Voices of Native American Educators

Abstract

Voices of Native American Indian Educators: Integrating History, Culture, and Language to Improve Learning Outcomes for Native American Indian Students, edited by Sheila T. Gregory, is a comprehensive resource that provides a vivid portrait of best practices for Native American students, as experienced by Native American educators. This book is based primarily on research studies, both quantitative and qualitative, that offer new, practical strategies for teachers to improve the academic performance of Native American students. All of the contributors in this book are Native American Indian educators who have experienced success in their teaching practices by using a variety of multidisciplinary approaches in their practice of teaching. In this collection, “culture” is considered to be constantly evolving and is described as something that can both be learned and unlearned. Furthermore, people who share the same culture do not always behave in the same ways. The complexity of culture, then, is a tremendous challenge for many researchers who strive to quantitatively define the characteristics of a population, rather than contextualize through culturally relevant pedagogy. Voices of Native American Indian Educators seeks to fill this enormous gap in the literature by providing both a variety of scholarly research on best practices and a generous list of references and other resources available to teachers on Native American Indian students.