The Alaska Board of Education has unanimously approved new reading standards for Alaska Native languages, so students from kindergarten to third grade can now have their reading skills evaluated in an Alaska Native language instead of English.
The new standards, which are broader than the state’s current reading standards, give students learning an Alaska Native language another option to meet reading requirements set by the Alaska Reads Act. Schools are allowed to fit the standards to their cultural and linguistic needs.
The standards recognize students can achieve literacy in state languages other than English.
Jamie Shanley, assistant director of education with Sealaska Heritage Institute, a nonprofit Tribal organization that helped create the standards, said doing so was a challenge. “That was a really hard clashing of two worlds, a Western ideal of education with this standards-based system and an Indigenous worldview,” she told the Alaska Beacon. “And so, this group really has [a] beautiful way of meshing those two things.”
The standards define reading differently. Shgen George, co-owner of Teaching Indigenous Design for Every Student, an education consulting group, explained that Alaska Native cultures do read, even if there wasn’t historically a written language.
“Reading is looking at things and gathering information,” George said. “And so we really talked a lot about how we have been reading things this whole time. And so we really had these deep discussions about reading the weather and reading our environment and reading our regalia and our art.”
There are Alaska Native language programs and schools all around the state, including the Tlingit Culture, Language, and Literacy school in Juneau.
Several educators from TCLL helped to form the standards. Principal Molly Yerkes said the school already uses elements of the new standards and that they will help schools take the next steps to develop ways to assess reading in Alaska Native languages.
“In Alaska, every community has to develop their own,” Yerkes said. “It’s not like something you can buy in Texas and McDougal Littell. So I think this adoption of these standards will support the creation of quality materials and also hopefully lead to a support for more native speakers of Indigenous languages to become teachers.”
She said the TCLL staff are working with researchers to develop assessments for Lingít learners.