Episode 6 - Michael Little Crow - Big Ideas

As the Little Crow Flies, straight talk from Indigenous communities. In this podcast, we'll take a look at the previous five episodes from Fire Circle's participants. This will be an analysis of what I have learned by listening to their voice. By interacting with them a second and sometimes third time, this research is based upon an Indigenous research method, as taught to me by Donna and Many Bad Horses of the Northern Cheyenne. He would meet with a group of friends that I had in Corvallis, Oregon, and he would have what he called a village. So for three days, we would live together on a piece of land one of the friends had in the Soul Creek area of Corvallis. And at the beginning of the village, he would ask us to reflect on our life, on things we wanted to know, what sort of was the question we had that would help us make progress with our life. And then within the confines of a personal area, we would put that question up to the sky, deep in our hearts, and then we would engage with the activities over those three days, not directly asking anybody about these questions that we had. But over the three days, the various activities we had, we'd do a sweat lodge every evening, have a community breakfast in the morning, meals together, talking together, spend that time. Over those three days, it seemed like in every case, each one of us would find the answer to those questions we were asking. We found it in the community we had developed, the conversations we had, and we learned. That's what this podcast has been about, gathering the voices from the community that I've worked with during the FIRE Circle's professional development, bringing them back together to see what lessons they learned, how they are applying them in their personal teaching practices, and what advice they have for myself and others from the lessons that they've learned and the journey that they've been on. So as I expand a little bit more on these major themes that I've picked up, I would like to especially thank Velma, Claire, Frank, and Pauline, my cohorts who together created the FIRE Circle. We tested this out on ourselves for about a year, doing readings and coming up with ideas, and then we developed what we called the FIRE Circle and ran sort of two sections of it. So two of the participants in this podcast have come from the first running of the FIRE Circle, and three of them came from the second running during the summer of 2022. So the major themes that I picked up, one in particular, was the importance of listening, listening deeply, listening actively, and there was really three components of the listening we need to do in our life, maybe four, I think, as I'm talking them out. So we need to be willing to listen to those who have more experience than us. Maybe they've been in the teaching profession longer. Maybe they've had greater trainings, but we need to listen to their voice. We also have those that are our peers that we work together. Maybe we've been in this position for the same amount of time with those people, but we have those that we view as peers, and they can give us particular insights that wouldn't come from either of the other two groups. And then as educators, we always need to listen to those who we might see as having less experience than us, at least as far as teaching and running a class, but certainly they have experience and more experience than us in what their needs are in life. Yes, these are the ones we call our students, our learners. And I always tell my students from long time is they are the ones who have the most experience with themselves, right, of anyone else other than maybe their mother. They have had the most time with themselves, and so they have experience about what they need, about what they want, and we need to listen to that. And I guess the fourth point that came up as I was talking, the oral traditions bring out different insights than the written traditions. And as I was speaking, I was thinking we also need to listen to our environment, all the things that are around us. Yes, the birds, the living things, the inanimate objects, the feelings, emotions we pick up from our surroundings, listen to those as well. And as we put all that together, listening to our own voice within. But if we do this listening, listening and reflecting, we'll be able to move forward in our teaching practice in a way that is going to be more successful because we have gained the data we need to make our own decisions and to make our activities engaging and containing deep lessons. Another thing that I developed from listening and analyzing the five podcasts is that the way I did the analysis is I conducted the discussions. I was part of those discussions initially. I would edit the audio to make it smooth, take out some open spaces, all that kind of stuff. So that would be a second listening. I would listen again to do a fine editing on the audio. And then I did a transcription. I used a software package that did the main heavy duty transcribing. But I went through and edited the words that it didn't pick up correctly and those kind of things. So there was a written part where I engaged deeply with the discussions and then reflecting on them. And that's the way this oral tradition has taught me to do this analysis. So the other thing I picked up was the need to lead by example. Karen, in her podcast, gave this story about how she taught her students the need to show up, to be there ready to learn, ready to engage. And even when life circumstances create difficulties for us, she showed by being able to be there for her son when he was going through his treatments, his medical treatments, be there for her family, and also be there for her students and her colleagues all throughout it as best she could do. But by her example, as she says, she showed up. She was there for everyone and for herself. And with that thought, Hanyara talked about the practice of what she called doing circles. This reminded me of a tradition we have of the talking circles, sitting down and being able to talk. But why we call them talking circles, they really are listening circles because one person is talking, but everybody else in the circle needs to be listening. And while the person is talking, they also should be listening to what they're saying. So maybe a listening circle is more appropriate. But that need for self-care, hey, what's going on? Let's talk it out. Let's see if there's solutions to any of the emotional difficulties we all are going through. And finally, Iva made mention in her last portion of her advice is that Indigenous educators need to find their leadership voice because our students are looking for that. They're looking for us, our colleagues are looking for us to take the lead and saying this is what's needed. We need to establish culturally effective, culturally appropriate, and culturally successful ways of teaching and interacting with one another. And we need to engage in a way that educates our colleagues who don't have this experience. Another major item that came out to me was the importance of learning within a context. So we had a couple examples of a cultural context. Iva brought up her work with the tipi making and how that involved looking at circumference and area and circles and hypotenuses and triangles and all these other mathematical things. But not just for the sake of these mathematical things, but because it was culturally necessary. And that story of the little people and how their hearts were equilateral triangles. And also was mentioned several times, Jeffrey and Joey and Karen mentioning about the birch bark canoe, how that involved mathematical knowledge, planning, scheduling, and a way of bringing the cultural knowledge into use in a way that was sustainable. And so along with this learning in context, using games and simulations can help bring that context to even greater life. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to teaching math, that we're not just teaching formulas and numbers and how to do arithmetic, but we're teaching methods of quantity that allow students to make good decisions in life, to collect data, to apply it to a situation, and to make good decisions. Another thing, and when we teach, a strong thing the academy has given to many of us is this idea that there needs to be control. The teacher needs to implement a system of discipline and needs to control the learners. While indigenous thoughts are that we need to empower our learners to make their own decisions. I'll just mention a few things that, because this has been a big struggle for me. I have colleagues, I was in a training, and one of the things that was told by the facilitator was as you teach this class, be sure to hold your students accountable, hold their feet to the fire. And I had to look that up, that sounded like it wouldn't be too pleasant, and it's not. It comes from torture, but the fact that you need to make your students do something they don't enjoy. Why don't we flip that, make the activity something that are enjoyable, make the learning enjoyable, and then the students will want to do it. That's the approach I think that came out of these five various podcasts. The need to allow our learners to see the path for themselves, to decide and to find ways to make the learning enjoyable. Not having to control others, but working to inspire them. And kind of what ties into me with that thought is the thought of relatedness that really ran all the way through each of these discussions. That we are related to one another as colleagues, we are related to our administrators we work with, hopefully, while having the best interests of our students, and certainly we are related to our students as uncles and aunties, grandma and grandpa, mother and father, a brother and sister. The familial relationship is there. My wife so often has taught me that from her culture in Thailand, teachers are the second parents. So they do not replace the parents, but during the day they are there in the parent's state. They have to take care of all aspects of that student, their emotional well-being, their learning, their physical well-being. This idea of looking at our students that we are engaging with as our relatives. Remember Bob Tom from the Siletz, I was into a talk from him and I did much work from him with him when I was in Oregon. But in a talk he was given once, he says, you know, that's what the purpose of life is. The purpose of life is to make relatives. That's what he was taught. He said, so each time we meet people, we have to think we are making relatives. We are relating to them. We're building on maybe we've seen them before. We're building on that. If this is the first time, then we're laying a foundation for a future, deeper relationship. This idea of relatedness in education. And all of this ties back to the theories I've looked at, the self-determination theory, the need for the feeling of competency, the need for autonomy for persons to decide for themselves, and the psychological need for related. Once we have all those three, then we are psychologically sound and we have what we need to move forward in our lives. We should be treating our students as adults. I know early educators, elementary educators, there is more guidance you might need to give to your students than you would at high school. But somewhere along the line, we need to keep thinking in terms of that, that we are working with our students not to give them content knowledge about some specific discipline, but that in addition to that, the main goal is to develop them as human beings, to develop them as individuals who can make decisions on their own, who have control over their selves. And that is the main lessons I've learned. So I hope to hear from some of you about what you've learned from these podcasts. There's so much more. And I thank you for listening and for being a part of this either as an observer or as one who contributed. Thanks so much. Om Nithyanandesvara. We are all related.