Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

388 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
CULTURAL MEDIATORS OF LEARNING FOR NATIVE CANADIAN
(ABORIGINAL) STUDENTS IN THE FORMAL SCHOOL SYSTEM
Using cultural historical theory as explicated above, I set out to investigate and understand
aspects of Aboriginal cultural socialization and its mediating influence on the learning of urban
Aboriginal students from low-income backgrounds in Manitoba, western Canada. In both Canada
and the United States the persistent failure of Aboriginal/Native students in the public school
system has been consistently explained in terms of the differences between the sociocultural environments
of their homes and communities and those of the school. Particularly in the case of urban
Aboriginal students who constitute the highest incidence of school failure and dropout in Canada,
the lack of Aboriginal cultural knowledge among teachers—who are predominantly middle-class
Euro-Canadians—has been identified as a significant factor in school failure, prompting calls
for the inclusion of Aboriginal cultural perspectives across school curricula, classroom practices,
and teacher preparation programs. For me, these calls raised the following questions: (1) What
specific aspects of Aboriginal cultural experience/socialization influence and mediate learning on
which teachers can draw to support and enhance classroom learning for Aboriginal students? (2)
Would these cultural experiences be similar and supportive of classroom learning for all students
from a particular Aboriginal group or should we base interventions on regularities discerned in
individuals’ histories of participation in and familiarity with cultural activities? (3) What are the
histories of individuals’ participation and engagement in activities in their cultural communities?
(4) What are the patterns and variations of engagement of shared cultural practices among particular
groups of Aboriginals? (5) How does such participation/engagement contribute to learning
and development both in the community and in the school? These questions led me to a one
year study conducted among Canadian Aboriginal students, undertaken to identify aspects of
their cultural socialization (existing knowledge structures) that influenced/mediated how they
received, negotiated, and responded to curriculum materials, teaching methods/strategies, and
learning tasks in their high school social studies classroom. Knowledge of cultural mediators of
Aboriginal student learning is critical to our understanding of how teachers could best adapt classroom
materials and processes to enable Aboriginal students to have generous and positive access
to their cultural heritage while also acquiring knowledge and confidence with the content and
codes of the dominant cultures. Historically, Aboriginals have faced tremendous social inequities
that are structured into the fiber of Canadian society and of schools. Consequently, Aboriginal
students suffer from enduring gaps in academic achievement compared to their more affluent
peers or peers who belong to dominant cultural groups. In this regard, Aboriginals share many
similarities with other ethnic minorities, including students of European descent who experience
persistent intergenerational poverty in both Canada and the United States.
RESEARCH METHODS AND PROCEDURES
The Aboriginal students who participated in this study came from the Ojibwe, Cree, and
Metis groups (Metis are mixed descendants of European and Canadian Aboriginal groups). The
study occurred at two sites simultaneously. One site consisted of Ojibwe and Cree communities
in a large urban location in western Canada where my Ojibwe research assistant and I carried
out prolonged observations (one visit per week over 46 weeks) of ten research participants’
engagement in shared activities in their communities. The other research site was an alternative
high school with a very large Aboriginal student population (90%) where the research participants
attended school, and where we observed classroom materials and teaching/learning processes in
a grade 9 social studies classroom once every week over the entire 2001 academic year.
Data for the study was collected in an integrated grade 9 social studies classroom with 80 percent
Aboriginal students, 20 percent whites, and two teachers (one was Euro-Canadian and the other