Decolonizing the Digital Classroom

Educators all across Turtle Island are seeking new ways of increasing their reach to find more accessible ways of teaching their students about Native Peoples and history. However, it is increasingly problematic to access Native works and lesson plans that are created by Native artists and educators. This is due to the insensitive content and Culturally illiterate lesson plans created by non-Native people on teacher-driven sites like TeachersPayTeachers and Pinterest. 

Early on in the Pandemic of 2020, in-person work came to a screeching halt. Due to the current economic climate 100% of our dance company’s performances, speaking engagements, events, and presentations were canceled. 

Turning to the internet to find solutions to teach on a digital landscape, educators were met with the unique opportunity to find lesson plans, presenters, dancers, and storytellers virtually. It was through this new way of sharing that our family dance group realized we, as an online community, can still gather for a story, teach and share dance. Another unexpected impact of this situation was that we could promote further investigation within and across other disciplines and fields to share Natives stories, dances, and music. We worked with many educators on how to correspond, educate and engage in culturally relevant ways that are respectful of Native traditions. These virtual events helped us to bring the Native arts community together. It provided an understanding of how digital tools help us reach target audiences, improve communication, build digital capacity, and encourage empowerment in the digital landscape for Native artists.

As life returned to our new normal, many educators still wanted to gather to find the most conducive information to enhance culturally literate information and experience. We understand that educators do so much for so little, therefore we need to create new ways of increasing their reach and make sure accurate and culturally literate lesson plans and teachings are accessible. We need to create new approaches and develop, broaden, and strengthen our strategic thinking in new ways that are culturally literate.

The solution we need is an App, an app that begins as a game but is actually a huge resource pool. This app will meet the actual needs of educators and will increase discoverability and access to accurate Native lesson plans, stories, and art that are already made and out there but are difficult to find. The app will provide an opportunity to learn about and appreciate Native culture. It will respond to a need to improve Cultural literacy, communication, build digital capacity and encourage empowerment in the digital landscape. This app will enhance opportunities for further work and provide artists and arts organizations with the tools to improve cultural literacy thus opening up opportunities for collaborative unions.

This app is not intended to be all-encompassing, but to provide an overview of key themes and pathways to overcome barriers that made it difficult to communicate effectively due to a decrease in accessibility. This will create a working environment by bridging artists, arts organizations, and citizens together by integrating resources from across Native Country. This app will create a space for sharing stories that are meaningful, educational, and fun.

This app will begin as a game that is divided by age or grade. It can be further divided into regions and Nations. This app will start with questions like: who is it? What is it? Where is it? Who made it? 

Possible game- She is a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, one of the first Native American women to serve in the United States House of Representatives, and the first Native American to become a Cabinet secretary; Who is it? 

Answer- Deb Haaland: a member of the Pueblo of Laguna tribe who hails from New Mexico. A progressive Democrat, she successfully ran for Congress in 2018 and was re-elected in 2020. In December 2020, President Joe Biden nominated Haaland as his Secretary of the Interior. 

This app will provide an understanding of how digital tools can improve communication, and cross-cultural learning training, help reach target audiences, and build digital capacity for Native organizations and artists. 

The content created for the app will be adapted over the course of its time. Each discovery session will influence subsequent updates and will be amended when there is a cultural barrier.

As a solution we will correspond and educate with digital strategists on how to engage in a culturally relevant way that is respectful of Native traditions. The development of the app will be structured to be easily accessible and freely shared with all educators, artists, and organizations.

The foundation for the app is to encourage a greater understanding of digital engagement and participation in a culturally relevant way that is respectful of Native traditions. A bridge between Artists, arts organizations, and the public must be established. This bridge is what this initiative will be creating in order to build relationships, share ideas and explore in the form of a digital toolkit. By providing a clear path, Native artists and arts organizations can respond more effectively and be more accessible through digital technology. To ensure openness, the development of this bridge will be created by Native artists, organizations, and the public. Encouraging dialogue between Native artists and arts organizations will decrease the number of miscommunications and misunderstandings that are common and can act as barriers. This initiative will identify which digital tools need to be addressed to improve interactions with partners and organizations creating opportunities for cultural development. Working directly on the needs of the arts community will maintain accountability and sustainability ultimately leading to increased productivity and capabilities.

We will collaborate with culturally literate organizations and digital strategists that will provide guidance and insight into digital experience that will help Native Artists to become more accessible through digital technology. This collaboration will facilitate artistic contextualization that is culturally relevant and encourage an understanding of how digital tools can help reach target audiences. We will host both traditional and live-streamed workshops in discovery sessions; this component encourages participatory methodologies to encourage participants to uncover key areas of digital strategy interest and to learn about new trends in the digital age as a pilot project. All of the findings of the pilot project will go towards the development of a digital toolkit to be freely shared with indigenous artists and arts organizations. This toolkit will build upon existing solutions by establishing new approaches, and develop, broaden and strengthen our strategic thinking in new ways that are culturally literate for the Native Artist. The technological direction is contingent upon the analysis of existing and emerging findings that will improve digital knowledge.

This app touches upon Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous traditional knowledge. Participation of Native American, First Nations, Inuit or Métis individuals will be encouraged by inviting community members to participate in the appointing of additional cultural consultants. The app will improve how we engage and participate in the Native arts, providing opportunities for further work with our audiences. The result of the app is to promote a greater public understanding of different cultural backgrounds through discussion. Cultural literacy is an important concept to undertake in this app as it will always lead to greater empowerment and benefit all involved. This app will be created to promote further investigation within and/or across other disciplines and fields to respect cultural differences and accessibility through digital technology.

An expected impact of the app is to build a stronger social infrastructure leading to increased individual and collective preparedness for cultural differences.

The app will also serve as both a mirror and a window for Native and Non-Native students. The digital experience has unspoken Eurocentric viewpoints about how we navigate the digital world. Native Artists struggle to share experiences and perspectives due to our cultural barriers. How do we find a way to make the digital experience accommodate sharing experiences and stories of First Peoples perspectives in the digital environment? The overall objective for the app is the development of a digital toolkit. It can be challenging to maintain digital engagement if there is no digital toolkit to use as a road map between Native artists, arts organizations, and the public’s access to that art form. The vision of the app is that it will be developed by artists, organizations, and the public. The app is intended to promote a greater understanding of Native culture and participation in a culturally relevant way that is respectful of Native traditions.

As the lead applicant, Creative Director and project manager, I have a number of perspectives and experiences with digital marketing. I am a successful globally recognized Native artist and the wife and business partner of a globally recognized Native artist, my husband Tony Duncan. We use digital tools to connect with our audience all over the world, and to share our culture and education as a tool for social change. We started an initiative in the schools in our area to discourage Native stereotypes and encourage active participation in learning about other cultures. We used social media as a vehicle to carry our message of respecting cultures. By sharing the hashtag #respectingcultureiscool, we were able to engage audiences that we never thought we could reach. This initiative was very successful and a vital part of our digital experience. I know from first-hand experience both the benefits and difficulties of building a digital platform as a Native artist and will bring this discernment to this project. 

There is a strong tension between sharing between Appreciating Native culture and Appropriating Native culture. This is a big reason why leading this project as a Native artist is critically important. The app will provide an opportunity to learn about and appreciate one another’s culture as well as benefit and empower Native artists and the broader community to improve digital engagement.

Studies have found that when the public is given the opportunity to experience a culture other than their own, it facilitates a cross-cultural understanding leading to mutual respect for one another. The development of the app will provide mentorship, management, and other resources educators, artists, and arts organizations need to provide services and support. The app will provide a strategic framework to guide and integrate culturally literate works with the public both at home and abroad.

To successfully undertake this initiative to improve the public’s access, engagement, and participation in Native culture and history that are respectful of Native traditions, we need to team up with technology experts and consultants. We lack expertise in mobile and app development. We will conceptualize the project and identify culturally relevant ways to promote digital access that are respectful of Native traditions. Each team member including myself, will need to understand the meaningful request for cultural literacy in the digital landscape to carry out the initiative's mandate to be respectful of Native culture. It is important that each member specializes in digital strategy, marketing, and engagement to create innovative and publicly accessible arts-based initiatives and programming. 

Violet Duncan is Plains Cree and Taino from Kehewin Cree Nation. Touring nationally and internationally since 1991, she has performed for audiences across the United States, Canada and Europe through work as a Native dancer, hoop dancer, choreographer, storyteller and author. Violet is a former "Miss Indian World", representing Indigenous Peoples of North America. Violet has over 20 years of experience as a facilitator and mentor and has been a motivational speaker to Native Women and Youth. She has an incredible ability to engage and connect with young people. Much of her work is centered on strengthening and empowering Indigenous Youth. After becoming a mother of four and seeing the need for Native representation in literature, she took it upon herself to author three award winning children's books, I am Native, When We Dance and Lets Hoop Dance! She has recently joined the family of Penguin Random House with two new children’s books coming out 2023/24. Violet is currently the Indigenous Cultural Advisor at the Tempe Center for the Arts, where she aims to create space for a permanent program of Indigenous performance and practice. 

Find out more about Violet at www.violetduncan.com

This solution improves the real of information that has been vetted and approved by elders, community leaders, and educators to be more accessible and visible 

Phase 1 is “Design” where a team will conceptualize the project and document where the cultural problems arise, create the needs analysis, offer proposed solutions, and discovery and formulate the change we anticipate to see. This stage will create evaluations and establish a reporting process, develop and structure a digital toolkit to make it accessible to Native Artists and organizations. The technology experts will specialize in digital strategy and engagement to create innovative and accessible programming for the digital tool kit. Phase 2 of the project called “Engagement” is a series of workshops/discovery sessions in a pilot project; this component administers the evaluations and encourages participants to uncover key areas of digital strategy interest, and cultural barriers and learn about new trends in the digital age. Learning from each initial discovery session will influence subsequent workshops and those evaluations. Approx. 4. Phase 3 is follow-up, implementation, and evaluation. The results of the pilot project will be used to develop and structure the digital app to make it accessible. To maintain sustainability and accountability speaking engagements and workshops will be implemented to freely share findings with participants, artists, arts organizations, and the public. 

The overall objective for Phase 1 is to conceptualize the project, document where the cultural problems arise, create the needs analysis, offer proposed solutions, formulate the change we anticipate seeing, and structure the digital toolkit. To obtain feedback from Native artists and other members of the arts community, a major milestone in phase one is to create evaluations that encourage feedback about cultural literacy in the digital experience and to establish an efficient reporting process. The evaluations will be shared at the discovery sessions in phase 2. The goal of the evaluation process for Native artists and the arts community is to identify that the challenge of cultural illiteracy does exist. The indicators of success for the first phase is to dialogue with digital strategist and consultants about what success looks like in a culturally literate digital experience and compare to find ways to improve. Another indicator is the designing of both a pretest and a posttest to administer at the beginning and conclusion of each discovery session to determine if the methods specified were useful and if the objectives were met. All the findings from the evaluation are critical to finding out how Native artists and the community will be more efficient as a consequence of the initiative. This will lead to the development of a digital toolkit to be freely shared with indigenous artists and arts organizations. This app will establish new approaches, build relationships between national and international communities and develop, broaden, and strengthen strategic thinking.

The result of the initiative is to promote a greater public understanding of different cultural backgrounds through discussion. Changes in how artists and organizations work with technology and public access created the context for this initiative. Working with the arts community about cultural literacy and how it affects digital engagement empowers and benefit all parts of the community. An expected impact of the initiative is to build a stronger social infrastructure leading to increased individual and collective preparedness for cultural differences. The initiative will improve how we engage and participate in the arts, providing opportunities for further work with our audiences.

The app will provide mentorship, management, and other resources artists, educators, and arts organizations need to provide services and support. It will be structured in a way to make it accessible and to be freely shared. By bringing the arts community together, this initiative will provide an understanding of how digital tools can help reach target audiences, improve communication, build digital capacity, and encourage empowerment in the digital landscape for Native artists. We hope to utilize apps, SMS technology, software, AI, robots, drones, blockchain, and virtual reality.