What is Community Empowerment and Academic Success?
Most of us would define academic success in terms of modern schooling, saying it is to be educated in school and home and go on to higher learning so that you can get a good job and have a successful and meaningful life. I m sure you have your own definition. How can we make bilingual education and cross-cultural education tools for community empowerment and academic success? When we talk about bilingual education, we are talking about speaking two languages. As an Iñupiaq, I will talk about the Native language experience in Alaska. When the Guidelines for Strengthening Indigenous Languages were being developed, my concern was that someone needed to be responsible for providing a forum in which our people who had been punished for speaking Iñupiaq in school could come together and tell their story so that their experience could be validated and they could hear an apology from the school system and some avenue for forgiveness and healing would begin. The reason I brought this up is beca
