Yup’ik Math Curriculum Adds Up to Success
This story appeared on Indian Country Today Media Network in 2015. For more on topics like this, see my book, American Apartheid: The Native American Struggle....
Seated on a couch in their house in
Manokotak, in Alaska’s southwestern Bristol Bay region, Yup’ik elders Mike and
Anecia Toyukak paged through a notebook of mathematics lessons based on traditional
Yup’ik concepts. The couple, shown here, is part of a team of elders, educators, curriculum
writers and others, including University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) professor
Jerry Lipka, who have collaborated for more than 30 years. During that time, the group has produced 10 culture-based mathematics
lessons for elementary-school students.
In the Yup’ik view, the human body is the
measure of the world, whether the item to be gauged is small, such as one
element of a hat pattern, or large, like the distance to be traveled between
two features in the rugged Alaska landscape. “Here’s how we measure,” said
Anecia, a retired teacher, as she jumped up to demonstrate computing lengths with
a portion of the forefinger, the hand in open and closed configurations, one or
both outstretched arms and more.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Alaska
Native Educational Program and the National Science Foundation have supported
the project, called Math in a Cultural Context. “All curricula are culturally
based. The key question is, on whose culture is it based?,” asks an article in the Journal of American Indian Education that
was co-authored by Lipka, UAF professor Joan Webster and Evelyn Yanez, a Yup’ik
educator and UAF adjunct professor.
Schools across Alaska have taught the curriculum.
Research reveals that students of several Alaska tribes,
as well as non-Native students, show improvement in test scores and outperform
their peers when they use the system. This is according to scholarly papers in publications such as The Journal for Research in Mathematics Education by Lipka and
co-authors including Dora Andrew-Ihrke, a Yup’ik educator and UAF adjunct
professor. The curriculum is also “a small step in reversing power relations
and what constitutes legitimate school knowledge,” the authors write.
Through the innovative, heritage-based lessons,
children develop skills in measuring, which leads to understanding numbers, proportionality,
geometry, algebra, data collection, graphing, probability and more. The modules
successfully cover in the earliest grades what is generally considered higher mathematics,
according to Sassa Peterson, a Yup’ik educator and the project’s translator. “Both
Evelyn and I have wished the curriculum had been available when we were
young teachers,” Peterson said in a separate interview with UAF colleagues.
In the module “Patterns and Parkas,” the
youngest students investigate the principals of geometry by folding an uneven
item to create a symmetrical form, such as a square or circle. Practically
speaking, this lesson can be used, for example, to make parka border patterns.
It’s also conceptually important—critical for understanding symmetry, a basic idea
of Yup’ik mathematical thinking. “You cannot have the whole without the half,”
said Yanez.
In “Star Navigation,” fourth, fifth and
sixth graders use cultural knowledge about angles and the stars to determine location, direction and distance. In “Salmon Fishing,” sixth and seventh graders integrate
probability and environmental science, as they study salmon species and their
life cycles.
The eminently practical curriculum supports
Yup’ik culture and values. The classroom is child-centered, with students
working collaboratively. At home, the students see their parents and
grandparents using similar approaches to make clothes, boots, snowshoes,
kayaks, fish-drying racks and much more, according to Anecia and Mike Toyukak. Peterson
described traditional Yup’ik life as “rich in mathematics.”
The project has an international component, said the Toyukaks. In
addition to working with partners in Alaska, the group has explored the relationship
of culture and mathematics with Sami people in Sweden and Norway, Koryaks from
Russia’s Kamchatka region, Yapese in Micronesia and Inuit in Greenland.
The work is ongoing, as the researchers continue to meet with elders and
delve into the subtleties of the mathematics embedded in Yup’ik daily
activities. “We’ve moved forward in just the last six months,” said Lipka.
“We’re even learning from topics we first considered years ago.”
One recent realization has been that certain
ideas are embedded in the language and used when referring to varied activities.
Yanez explained: “We use the same words when making baskets, making parkas, navigating
by boat and so on.” As a result, the team is working
on supplemental learning modules that are currently in a pilot, testing phase
in about a dozen schools.
Group members hope they inspire other communities to work with
their elders on their own curricula. Said Lipka: “We want to encourage others
to see the beauty in this process.”
Text and photos c. Stephanie Woodard.