Anna Matykowski
Carleton College Educational Studies Philosophy of Education Resume Subject Matter Competence Service Learning Component Working with Parents Integrating Technology Experiential Learning in Classrooms American Indian Education Case Study of a Student Model Lesson Plan/ Performance Packages Self-Reflection Pieces/ Professional Summary Student Teaching Observation Record	AMERICAN INDIAN EDUCATION During my student teaching seminar at Carleton, I learned about Native American treaty rights from Mary Hermes, a professor from the University of Minnesota, Duluth. Professor Hermes outlined the history of treaty rights and discussed the implications for American Indians. I was shocked by one of Professor Hermes’ stories about her teaching experience. After a lesson about treaty rights, several of her Native American students shared that Professor Hermes’ lesson was the first time that they had ever learned about their rights to hunt and fish on ceded territories. Not only is it valuable for educators to teach about treaty rights, but it is also important to incorporate lessons about different tribal histories and cultures into language arts lessons. I believe that all teachers have a responsibility to educate their students about the people who originally lived in their geographical region. As a language arts teacher, I use American Indian literature as a means to integrate these topics into the curriculum. When I student taught at New Spirit Middle School, I successfully integrated several poems that I had initially discovered in Carleton’s American Indian Literature course. For example, I played a recording of “Fear Poem” by Joy Harjo to catalyze a discussion about the extent to which humans have control over their fears. This poem painted fear in a historical context, describing how white soldiers raped and killed many American Indians. After this large-group discussion, the students met in small groups to track the theme of fear in their novels. At the end of class, students had to decide whether or not the protagonists from their novels could control their fears as much as the poem’s narrator.