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Begining with intensive on site education for eight school teams, Four directions will focus the integration of Native American culture with technology as part of curricular reformation that gives students the attitudes and skills to lead fullfiling lives and compete successfully in the global economy. Activities include 1 restructuring curricula through building on local cultures and values; 2) collaborating across sites through on-site training, on-line tutoring, and cooperative teaming; 3) creating networked "virtual communities" with Interment training presence; 4) encouraging life-long learning by extending technologies into surrounding communities; 5) maintaining a network database of teaching, assessment, professional development, and student created resources organized by Goals for American Indians, Alaskan Natives and national standards; and 6) creating a research based evaluation mode.

Expected outcomes are: 1) relevant education and learning environments designed around children's real life experiences; 2) technologies integrated throughout curricula; 3) ongoing professional development integrated into the culture of schooling; 4) increased use of technologies to express and exchange culturally relevant concepts via exemplary thematic cycles; 5) a comprehensive database of locally developed educational resources; 6) higher student achievement and fewer drop-outs; and 7) dissemination of the Four Directions model.

The BIA operates schools in six of the ten poorest counties in the United States. This proposal is designed to serve the needs of severely disadvantaged students and their communities.

There is no lack of educational statistics illustrating the effect of poverty on Native American students. Underachievement, absenteeism, over-aged students, and high drop-rates characterize statistical descriptions of students within BIA schools and for the nation generally. Estimates of dropout rates suggest that over half of Native American students do not complete high school. In 1985, a prominent Native American educator stated that 75 percent of students in BIA schools were scoring below grade level on norm-referenced tests (Gilliland). All students in BIA funded schools are Title I eligible.

In addition to being economically impoverished, these children and communities demonstrate the greatest need for education technology. Most BIA schools are located hundreds of miles from libraries, civic groups, metropolitan centers and post secondary institutions' access to information is limited.

"Computer-based education in poor schools is in deep trouble ...districts lack the training and social support to use computers effectively. In most cases, computers simply perpetuate a two-tier system of education for rich and poor" (Pillar, 1992).

Their expressed need for help reifies the draft mission statement and principles of professional development from the U.S. Department of Education: "There is an emerging consensus across the nation that high-quality professional development is essential to successful education reform...High quality professional development also promotes Îlearning communities' inclusive of everyone who has an impact on students and their learning." (U.S. Department of Education).

Further involvement of the entire learning community is necessary. The National Staff Development Council Standards for Staff Development states that "staff development is no longer viewed as something that is only necessary for teachers. We now recognize that everyone who affects student learning, from the board of education, central office administrators, principals, teachers, to classified/support staff, and parents must continually improve their knowledge and skills in order to ensure student learning" (Hirsh 95).

The grant will ensure ongoing, intensive professional development for teachers and others in the learning community to further the use of technology and its integration into meaningful curriculum. It offers a creative, new vision for using technology to help all students learn to challenging standards and intends to build on a consortium of BIA schools and "communities" nationwide.

The initial sites for learning communities represent tribal groups in states located in the North, South, East, West, and Central United States. Over the next five years the initial sites will be expanded to 24 sites involved in outreach to impact the 187 BIA schools located in 23 states and on 63 reservations. Partners from business, industry, post-secondary education, museums and libraries will join the networking as a virtual community across the United States is created.
 

The focus of Four Directions is patterns found in real life experiences and the student projects created specific to each site. Education of Native Americans has historically perpetuated cultural discontinuity through the use of curricula developed outside of local communities.

Curriculum materials utilized in BIA schools are, in large, derived from, influenced by, or created for, the dominant culture.

Education for Native American children has been characterized as irrelevant and meaningless. This contributes to self-devaluation, low esteem of self and others, high drop-out rates and myriad problems which manifest socially and economically (King 1990, Lake, 1990).

The use of patterns is consistent with paradigms of education in Native American cultures and with current brain research (Gilliland, Caine & Caine).

Looking for patterns trains the mind to search out and discover the similarities that bind seemingly unrelated information together in a whole. ...A child who expects things to "make sense" looks for the sense in things and from this sense develops understanding. A child who does not see patterns often does not expect things to make sense and sees all events as discrete, separate, and unrelated. Mary Baratta-Lorton

Holistic learning-centered classrooms facilitate binding thoughts together. A thematic cycle based on the environment can blend math and science, history, sociology, art, with reading, writing, and technology as a means of learning. Each genre merges with others through real world-experiences rather than mock test or textbook exercises.

Technology interwoven with the curriculum provides all students with high levels of input--a profusion of information, experiences, and ideas.

Fifty percent of the schools in the consortium currently maintain an array of technologies with a limited number of staff incorporating the technology in the curriculum. The remaining schools have adequate resources to begin implementation of the grant, but lack sufficient staff development for curriculum integration.

Each school has a master teacher on staff who will be responsible for implementing the technology initiatives and coordinate training for the entire community. In addition, a committed support staff of 10 individuals is available for consultation and training on a 24 hour per day basis and is immediately accessible at each school through the Educational Native American Network.

All schools have access to the Educational Native American Network (ENAN) which is a BIA funded telecommunications project based at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico. The ENAN Project is currently in its sixth year. The project is funded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs/Office of Indian Education Programs.

From a historical standpoint, the ENAN Project is unique. ENAN was the first computer network devoted to American Indian Education and, as such, is often called the "Grandfather of Indian Networking." ENAN has evolved from a small pilot project designed to network Western New Mexico and Eastern Arizona BIA/OIEP schools, to become a far-reaching network of teachers, students, administrators and concerned parents with one goal in mind - to improve the education of all American Indian children.

From its inception (as the Eastern Navajo Area Network), ENAN was designed to foster communication between BIA/OIEP teachers, students and administrators. It is still doing that and much, much more. Soon, ENAN will begin ISDN service to selected schools, for the purpose of providing TCP/IP connection to reservation sites that could otherwise not afford such service. ENAN now supplies full Internet connection to more than 100 BIA/OIEP schools, with SLIP service available on demand.

The utilization of ENAN will facilitate first year training and grant implementation since most schools included in the initial consortium are located thousands of miles from each other and hundreds of miles from any major town or city.

Through the utilization of telecommunications and technology, students and teams will explore and share worlds that would otherwise be impossible to see. Examples of the rich diversity offered through this consortium are Quileute Tribal School and Takini School. Quileute in Washington State is located 50 feet from the ocean. Waves crash near the school building as students watch whales pass by the windows. Students in the culture classes carve traditional canoes from massive trees and study basketry - a tradition passed on by their elders. Takini School in South Dakota stands in an ocean of prairie grass that was once home to millions of buffalo. Students are descended from survivors from The Wounded Knee Massacre.

Individuals involved in this grant have a strong commitment to education and have worked with Native American students from 10 to 20 years.

The teams will receive training in curriculum generated through thematic cycles and technology. The student generated projects developed through the thematic cycles will be modeled and shared with schools across the nation through telecommunications and CD-ROMs pressed for distribution.

The central theme of Four Directions forms the infrastructure for learning and curriculum across consortium sites. Inquiry is organized around theme cycles through generating authentic questions; reviewing what is known; refining and narrowing questions; planning strategies to learn; gathering and synthesizing information and attitudes; and defining more questions.

Current concepts of curricula as objectives and activities which are prepackaged and contrived outside the learning situation are prevalent. Changing to a vision of curricula as meeting standards in vitally relevant ways, generated by learners through thematic cycles, requires intensive education and support for teachers, administrators and parents (Short and Burke, 1990).

For example, teachers, paraprofessionals, administrators, parents and students must rethink their roles. Shared "ownership" and control of learning and structures for learning are major issues to be resolved. Training and support in this proposal have been designed to help the teams make the transition to a meaning centered, learner-centered curriculum.

Evaluation

Their presence on site will be viewed as supportive and part of the overall attention given to each individual and site in facilitating change. Contracted evaluators will take the stance that all involved in the project are evaluators and work in partnership in the entire change effort. The evaluation will examine over time the project's success:

• in assisting schools in designing and implementing challenging world class content and performance standards and integrated, real life teaching and learning for Indian youth in order to meet National and Indian Goals for education;
• in developing a community of learners that encompasses students, educators, parents and the community; extends learning into the home; and promotes business and community (including virtual community) partnerships with the schools to foster next step transitions, such as school to work;
• in promoting staff development that supports high challenging standards for all children, closes the technology gap, models quality staff development guided by emerging national and federal standards; and
• in impacting on the achievement, attitudes, and dispositions of teachers, students, and parents.
• in helping consortium members implement strategies for the project to become self-sustaining and ensure continuation through time.

Also during this visit a three day training/orientation session will be discussed. This training will occur at the Southwest Indian Polytechnic Institute (SIPI) in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for school teams immediately after grant monies are distributed.

The three day training session at SIPI will be an abbreviated training presentation of the 10 day retreat to be conducted each year. Each day will focus on forming the school team (teaming); generating thematic cycles and the focus themes; and providing hands-on training on how to incorporate technology and real life experiences within the curriculum.

The design for on-site training that will follow immediately after the SIPI retreat will include six days of training at the school. The first three day visit will focus on team building, technology training, and thematic cycle development. Within one month from the first visit, a second three day training visit will be scheduled. This training will focus on demonstration projects, attitudes, and technology.

The currently established Educational Native American Network (ENAN) will be utilized to facilitate off-site training and collaborate with thematic cycles for the Four Directions Home Page. The school-based teams will define a basic structure for the school's home page that will cover such topics as the school's history, events, activities, expected outcomes, assessment procedures, and curriculum. The school home pages will also offer perspectives of the local community including description of traditions, cultural events, local geography, environmental issues, profiles of community leaders and artisans, and business and institutions that contribute to the local economy.

The school's home page and educational resources will be designed by the school team. Teachers will guide students in integrating various aspects of the curriculum as they produce materials that reflect the children's real life experiences in their communities. Thus, a multi-media report on a local environmental issue might involve students in collecting and analyzing data, require math competencies and ability to construct charts and graphs, as well as the visual, verbal and written communication skills needed to produce the report. Through the processes of creating school home pages and educational resources, the students will be gaining skills in the use of computers, thematic cycles, and other information technologies.

The University of Kansas will extend the Unified Network InformaTics for Education (UNITE) system (Aust 1994) to accommodate the needs of the Four Directions data base. The UNITE system includes Contributing Software, a Macintosh Browser, HTTP server software, mechanisms for automatically constructing browsing structures and search engines. The Four Directions data base will also be accessible from other computer platforms using standard WWW browsing software such as Netscapeª or Mosaicª. The UNITE system was used to construct the Explorer data base currently available on at http://unite.ukans.edu/ on the Internet.

Activities that engage students in collecting and analyzing, reporting on their local culture support the curricular reformation proposed in the grant. Thematic cycles developed as part of the Four Directions will serve as models for thematic curricula integrations. As the UNITE system matures to accommodate the needs of Four Directions the indexing schemes, search engines, query interfaces and contribution interfaces will be designed to be easily extended. The ability to construct, index and access multi-media resources from multiple perspectives will be valuable to a wide range of user communities who seek to be competitive in a global information-based economy.

Training will be concentrated on the teams established at each grant site. These teams will form the basis of the collaboration and exchange of information at each school. The school team will expand to include all members of the "learning community" during the first year and expand to cluster schools in the second through fifth year.

Each member will attend a ten day summer retreat in July for all sites. On-site training visits to the local site every school year form the basis of professional development needed to implement change. Consultants knowledgeable and experienced in curriculum generated by thematic cycles and knowledgeable and experienced in using technology to support inquiry will form visiting teams for inservice.

By creating the school teams and creating these experiences we will begin to:

Training - Summer Retreat - SIPI

Training materials and activities developed during these training days will be shared on Internet so that other schools may experience step-by-step progress of the grant.

One example of a thematic project could include Weaving. Every site has examples of weaving through baskets, clothing, and blankets. The metaphor could be expanded to include fabrics and strands of life and other cultures.

The last day of the training will provide participants the time to present their project to the group. Evaluation will be on-going and used to inform and modify training efforts.

Training Schedules - Off Site

Training - On Site Training - Individual Schools

Training Schedule - On Site

1. The evaluation will include an initial assessment to obtain baseline information describing each school from the perspective of the project goals. The following questions will guide the description of the school's curriculum and instructional practices.
• Is there evidence of a school and classroom climate and environment that is both inviting to students and conducive to learning? Are the cultures within the community reflected in the curriculum and instruction?
• What evidence is there that administrators, teachers, and students hold high standards and expectations for teaching and learning?
• Are teachers engaged in meaning-centered teaching? Are students engaged in meaning-centered learning tied to real world situations?
• What are the available resources to enhance the learning environment and teaching and learning?
• What technology resources exist and for what purposes are they employed? How does existing technology support teaching and learning in the classroom, facilitate communication, support staff development or improve the home-school connection?
• What plans or mechanisms are in place to ensure parental involvement and help parents understand the integration of technology into children's learning in and out of school. Descriptive baseline information will be obtained through several methods:
• Staff will conduct observations of representative classrooms utilizing research-based benchmarks assessing effective curriculum instruction.
• Schools and classrooms will be videotaped over time to demonstrate the changes in climate, instruction, and engagement that occur over time.
• Staff will conduct interviews with project team members, administrators, and samples of teachers, students, and parents to obtain information on the quality of curriculum and instruction, attitudes toward learning, attitudes about the role and use of technology, and staff development opportunities that exist.
• Staff will utilize a survey instrument to inventory technology available and used in the school.
• Staff will collect aggregate information that schools use to assess student progress.
2. Assess the quality of staff development and training throughout the project.
• Evaluators will attend staff training sessions and observe the quality of training utilizing research-based findings on effective staff development and emerging national and federal standards for staff development. Participants will complete baseline questionnaires and will assess their own professional development over time. A comparable group of non-participant teachers will be similarly surveyed to examine attitudes, dispositions and skills over time.
3. Develop ongoing case study describing project implementation
• Baseline information will be integrated in a case study for each school. The case study will be augmented over time and will describe the implementation of the project, changes that occur towards meeting the project's goals, barriers to implementation as they occur and the resolution of those barriers.
• Evaluators will share yearly reports with all schools that describe implementation successes and problems across sites.
4. Conduct and prepare report on overall evaluation results.
• Information obtained by the methods described above will be obtained each year of the evaluation. A final report will describe schools in the baseline year and changes that occurred over time in implementing the project.

Final Report Questions

• In what ways have the schools changed as learning organizations that promote challenging curricula?
• How have teachers beliefs about teaching and learning changed? What role has technology played?
• What teachers' perceptions of the staff training/professional development they received?
• Has the project influenced student achievement? How has the project affected how teachers and parents assess student achievement?
• Has the project been successful in extending learning into the home? In strengthening home-school partnerships?
• Has the project been successful in closing the gap between technology haves and have nots? Has equity been achieved in acquiring technological skills? How is technology routinely used in the homes and in the community as an integral part of learning and everyday life?


Research and Training Associates, Inc., 1995

Computer Equipment for LEA and Schools:

• Two Power Macintosh or IBM AV computers with 16 megs RAM, 1 Gig Hard Drive, CD-ROM
• Three Macintosh or IBM Powerbooks - For students to take home and work with parents and for teachers to take home over the summer break.
• One LaserWriter IIf
• One Gigabyte Hard Drive
• Sony Video Recorder
• Adobe Premier Software
• Adobe Photo Software
• HyperStudio
• HyperCard
• Macro Mind Director
• Morph

Four Directions has received support from the Technology Innovation Challenge program, U.S. Department of Education. It is administered by the Pueblo of Laguna Department of Education.