As a Diné woman in higher education, I understand what it means to have to live in and between the borderlands of cultures. As a child and a young adult, I’ve lived in a wide array of places: from the red earth and rocky mesas of the Navajo Indian Reservation in Arizona to the cold and icy suburbs of Anchorage, Alaska and to the high mountain desert terrain of the Bishop Paiute Indian Reservation in California. In order to pursue my college degrees, I’ve had to migrate to places like the college town of Davis in central California and finally to rainy (but vibrant) Seattle, Washington. In each location I’ve succeeded in creating a home and a space for myself in school and the community while simultaneously adapting to these new cultural landscapes along the way. While these experiences have certainly contributed to my own sense of adaptability and appreciation of multiculturalism, these experiences also provided me with firsthand knowledge of what it means to become “bicultural”. Becoming bicultural is to learn not only how to cope with constantly moving from culture to culture, but how to learn to use this experience to become resilient and thrive in shifting environments.
My personal experiences have led me to want to understand the experiences of children from diverse backgrounds who come to school quite adept and fluent in their home culture, but suddenly find themselves having to learn how to adapt to the unfamiliar culture of school – possibly at the expense of their education. The goal of my research is to try to understand the reasons why Native American children experience home-school discontinuities, the effect that these discontinuities have on their literacy experiences, and what kinds of changes educators can make at the curricular, pedagogical, and structural levels to increase American Indian students’ access to literacy in meaningful ways. As a researcher and future professor in the field of education, I am in the process of devising strategies in which diverse students can begin to translate their rich cultural backgrounds into strengths in the classroom and learn to become bicultural in the both the culture of home and mainstream school culture. My current interest in digital storytelling is based on the concept that in combining the oral, written, and digital storytelling formats, Native American families will be able to gain exposure and access to new multiple and powerful forms of literacy, while having opportunities to draw from their existing forms of language, literacy, and cultural resources.
