One Size Does Not Fit All - Part Six of High Altitude Tales

Meet Iva, an innovative teacher conducting scientific research with her middle schoolers on the Wind River Reservation. They even set up trail cameras!

It's the final episode of High Altitude Tales.

 For teachers, the end of May and beginning of June are often emotionally taxing. I can vouch for this. I have taught high school English in the Wyoming public education system for 12 years, and the end of the year always exhausts for me. It’s a yo-yo of emotions. I’m excited for summer, but I’m already missing my graduating seniors. I love end of year celebrations, but I also have a mountain of grading to get done as students scramble to revive their grades at the last minute.

This is also the time to reflect.

Since the pandemic, people across public education have been grasping for solutions for chronic student absenteeism.

“Nationwide, about one in four students were chronically absent last school year. And in some districts, those numbers are worse,” says NPR’s Ayesha Roscoe.

Teacher recruitment and retention are also a point of concern.

“The US Department of Education also says there is a shortage; 40 states have lower public school staff levels than they did before the pandemic,” says CBS News.

And there have been questions about what should be taught in schools.

“Overall, the number of individual titles challenged in both school and public libraries rose 65% from the previous year, the highest level ever recorded by the ALA,” says NPR.

Public education as we know it is sitting at a crossroads. And this isn’t your normal two streets intersecting kind of crossroads. This is a, “we have so many options I want to curl up and rock myself in the corner” crossroads.

So this might be a good time to think about what’s working, and to highlight teachers who are actively creating solutions and doing it well. We need to focus on the best of us in education, and I have just the person. 

“Hi, I’m Iva Moss-Redman, Wind River Reservation,” says Iva.

I met Iva at the Wyoming Department of Education’s Teacher Retention and Recruitment Task Force, we were both selected to participate, and we hit it off.

Iva has taught for 18 years and is someone who is constantly smiling and has a quick, wry sense of humor. She has the energy and wit to keep up with middle-schoolers. 

Iva is also helping me with my podcast about why teachers are leaving education and what can be done to stop the exodus. It’s called Those Who Can’t Teach Anymore. For this project, Iva is keeping a weekly audio journal of her school year, and she will be featured throughout the second season, which will follow several teachers from across the country through their school year.

What I love about Iva’s journals is how they often focus on the big units she has created and applied to class.

“The goals for this quarter that’s coming up, the kids had eight of them, I presented to them and shared with them, like, ‘Okay this quarter, our goal is to understand what a treaty is, what a treaty right is, what treaty boundaries are,’ and then build that into mapping, ArcGIS. So we’re moving toward S3 Technologies,” says Iva.

Iva is a middle school Stem teacher among other things. If you don’t know, that stands for Science Technology Engineering and Math.

“But this is what I'm doing as a public school educator now, and I've been teaching in the math classrooms, the STEM classrooms, the science classrooms, the computer science classrooms, and then the Arapaho language and culture classrooms,” Iva says.

Iva has a lot of experience in the classroom, and this experience has honed her approach to being an educator. Her philosophy of education is continuously evolving, so the example in GIS you just heard about isn’t something she was using nearly 20 years ago when she started teaching. It’s a newer addition to her instruction. Iva is what we call a lifelong learner. So where she started as a teacher isn’t where she is now.

 ”My initial teaching philosophy was like the generic philosophy that all education teachers or majors come out of college with, right? And it was something like, ‘I'm going to create a safe environment for my learners. I'm going to use strategies that are beneficial to them, for my students and learning styles, and I'm going to use current research or, be informed,  blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,’ right?  It's all good stuff about how we want our teachers to be, and it's true to a point, right?” Iva says.

But she came to feel that these canned statements were too generic and didn’t apply very well to her specific students. This philosophy is just a frame, she realized.

“As we get more experience, I think we start adjusting them, because we end up in communities that need those adjustments. Like, you're in Cheyenne and I'm in Wind River. Two different bodies of students, right? Two different groups, two different cultures. Yours is more urban, mine is more rural.

Your teaching philosophy is: ‘Tweak to adjust to your type of students.’ Mine, I've been teaching Indigenous students for most of my career. And so now I think my philosophy goes around my experience,” says Iva.

For example, earlier this year Iva had students gather stories from their families, and in doing this, she had to talk to students about giving gifts in exchange for the stories, which is often a cultural expectation in tribes.

Iva says, “‘When you approach the oldest member,’ I said to my class, ‘in our cultural ways, in our Shashone and Arapaho culture, we have to give a gift.’ I said, ‘This is your gift for that story because you guys have been trying to get creation stories from the people you live with, but you haven’t been doing it properly.’ I said, ‘Now you have a painting, and now you can give that gift and in return, you want a story, you’re asking to be told a story. And maybe they’ll return it, maybe they won't return it, but you’re going to document that too.’”

But these adjustments don’t replace what keeps teachers accountable. Iva is still tracking attendance, managing grades, and the thousands of other things expected of teachers.

“I still look at the data to inform my teaching. I still provide modifications and accommodations, but now it's more integrative and culturally responsive to the group of students that I teach,” says Iva.

To get to this point has taken time, in part because public education as Iva experienced it is not often culturally responsive, so she took time to learn how to be more culturally responsive. Iva began her PhD in Education to learn how STEM is embedded into Arapaho culture. And her research sent her down the road of her own family’s history. The federal government forced her relatives to go to boarding schools. If you don’t know, boarding schools were a method of cultural genocide against Native Americans in the late 19th century. The US government forced tribes to send their children to these schools. According to Captain Richard Henry Pratt, who established the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the goal of these schools was to quote, “kill the Indian and save the man.” So again, the goal was cultural genocide. This history creates complicated feelings about being a teacher for Iva.

“I am an educator, right? And it's not supposed to be that way, with Indigenous people, and knowing that my great grandmother on my mother's side was a boarding school student at St. Stephen's,” says Iva.

But as an educator, this research drove Iva to focus on the impact of boarding schools and how traces of boarding schools are still prevalent in dismissing the culture that is foundational to her community.

“My mom, her first language was Arapaho, and then when she got into public school, was beaten and hit a lot of the time by the teachers for speaking Arapaho. My mom was the oldest and then the sisters that were right after her went to school and experienced that. And so the younger sisters, they were learning Arapaho, but the older sisters also taught them English so that they wouldn't go through that experience in public school. And then me, I was a former Arapaho language teacher,” Iva says.

So this has affected Iva’s approach to teaching by making her more conscious of incorporating language and culture into whatever she’s teaching. Iva’s emphasis on community and what her students need is personal and in reaction to the history of her family.

“Public education currently does not consider my type. My community knowledge is invisible to it.” says Iva.

Iva’s approach to education is to make her community knowledge visible for her students – to help them realize that their ways of knowing are valuable and not separate from things like STEM. This approach is also being more valued outside of public schools. The federal government now requires the inclusion of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, or TEK, before programs can move forward.

“There's this big push for  T. E. K. and Indigenous Knowledge Systems being partnered up with National Park Systems and all these federal programming things.

I think it's the Bridger Teton Forest up there by Jackson and Dubois that are thinking about bringing a fire program in that models the types of burning that the indigenous peoples used to do to keep the forest healthy. They're going back to that knowledge, but then the public education doesn't see that knowledge as valid or valuable. They acknowledge it and they say, ‘Okay, we're gonna let you have this, but then we're going to put it in the social studies standards. Okay, you've got that.’

We're still invisible,” Iva says.

The emphasis on Indigenous Knowledge Systems is growing outside of education. Iva is helping it grow within education, to make it more visible, and this is contributing to how she approaches her teaching.

“The current philosophy has probably emerged through my research. My dissertation is investigating how Indigenous knowledge systems are STEM, or how STEM is embedded into the Indigenous knowledge systems.

And then I went down the lines of like, well, ‘What the heck, how do I define a system?’ And my philosophy and approach, how does that align with that stuff?” says Iva.

Iva answers these questions by focusing on community.

“But you think that, and then you think about indigenous knowledge systems that are our systems, or frameworks that our tribe had in place to teach our students to be successful in their life, in their survival. And the Arapaho specifically had one called the Four Hills of Life,” Iva says.

Iva explains that the first hill is childhood, the second hill is young adulthood, the third hill is adulthood, and the last hill is elderhood.

“And they don't really like to look at elderhood until maybe you're 70. So you've spent about 30, 35 years in adulthood, and then you're considered an elder or a knowledge keeper that can guide and help the other three age groups. And that reciprocity and that mentorship goes with each group,” says Iva.

And in these four hills, there is a structure to how learning and instruction occurs.

“So the second hill is often interacting with the first and the third, maybe not necessarily the fourth. And then if you're in the third, you're interacting with the fourth, and the second, and the first. So there's that built in mentorship and those built in teaching frameworks that are available in the cultural structure of my tribe. And each tribe has their own way of doing this, but I'm just speaking to my tribe since that's been mostly where my research has been,” Iva says.

I want to emphasize that Iva’s philosophy of education is specific to her community. She is an expert on her community, so her approach to education reflects her community.

A current critique of our education system, from students themselves, is that their education doesn’t feel relevant to them. Through my years of teaching, I’ve heard this constant refrain from students: They wish high school was more relevant to them and what they want to do after school.

Iva is focusing on the Four Hills of Life specific to the Arapaho – that’s not something every teacher should necessarily adopt. But what I think is important to note is Iva’s emphasis on relying on her background and teaching to her community. Every community is unique. So along with STEM, Iva is teaching her students how to find success within their community by keeping the Four Hills in mind.

“You know, my eighth graders are starting to approach that second, right? They're starting to hit puberty and move through those changes into becoming an adult.  But they're still learning. So, I needed to find out who's their support systems.  Because our cultural frameworks had this in place for us. And that's what boarding schools took away,” says Iva.

But Iva’s students are being exposed to the Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Traditional Ecological Knowledge along with their STEM coursework. This is because Iva is trying something completely new.

“My approach this year has been to integrate my students’ cultural knowledge into STEM,” says Iva.

This is very unique to education. Often content is taught out of cultural context. Materials aren’t always relevant to where the students are located and what they value. Iva is emphasizing cultural contexts to connect with students.

“The first quarter, I started with the creation stories of my students. We learned six creation stories, some from the Plains Tribes, Great Lakes Tribes, Arctic Tribes, and a Southwest Tribe. The regional stories introduced my students to other cultures and ways of knowing and being on this earth. This was all to introduce technology which was 3D printing. The mathematics they had to learn was around geometry, scaling, measurement, volume, but also engineering of their 3D models. That quarter, my students learned how to fail,” Iva says.

Learning to fail is important, especially in STEM. Iva emphasizes that in STEM most initial designs will fail, and it is not uncommon to have to try something hundreds of times to find success.

“My kids did not know how to fail. They didn't know how to be okay with it, you know, tantrums were all over the place. I think fourth quarter now, they just kind of giggle about it and say, ‘I didn't do that right now, did I? How do I get it better?’ So now they're asking the right questions about ‘How can I improve this? How do I get it better?’” says Iva.

By fourth quarter, Iva’s students are doing real research and considering what it means to approach science from their specific perspectives. Iva calls this positionality.

“Fourth quarter unit is about research, indigenous research, and what does that mean? So I'm introducing them to their positionality. You know, their position in their community is that you are enrolled either in the Eastern Shoshone or Northern Arapaho tribe, but you have descendancy either from the Paiute, from the Chau band, from the Crow, from the Cheyenne, from the Sioux, or from the Navajo. There's a big group of identities in my classroom,” Iva says.

Here’s where Iva is doing something truly innovative in her teaching. I want to draw a contrast to how approaches to research are often taught. Usually, there’s an assumption of objectivity in any research. That the researcher is a cold blank slate looking at their work without bias. This overlooks the unique qualities of students and what they bring to research or discussions. Iva wants students to be aware of how their perspectives will impact their research.

“And so I said, ‘This is your positionality because you're being taught that this is your lens. This is how you're going to look at research.’ Because you come from this specific group of people, and they are Indigenous, it now becomes Indigenous research, just because of who you are and how you're going to look at it and how you're being taught by your knowledge keepers,” says Iva.

For this project, Iva partnered with the University of New Hampshire. They helped her set up trail cameras. Let’s pause for a moment, I want you all to think of your education. Did your teachers reach out to entities outside of the school, community, and state to find resources to help you learn? If they did, how often did they do this?

In my experience, it was rare, but for Iva, she does this consistently throughout every school year. Just this year in what she shared with me, she worked with the Teton Science School, Yellowstone National Park, and the University of New Hampshire, and those aren’t all of the entities she reached out to. This is part of what makes Iva’s teaching so awesome. She consistently reaches out to people actually doing the work she is trying to teach her students. Things like using trail cameras to observe local wildlife.

“So they purchased six trail cameras. We picked out three sites. One on campus, one at an elder's residence where she says there's moose and everything that goes right through her land, and then one on the river. So, the Little Wind River is right behind the school and it stretches all the way down to the Big Wind to Boysen Lake,” Iva says.

Iva has a mix of sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students, all of varying abilities.

“I have to differentiate the research. So the one on campus, they develop their research questions and they're not really hard. They're like, ‘Who lives in this hole?’ So, there's prairie dog holes, badger holes. We didn't know what kind of holes they were but in the first pool of the film, they're prairie dogs that were coming out of the hole.

And so that's a really easy question to answer, right? They can answer that question with just the first week of examination, like this isn't a badger home, these are prairie dog holes. So that level is getting them situated with how to develop a research question, how to develop a hypothesis,” says Iva.

The next group is focused on cameras that are set up on the property near an elder’s home. They are focused on what potential predators are in the area.

“The model that's at Grandma Alice's is like your mid-level model. We're not pulling film until two weeks. So they kind of have to stew on this, like, what are they going to see? And so some of their questions were, ‘How many moose are we going to count? Is a mountain lion on her property?’ Or another one was, ‘Are the dogs chasing the animals away?’ Because she said she's not seeing the deer as often as she did.

So they developed their question with, kind of, what Grandma Alice was wondering about. And so there's two cameras at that site,” Iva says.

At the last location, on the river, they put out three cameras.

“And so that's for your higher level learners and your advanced ones that really want to ask those questions about what types of animals live on the river and can they identify them through these cameras,” says Iva.

And Iva is having success with her students.

“They're engaged with what's coming from these cameras and it's real life research and it's real life, like, ‘We're going to answer these questions and then now what are we going to do with it?’ Now we have to have a plan, like, ‘What do we know about these communities and then what are we going to do about it?’” Iva says.

For example, one of the groups identified dogs on their cameras, and based on their hypothesis, these dogs, not a mountain lion, might be responsible for the lack of deer at the elder’s residence.

“We know that the tribes have been trying to get dog ordinances in place because of the high rate of wild dogs, but they can't seem to enforce this, they get it into the code. And so maybe with this data, they can propose something to the councils to say, ‘Look, we have evidence that these dogs are impacting our wildlife,’ or something like that. I'll see what they come up with.

And then with the river,  they just want to learn more about it. They're learning the names of these rivers that they see every day,  and they want to know what animals are there.

And then we might talk about if there's any conservation or anything in place to protect these animals or fish or anything, and start getting them to think about their communities. And how they can help,” says Iva.

When Iva told me about this project, I’m pretty sure I said something like, “I want to be in your class.” Because Iva is providing kids with authentic experiences that are connecting to who they are and where they are. She is also validating these students’ ways of knowing within an educational setting. This is huge.

And this work that Iva is doing is a lot. She is very busy. She is a meticulous researcher and organizer, which all takes time. But when thinking about the solutions needed for public education, Iva is a great person to find inspiration from, but that doesn’t mean everyone should do exactly what Iva does. That would be falling into the same trap of standardization we’re already in.

“One size doesn't fit all. You can't just go and shove this, these models that work in one specific area or one, I guess, middle class group of people. Doesn't work for all groups of people. All our communities have great wealth in their community. You know, our ways of knowing and being.

And if we want our children to continue to thrive in our communities, And not in the other communities, such as the big urban places, then we need to modify, accommodate, differentiate, and respond to how our communities need our children to be educated, because we are currently educating Wyoming children to go elsewhere,  to go build their lives somewhere else, and they abandon our communities, and as educators, with this model, that's what we're doing.

We're educating them to work in a world that consumes our own old knowledges that makes us who we are as Wyoming people or indigenous people,” Iva says.

As programs working to reform education develop or gain momentum, I think it will be important to remember what Iva has done on her own. So often reform standardizes a new set of ideas; the key word being standardize, which continues to disregard individuals and their unique communities.

What Iva is doing is specific to her students and her community and her research and her knowledge base, and it is working. So rather than looking outward for solutions, it might be worth looking within our own communities, to our own teachers for solutions to keep students engaged and to meet the needs of our unique communities. Doing so might keep teachers in the profession and kids from wanting to leave their communities.