their brain’s cognitive structures.”

SITKA TRIBE OF ALASKA SHARES RESOURCES TO HELP BRING CULTURE INTO SCHOOLS.
PHOTO COURTESY OF KEET GOOSHI HEEN MIDDLE SCHOOL

Postsecondary preparation: Research indicates that American Indian college students do better (have a higher GPA) when they have a strong, positive sense of cultural identity. Similarly, students need the schools to make a connection to their family culture and help students be grounded in their identity. This helps students know who they are and where they want to go. 

AASB has worked with stakeholders across the state to develop the Bridging to the Future Framework. The framework outlines how to systemically support each student in sixth through 12th grade to understand themselves and their goals. It is grounded in a holistic approach that builds on a range of mentoring, life, and academic experiences to foster the confidence and skills (navigation), sense of self (identity), and preparation (academics) needed to successfully pursue postsecondary opportunities. The framework also takes an ecosystem approach, acknowledging that family members, school staff, peers, other supportive adults, and even the school environment influence and support these experiences. 

From early childhood to postsecondary, Alaskan school districts are taking strides to incorporate identity and self-awareness as a part of the core foundation for student learning. In each district and community, this looks different, but there are policy, curricula, facilitation and planning, and models that can be held up as examples of weaving culture, place, and people into each student’s learning and learning goals. Reach out to the Association of Alaska School Boards for more information at aasb@info.org.