True Story 10.12
Two styles of pupil behavior in a remote Inuit classroom
The setting for this story
This account is based on a film study of Inuit schooling in Alaska. One of the schools was located at Tuluksak, a tiny, remote village. Operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, it consisted of two classrooms, a cafeteria, a few other rooms, and living quarters for Mr. and Mrs. Pilot, Anglos who had taught there for 20 years. The film study was led by John Collier of California State University.
A story of misaligned minds15
Using English as the language of instruction, Mrs. Pilot oversaw about twenty Inuit pupils in her neat and well-equipped classroom. Her style of teaching was structured, paced, and extensively verbalized. From a conservative point of view, hers was a well-taught, well-disciplined class.
In the opinion of John and his filming team, Mrs. Pilot’s classroom was overstructured and the pupils were sleepy, dull, and overtrained in proper classroom behavior. There was virtually no spontaneous communication by the pupils either to Mrs. Pilot or with each other.
Once each week an old man from the village would come to tell stories in the pupils’ native language. The film of one of his visits reveals that “child-to-child communication changed. While they were intently listening to the storyteller, the children formed a warmly communicating group, expressing their acceptance of each other by body contact, hair caressing, and hand clasping.”
Later that same day, Mrs. Pilot brought in two Inuit-made models of forest hunting camps complete with canoe, meat cache, and tools. The children became engaged with the models at once. Soon, however, Mrs. Pilot took a pointer and began to explain details of the models and ask questions. The pupils resumed their proper classroom behavior, watching and waiting throughout Mrs. Pilot’s lecture and questioning. It was the filming team’s opinion that Mrs. Pilot actually had distracted the pupils from the models instead of stimulating closer examination of their details.
John’s question
What is the best explanation for the two distinct behavior styles of these Inuit pupils?
Critique of story 10.12
After the old man visited and the pupils quickly became engaged with his story and each other, John and the filming team concluded that the children were relieved to be free to interact using their native language. The team felt that this conclusion was supported when, later that day, the pupils were left alone with the two models and again became engaged quickly.
Note, however, that while the old man was telling his story, the pupils’ interactions with each other were largely nonverbal (body contact, hair caressing, hand clasping). And when the pupils became engaged with the models, it was not because the models were talking with them.
So the team’s conclusion – that the children were relieved to interact in their native tongue – is only half right. Human communication occurs via spoken language plus a range of nonverbal indicators such as tone of voice, nonlinguistic sounds (e.g., a sigh, a chuckle), gestures, postures, touch, facial expressions (especially around the eyes), interpersonal distances, even extended silences. Spoken language never occurs in isolation.
The answer to John’s question cannot be framed only in terms of language use. A better answer will reference the extent to which the pattern of classroom interaction is congruent with the entire pattern of communicative behavior that the pupils, daily since their births, have been participating in as family and community members. Like most indigenous peoples, the Inuits’ patterns are communitarian, characterized by mutuality and collaboration. Children learn mainly via observation and imitation of adults, i.e., holistically, rarely via direct instruction, i.e., analytically. Elders’ storytelling, a holistic approach to transferring knowledge, also plays a crucial role in Inuit children’s enculturation. Mrs. Pilot’s adult-directed classroom could hardly be more different.
For thought
Why were John and his team quick to point to language use as the causal factor? The answer is that, for us modern folks, language is the in-your-face mode of human communication and an indispensable element of technological progress, of our children’s schooling, of the daily news and gossip cycle, and of whatever captures our attention moment to moment. But language is only one of many interrelated ways in which we communicate meaning with one another.
Surrounded on all sides by tangible and conceptual evidence of analytical thought, as we modern people are throughout our lives, it is indispensable for us to begin as youngsters to acquire the skills of perceiving, learning, and thinking analytically. (This is the fundamental purpose of schooling.)
But that’s not so in the case of indigenous peoples, whose world allows them to perceive, learn, and think largely or entirely holistically. You and I did, too, during our earliest days of life. But then we had no choice but to learn analysis (because analysis infused everything around us).
I was drawn to cultural anthropology because it promised the widest possible perspective on human interaction. In graduate school, I became intrigued by research into nonverbal communication, which addresses a vast sweep of behavior including even out-of-awareness interactional rhythms (fascinating!). The more one knows about cultural anthropology, the less likely he or she will be to point to language use as the sole explanatory factor for any change in a group’s interactional patterns.
Related stories
Story 4.04 tells a similar story about Inuit pupils’ culturally natural learning process being inhibited in a classroom. Stories 1.15, 4.14, and 7.09 discuss what some educators describe as the classroom “passivity” of indigenous students.
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Endnotes:
15 Collier, J., 69–70; in this document, the indigenous people are identified as “Eskimo.” The name Pilot is a pseudonym.
Full citations are available at misalignedminds.info/References.