American Indian Composition Pedagogy: Related Histories, Dialogues, and Response Strategies

Abstract

The field of composition and rhetoric needs to invest greater time and resources into the higher educational needs of American Indian students in writing courses. Data from local and national education surveys reveals that the systematic mis-interpretation of American Indian cultures and educational desires continues to present these students with roadblocks to their success in writing classrooms. American Indian students and their families desire a wider recognition that tribal values are equally integral to the experience of higher education as mainstream values. In seeking to understand the points of view of students, however, we uncover the myriad ways in which the knowledge that is currently furthered in writing classes contradicts, if not discounts, American Indian ways of creating and using knowledge. In response to inquiries as to what students need from higher education, many students and researchers who are committed to the success of this student group report that classrooms need to provide the intellectual space for different interpretive models of the uses of language, offer a variety of approaches to teaching certain ideas or constructs, and foster a learning environment that is respectful and aware of American Indian identities and worldviews.

This dissertation provides a history and an analysis of the actions in composition and rhetoric that have contributed to American Indian student scholastic impediments, contextualizes these tensions within a larger history of the issues that American Indian tribes have addressed in higher education, that engages an analysis of the concerns raised by an emerging groups of American Indian scholars in the field, and presents an American Indian composition pedagogy and writing course overviews that respond to the issues raised in this dissertation. Finally, this dissertation presents a set of two American Indian composition -- a second-level and an advanced second-level course -- that seek to offer solutions to the concerns raised in this work.