Reasons for, and solutions to, tribal college student reticence in videoconferences with college of art students

Professor John Peacock

Vol. 2 No. 2 (2017)
'Designs on e-Learning: Anxiety and Security' Special Issue

Case Studies

Reasons for, and solutions to, tribal college student reticence in videoconferences with college of art students

Published 2017-05-22

Professor John Peacock

Professor John Peacock
Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA)

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Abstract

Tribal college students are often reluctant to talk in videoconferenced classes. Many Native students have been raised to avoid competing with each other and not ask elders too many questions, which might be perceived as ‘acting white’ – especially in front of non-Native peers. This case study discusses team-teaching, undertaken by myself and an elder via videoconferencing, connecting students at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore and students at Cankdeska Cikana (Little Hoop) Community College, the tribal college of North Dakota’s Spirit Lake Dakota Nation. It describes how the elder and I re-directed synchronous discussion to his tribal and my art students’ shared experiences, whereupon they voluntarily devised intriguing follow-up asynchronous project-learning activities.

Keywords

Cultural Differences, Pedagogy, Native American studies

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Supplementary File(s)

Team Teaching Native American Studies Online

Author Biography

Professor John Peacock

Professor John Peacock is an enrolled member of the Spirit Lake Dakota Nation in Fort Totten, North Dakota, and Professor of Humanistic Studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. He was translation editor and wrote the introduction/afterword to The Dakota Prisoner of War Letters (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2013), a collection of 50 letters written in the Dakota languages by warriors incarcerated at the end of the Dakota-U.S. War of 1862 (translated by Dakota elders Clifford Canku and Michael Simon). Peacock’s writing in the endangered Dakota language has been read and exhibited at the Minnesota History Center and published in American Indian Quarterly and Studies in American Indian Literature. His English-language essays, fiction and poetry have appeared in over forty journals, periodicals and anthologies.

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