Eskimo student exchange program

Admissions requirements vary, so be sure to confirm which test s you need with the institutions that interest you. ACT : a curriculum-based multiple-choice assessment that tests reading, English, mathematics, and science, with an optional essay section.

Usually the students are shy, but all the students opened up. By the end of the week they were best friends. We had some really great discussions on indigenous rights. You will participate in hands-on volunteer work at a local public school, bringing a whole new world of learning opportunities to children in need.

Contact us and we will provide more details of our programs, as well as the next steps to participate in any of our programs. Guatemala Summer Experience Is a student exchange program that provides tools to adolescents by which they learn and grow through enriching cultural experiences with the diverse people and ecosystems in Guatemala. Discover a new culture and friendships that will last a lifetime.

Unforgettable experiences. Profile of our participants Boys and girls between the ages of 11 and Students who value cultural enrichment and diversity. Desire to learn and grow through experiences. Educators have long been aware that there may be a tipping point in the balance of biracial student bodies, where behavior can change rapidly.

Our analysis demonstrated this thesis. In Bethel, where 85 percent of the students were Eskimos, the low stress was directly related to the relaxed pace set by the dominant Eskimo group culture. The high percentage of Eskimos carried the White 15 percent of the student body along with this pace. This saturation of Eskimo style certainly made education pleasanter and more palatable to the Eskimos and sharply reduced the stress reasonably expected in acculturation, especially in adolescent years.

Anchorage exhibited a painful environment where White pace and values weighed down the Native students and made life intolerable for some in the schools.

There is no evidence that this would slow the educational process. Quite the contrary, a relaxed fulfilled student internalizes and communicates better than the rigid, aching student who has lost his sense of well-being. This is where the heaviest dropout rare takes place. And here many minority students are facing their first bitter inequality with the dominant society. But in other cultures adolescence is not necessarily a period of inevitable stress. In Bethel High School; adolescence appeared not to be such an important factor.

High school students continued to be relaxed and socially fulfilled in both community and school. There was no dramatic dropout rate as adolescence proceeded. In Anchorage, as we have stated, this curve was reversed, and Native students conformed to the conventional model. Stress grew higher with each school year. Many were faced with severe economic insecurities that in Bethel would be borne partly by the extended family culture.

Thus, school became a greater challenge, and education, for some, became a humiliation instead of a stimulating fulfillment. Obviously, as we have observed on film, White adolescents were also suffering. But they were White and had the security of White success to pull them through. In terms of age cycles in education, the Native student appears to have a better chance of fulfillment within his own supporting environment and cultural group. These observations are written about the present acculturation process in this phase of American history- now!

We are speaking of circumstances best adapted to becoming modern Eskimos. First we must educate for secure, fulfilled, and resourceful Eskimos. When we accomplish this, the right door to the future will open itself. Our key-sort cards gave us a rough statistical comparison of the differences and similarities of Alaskan schools. These indicated that there is basically no difference in the education presented to Eskimo students by the schools, regardless of whether the schools are run by the BIA, by missionaries, by the State of Alaska, or by the Anchorage municipal school system.

In working over the film to find areas of similarity and differences, we found consistently that in all areas related to the educational approach and administration-in curriculum, classroom appearance, educational materials and their use, teaching methods, general teacher behavior, and teacher relationship to students-there were no significant differences between systems.

Indeed it would be difficult to look at any class in the sample on film and be able to identify it as being BIA, stare, or public school. For this reason the research team often exhibited a certain amount of confusion as to which classes wert in which system-until they memorized the code numbers on the film boxes.

To be sure, within each school system there were different sorts of teachers who approached their students in often widely different ways, but each seemed to exhibit the same range of approaches, with no major difference between systems-only between teachers.

If there are basic faults in Eskimo education, these failures are shared by all of the schools. It is essential to be absolutely clear on this, for many people with varying motives feel that emancipating the Eskimo from the BIA will solve the problem of Native education.

This is fallacious and hides the true shape of the problem, which is that White schools in Alaska or elsewhere in the United States have not met the challenge of equal education for the ethnically and culturally different child.

There were fine and dedicated teachers-and ineffectual teachers-in all the schools. But any superiority was in terms of the materials and needs of American culture, and did not thereby necessarily meet the needs of Eskimo education. English, reading, and writing are all taught intensely in each school. If then, the Eskimos were unable to read and speak clear English, it means we must question how appropriate these skills and methods and equipment were for Eskimos in the Arctic.

We did not observe any teaching of English as a second language or any other effort specifically designed to bridge the chasm between the Eskimo and White worlds. None of the school systems in the sample could be said to balance out this negativity. Possibly the articulate St. The philosophy of education in all these schools directs the effort toward assimilating the Native child.

Nationally schools follow the principle laid down by Theodore Roosevelt that there is no place in American democracy for two languages, two cultures, or two different allegiances. Education for the minority child has always attempted to Americanize him and separate him from his cultural distinctions.

We saw nowhere in Alaska any appreciable departure from this philosophy. The BIA administration in the Kuskokwim suffers with this challenge and worries about Eskimo culture fading. The state schools supply their libraries with literature on Eskimo history and culture.

It is there if the Eskimos wish to read it. Public schools in Anchorage also have ethnic studies texts in their libraries. But these books are looked upon as social studies; for the most part they are directed toward White children, explaining the strange exotic ways of Eskimos-rather than life studies for Eskimo personality survival. The BIA schools and teachers are aware they are teaching Eskimos.

Therefore, they may be more responsive to dynamic change, if indeed it were ever to be sanctioned. But we fear this will never happen, not until all schools together face the issue of equal personality opportunities for all children. It is clear that the schools, educationally, are supposed to make the villagers look about and attempt to raise the standards of village life.

This could be a dynamic influence, but we feel the negative effect of this demonstration on Native life destroys any positive end. Defeat in education for Native children, and more seriously later in their mature activities, produces the weight of self inferiority that saps confidence and resiliency.

The educational presence of White teachers with their White culture-the affluent White style necessary for keeping teachers in their jobs in the village schools, whether BIA or state-creates a serious discrepancy that in itself manufactures deprivation among the Eskimos. Depreciation of self is a serious blow to development; and we feel that this disposition, created by the discrepancy that seems inherent in White education, is one of the major causes of failure in Eskimo education.

Culturally, it seems impossible for White teachers in the villages to live in empathy with the Eskimos they are educating. But how did these children feel when they walked home over the snow to their own small, dark, very crowded cabins? What should be the role of the White teacher in the Eskimo community, a role that would motivate students and at the same time not abet their sense of deprivation? We filmed just one teacher who, we felt, had mysteriously mastered this combination of teacher and equal human being.

This is a major cause of the defeat of Native education. It is impressive that the Peace Corps rules out this material discrepancy whenever it can and places its volunteers in Native villages at the same level and in the same style as Native students. In both cases the goal is to reduce the human differences. If critics were fully informed, the charge would be laid against all schools in the Arctic.

How do you expect kids to learn with a curriculum totally unrelated to their lives? His mouth fell open, and he was unable to think of one item. A culturally oriented curriculum that would be taught by White teachers is indeed a challenge to construct in the face of the rapid social change that is sweeping the Arctic. But at the same time there is no denying that the absence of a relevant and culturally supporting curriculum is a major fault in Eskimo education.

Our own records, as we have stared, show very few and sometimes no items in Alaska classrooms that would suggest the schools were not in Ohio. The only consistent Eskimo item we did see was an Alaskan Airlines poster that regularly presents Eskimo portraits. In Tuluksak the gamehunter BIA teacher had a chart of Alaskan furs, and his wife had two models of Eskimo camps, one of which had been made for someone else. The only school that encouraged free-style art work was the Head Start school; everywhere else the children colored Mother Goose dittos.

In early childhood education the only Eskimo-oriented text was one used in Head Start. One first-grade teacher in the state school in Angoon, which is outside of this report, used an approved Native Alaska Reader. The only class in any school that studied a standard text oriented to their environment was the BIA eighth grade in Kwethluk.

The most outstanding demonstration of relevance was Head Start in Kwethluk. Not only were the teachers young women from the village who spoke to the children in Eskimo, but the standard Mother Goose routine had been sufficiently acculturated into Eskimo styles of motion and pantomime, so that the children responded with delight. The second was Eskimo storytelling in first grade in Tuluksak.

Pilot also worked with an Eskimo hunting camp models in an attempt to stimulate language use. Even when questioning by the teacher appeared inappropriate, the model did hold great interest for the young students. The third example on film was made in the eighth-grade BIA class in Kwethluk.