Ask Mike Huerth, a Social Studies teacher at Nawayee Center School, about his philosophy of education and he’ll tell you, “…a teacher needs to be a learner. They need to teach students to be learners.” Behind this statement are more than 30 years of experience as a teacher, administrator and researcher in educating Native kids. Through the successes and challenges of his varied career, Huerth believes that we already have the methodologies that can help us become far more effective as educators of Native youth. What we need is to believe in the potential of Native students to succeed.
Despite an obvious passion for his work, a career in Native education was far from Huerth’s early ambitions. Sharing a history that is all too common among Native people, he grew up in a family that did not acknowledge their Ojibwe identity. It was his mother, who was white, who sat down with her sons and told them they were part Indian. For Huerth, who was six years old, this was a pivotal moment in his life. “From my perspective, it came at the right time to make a significant difference to who I am,” Huerth said.
After attending seminary school for four years, Huerth enrolled at the University of Minnesota where he worked with Roger Buffalohead, a well-known and esteemed local educator. While Huerth had no interest in teaching at that time given his introverted personality and a problem with stuttering, nonetheless he absorbed an intellectual framework that would be of use throughout his career. When he graduated with combined Indian Studies and Psychology majors, he left school with little idea about what to do next. Marriage and the birth of his first son pushed him to accept a job at South High School teaching Native American studies. Without any training and against the inclination of his own nature, Huerth began his long journey as an educator.
Despite his misgivings, teaching intrigued him. During his four years at South High School, he went back to school for his degree in Education. When his position was “excessed,” he found a new position at Flandreau Indian School where better student attendance allowed him to understand teaching on a new level. His combined 12 years at two schools helped him see the challenges facing teachers. He continued developing his innate ability to observe and synthesize results, studying the ways in which certain teachers seemed to be more successful in reaching students. After sitting in and observing Fred Smith’s class at Flandreau, Huerth said, “I learned more than in most of my college classes.”
Propelled by a restless desire to understand how things work, Huerth became curious about the process behind running a school and moved into administration. After a brief stint with the Indian Education Department, he became an Assistant Principal for six years and a Principal for 19 years, working at three different high schools and one K-8 school.
During his tenure in administration, Huerth’s view of education continued to expand, adding to his understanding of teaching methodologies that were successful with Native students. While at Henry High School, a teacher residency program impressed him with its potential for training teachers to be learners by pairing new and experienced teachers in a mentoring relationship. Novice teachers had support during the challenging early years, greatly improving the percentage that would continue to teach, and experienced teachers were introduced to new ideas. After spreading to other high schools, budget cuts would eventually decimate this program.
At the same time, Huerth was pummeled by the challenges of working within a bureaucracy. Despite having been recruited to rebuild the failed Four Winds School, Huerth’s efforts were stymied by the loss of staff positions that were systematically stripped even as the school continued to grow. “It was a heart wrenching experience,” Huerth said. “When somebody hands you something that is the answer to your dreams and then strips the very tools that you need, it’s like a mechanic trying to fix a car with a pair of pliers. The tools are gone.”
After four years of struggle, Huerth was ready for change. He retired after 25 years of working as a principal, hoping to find a new environment. After landing a “wonderful” job as a Principal in Taos, New Mexico, family needs prevented him from accepting it. Instead he accepted a position as the interim Director of Indian Education and spent a bruising year rebuilding the department. The district did not rehire him. “I think probably people don’t want to hear truly what you’re thinking in a bureaucracy,” Huerth said. Yet it was also an invigorating experience that showed him how productive and hopeful education could be within a positive, supportive environment.
A brief period of unemployment brought him to yet another perspective within education, working as a consultant for the Phillips Indian Educators web site. His project was to conduct an Appreciative Inquiry with 11 teachers into what works in educating Native kids. (Indigenous Education: What Works with Native Kids, www.pieducators.com/wisdom/writings-and-articles). After interviewing teachers on their successes, Huerth looked for applicable research that both supported and explained why a particular approach was effective. This project focused his interest on creating a composite of recommendations that teachers could use in teaching Native kids. At the same time, the process of learning what approaches were working (Appreciative Inquiry) and measuring the effectiveness of those methods in daily teaching (Action Research), combined with supportive theory, became his methodology for bringing critical analysis to teaching.
Huerth’s article, Indigenous Education: What Works with Native Kids, is a clearly-written, deeply informative summation of why it’s essential for teachers to understand the different learning needs of their kids, and the ways in which Native kids learn and why. The interviews have been organized into four categories: Whole Brain Research, Personality Type, Tribal/Relationship Orientation, and Undoing the Results of Failing Systems. The result is an informative compilation that is useful not only for teachers but also for anyone involved in working with Native youth.
Among the findings that emerged from Action Research were four points mentioned frequently in the interviews that were supported by additional research.
- Teach in a visual way, for example, allowing Native students to use pictures for notes. Statistically, Native kids tend to be right brained. Even Native people raised in adopted families may still exhibit characteristics typical of Native people.
- Native students are tribal, which means that extended family is important. Allow students to work in voluntary groups.
- Understand there is a predisposition for Native kids to be introverted. Furthermore, there is a predisposition for the culture to be introverted. Research by Jane Kise on the Myers-Briggs Personality Assessment suggests that the personality type most common to Native culture is one that creates an expectation that is supportive of introverted behavior.
- Recognize there is a culture of poverty in which kids learn early that they’re unsuccessful. Successful teachers find ways to “scaffold success,” teaching students how to feel successful about their accomplishments.
In other words, when viewed from a composite perspective, Huerth explained, Native kids are unlike the other kids in the classroom. Not recognizing this difference has led to Native students failing school in dramatic numbers across the country. Rather than examining the ways in which the public schools are failing to reach these students, the system has applied a conventional mindset that perceives the responsibility for failing as belonging to the child rather than the teacher. Yet, like the proverbial miners’ canary that is first to die when exposed to toxic fumes, the failure of Native students is warning us of a toxic situation within our educational system that will ultimately affect every student.
Teachers who work from a multitude of approaches, who bring a “richness” to their methodology, are far more successful in reaching a broad range of students, including Native kids. When asked if this approach could be applied in public schools, Huerth’s answer was an emphatic Yes. “The kids here at Center School have been bruised and battered more than any kids in school,” Huerth said. “They have been taught thoroughly by schools that they are unsuccessful. And yet, I found many of those kids, given the right richness, the right methodology, they can be excited about what they’re doing.”
Huerth strongly recommends that every teacher should be an action researcher. As an example, Huerth described teaching a lesson in History on New World exploration by European powers. If he were to approach this topic in a traditional way by assigning textbook pages, “I’m not going to get beyond the third sentence with the kids,” Huerth said. By asking instead that the students use the internet to find two Spanish explorers and explain who they were and what they were after, students were actively “exploring the explorers” in a way that incorporated the unique learning style of Native students. The process, however, is not complete unless the teacher is also testing the effectiveness of what they’re doing.
In what seems, in hindsight, a logical progression in a career that has encompassed education from a multitude of perspectives, teaching again at Center School feels like coming full circle for Huerth. “As I’ve said to the kids, this is probably the most enjoyable job of my life,” Huerth said. “I have been spending the last five months relearning but also learning things I never knew before. What I did learn in the process of doing the interviews of successful educators of Native kids is that it’s the richness of teaching that’s successful with Native kids. Therefore, one of my adventures in being a teacher now is to increase the richness of what I’m doing.”
Cultural content of lessons is also important, Huerth said, such as providing an inclusive perspective on his lesson on Spanish explorers in terms of their impact on indigenous cultures. Yet just adding Native culture or perspective to a course will not succeed; the course must also be taught culturally. From his early years of teaching, Huerth learned firsthand that how students are taught is as important as what they are taught. “When I asked my kids how they liked to learn, most of the kids say, ‘I like stories.’ Well, stories are very right brained, stories are very family oriented in a sense, they draw on a lot of those touchstones that work with Native kids.” In other words, teaching in a way that keeps in mind the composite that works for Native students.
The challenge for many teachers, however, includes isolation from their peers during long days with limited prep time, and lack of support from administration. For substantive change to occur, teachers need to be encouraged to try new methods, evaluate their success, and learn from each other.
Perhaps most important, however, is a teacher needs to be a learner who is committed to helping students become learners. “If I give them a textbook and say, here, I try to give them knowledge,” Huerth said. “If I say, go find a bunch of explorers and see what they did, I’m asking them to learn.” Teachers who can teach learning provide a process and skills for working with whatever challenges they face in their lives. Likewise, teachers who seem themselves as learners are continually working to improve their game, much as Michael Jordan was never satisfied with what he knew. And, finally, teachers need to believe, as Mike Huerth does, that Native students love to learn just as much as every other student.