Khan Academy Ed Talks with Kara Bobroff - Tuesday, November 9

Hello and welcome to Ed Talks with Khan Academy. I am excited today to talk with Kara Bobroff, who is the founder of the Native American Community Academy and NACA Inspired Schools. We're going to talk about culture in education broadly and the education of Native American students in particular, so looking forward to that.

Before we get started, a couple of notes: A reminder that Khan Academy is a non-profit organization, and we are able to do our work thanks to the generous donations from people like you. If you go to khanacademy.org/donate, you will see and have the opportunity to donate to help us continue our mission. Similarly, we want to thank some of our supporters who really stepped up during the COVID crisis to help us with our work, and that includes Bank of America, AT&T, Google.org, Novartis, Fastly, and General Motors.

Reminder: If you want to hear this talk again or if you have missed some and want to catch up, you can get audio versions of these talks at the Homeroom with Sal podcast available wherever you get your podcasts.

So with that, let me welcome Kara Bobroff. It's nice to have you!

Kara Bobroff: It's nice to be here. I'm super excited for our conversation, and I'm really looking forward to it.

Great! So I'd like to start off by asking people, how did you get to where you are today? Tell us a little bit about your path to starting these schools and this network and all the work you do.

Kara Bobroff: Yeah, um, thank you for that. It's an interesting story of like two or two or three different dynamics of a journey, both personal, professional, and then also like kind of a calling of what needed to happen within our community.

I'm Navajo and Lakota. I'm going to introduce myself in that way: "Yá’át’ééh, Cara Bobroff, and n’ahóóh.” So on my biological mother's side, I am Navajo and our family is from a community in New Mexico called Rehoboth, which is not contiguous without donation but part of navigation. And on that side, we're the Salt Clan, and that's how we identify. So we recognize our relatives of any relatives out there today that are also the Salt Clan, and Navajo. I just wanted to say, you know, open up kind of a conversation on that level just to say that's an important relationship.

The second part is Lakota. On that side, my biological father is from the Pine Ridge area. I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Basically, my parents were both educators. My mom was a middle school teacher her entire life; my father was a teacher, assistant principal, principal, and became a systems leader as well of our school district.

But not really knowing I was going to become a teacher was a crucial aspect of something that happened when I was about 19 years old. I served as a mental health worker in a residential treatment center, and that was the first time I started to work with youth who were six, seven, and eight years younger than I, who were going in and out of various systems from foster care to the psychology festival to home for all sorts of reasons.

I think that really set in stone for me that those students or children had been through more in their life than I would ever have to really endure, and it kind of drew me into education. Although my family's influence had for sure been a factor, I became a special education teacher at the school I went to. I started to see all the good things about being a teacher and also started to see some inequities around who had access to what kind of courses and how that was predetermined for a lot of kids.

I reflected back on my own experience and saw that that was probably true when I was there. Just like there was a group of us, and a third of us went to one classroom, a third of us went to another, and a third of us went to another. Not really sure why, but then we would reconnect. So that was interesting to experience. I was an assistant principal at a school my older siblings went to, which freaked them out! Like, how did you meet the sister where we went to school?

My journey took me to the Bay Area, and I served as a dean of students in Marin County at a school called Miller Creek Middle School. That was the first time I started to see a couple of things: one, that school provided so many opportunities for their students and families and was really responsive to their community. It wasn't a question of which college kids would go to; it was a question of what college, and if they would go to college, it was a question of which college they would go to. That was very different—much more responsive, socially and emotionally—for students.

However, there was a lack of diversity, so also from an equity standpoint, I just kind of saw the difference between what students and teachers had there—there was a public school than what I kind of experienced. During that time back home, there was a conversation around Native American education and a need for a Native American banner charter school. That was probably the first time I heard about that, and I always thought that would be a cool place to work when I moved back home.

However, you know, I think that was kind of grounded in the fact that many of our elders and those who had come before in an urban setting had always had a longing to do something more for Native youth, specifically in Albuquerque, knowing that that district serves about 80,000 kids, 6,000 to 7,000 of whom self-identify as Native. In like that time to now, when we look at the senses, that population of urban Indigenous families has increased not only in Albuquerque but across the United States.

So just kind of got interested in that and would go back and forth from different times, just having that conversation, and nothing really kind of came to you. My journey took me to Shiprock, New Mexico, where I served as a principal at Nuka Middle School, which was like the best school on earth in the sense of a place I really felt connected.

I kind of thought like I didn't speak my language fluently, so I didn't know if I would be the best principal for the community. But what I found was a couple of things: one, that the strengths of the students and families and the cultural knowledge was so great that it should be incorporated into the school, as the students in Marin had so many things brought into their school.

You know, opportunities as well, but there was a dialogue that was going on that was really troublesome in the sense that at that time, the school board thought, well, we shouldn't be teaching Navajo language because that inhibits students' ability to read. If you think about research in general or just like things that we know to be true, when you're bilingual, trilingual, and multilingual, those are all major strengths. There's a lot of bias to unpack, a lot of institutionalized, I would say, deficit mindsets around the students: like, are these students going to go to college?

Even like teachers that I was becoming the principal of would say to me, "You know, the families here don't necessarily value education, so why would we ask our students whether they want to go to college?" I tried to remain calm and diplomatic and, at the same time, use data to prove that that wasn't true, which we did by engaging our parents in that conversation. We found that 98% of families wanted their kids to go on to a two- to four-year college experience.

So that was a really tough situation because there was a lot of opportunity—the school was like fledgling and almost went into like a school improvement process that would have put them in danger of being taken over by the state. At that time, we were able to turn it around and really started to think about differentiation, more involvement of student voice, all those good things that people would want their kids to have in a school, and we saw progress.

So, as well as my own personal journey around my own identity—growing up not on the reservation but in a city, being disconnected from my family and then having to reconnect—was really a powerful thing that I was experiencing. But I came back home wanting to follow up on the idea of NACA and really started to engage the community in that process. I would say it's a lot of those different things, and then also just, you know, I would say my family had a lot of impact on me, both immediately and also some of my grandparents who really forged the way around education within their own communities too.

Wow, that is excellent. So that kind of leads us right into, tell us a little bit about the Native American Community Academy, and if we went and visited, what would we see? What would it look like?

Kara Bobroff: So NACA is like synonymous with me with the same word as far as love: there is so much interconnectedness and relationships among students, teachers, and families. It's truly a community. I think of NACA not in the essence of being something that was nonexistence that came into existence but just connected people together in ways that grew an entire web of support for generations.

So it’s our 16th year. You would see students learning inside and outside—like land-based learning as well as learning in a traditional, I guess, classroom. You would see students on a college campus, and you would also see early learning taking place in an elementary school, access to four or five different languages that they can take throughout the time that they're at the school: Lakota, Zuni, Navajo language, Keres, Tiwa, Tewa.

Partnerships with community organizations, access to school-based health centers—students being able to not only know who they are and where they come from but also being able to articulate a vision they have that’s meaningful to them based on their own world view.

One of the foundational pieces of NACA, as we were putting the school together, and what I mean by that is we literally went out and talked to community members over a period of like a year and a half to two years about what is it that we want to see for Native American students, and three things rang true.

One is that there would be both access and success going to college, and that was based on a lot of people's experiences of not having that within their own education and/or going to college and not succeeding within the first year, for all sorts of different reasons. The second is that the students would be secure in their identity and understanding what their identity is—not only as an Indigenous person but as somebody who's bicultural and someone who also has a passion in the area of the arts—but being able to be in connection with that in a very real way is one major outcome.

The last is that students would be healthy, and this is where the NACA Wellness Wheel, which is on our website and anybody can access it, is foundational to the start of the school. We talked a lot about what patterns and aspects of Native American education had not worked in the past, and we talked about some of the things that we saw as far as data and outcomes for Native students.

But we wanted to start with a strengths-based mindset, and we selected the wellness wheel, which is kind of based off of basically a lot of different tribes that think of people as being whole individuals. You’re not just coming to school to access one aspect of who you are—you bring all of yourself.

So intellectually, however students are faring physically, like your physical wellness, as well as your social-emotional wellness and your connection to your community and overall spirituality—and spirituality not being religiosity, but realizing, what are those things that renew us? What are those things that we can help reflect upon?

So our students spend a lot of time working with the wellness wheel as well as other courses and classes. 95% of the students' day is grounded in Indigenous perspectives, meaning that we’re bringing in either whether that’s authors or whether that’s knowledge from elders or knowledge from our content teachers in the languages or Indigenous science and understanding ecological aspects of different things that have taken place.

But those things are integrated into how students are learning and what they are learning. I think it’s really, really important too. So those are all the things that you would see. I can talk about NACA for several hours, but I always feel like when I think of our students learning things that may be hard to learn, I think of middle school kids who are understanding the role of education in Native communities around boarding schools.

They experience a lot of emotion around that. They’re doing an intergenerational interview with their grandmother who went to boarding school, just reflecting back to them, “I’m glad you’re at NACA, and you have access to language and culture; I didn’t.”

All of those are really powerful things. They take that interview and transcribe it into an actual written piece, use that piece, and they do a student demonstration where they perform—like presenting that back to their community—and then proactively, as an entire class, they decide to do something that’s much more positive and productive, not getting caught into the negativity or the victimization of our history, but really being more, I guess, like a visionary in the sense that they have the ability to empower themselves to think about what it is they want to see different.

So, a lot of different aspects of that, and we really hope that NACA is a place where our students can not only explore their identity but act upon it in ways that make sense—whether that’s slam poetry, it could be a service-oriented project, it could be anything that really resonates with them.

Yeah, so that’s just a little bit about NACA, but it’s a pretty amazing place.

Yeah, thanks for sharing all that. It definitely—I have so many questions, and I know we want to talk about the network feature—but one of the things that I see in learning research is that when students feel like they belong and have that feeling of belongingness, we see better learning outcomes as well. It sounds like that building in that culture then seems related to that research of where things are.

So do you see that relationship between, for instance, identity and academic achievement as well?

Kara Bobroff: I would say the belonging and connectedness, the essence of the community of our school, is huge. I think of a story of one of our students—her mom shared this with me. She came to NACA, and for the first semester, at least six months, was really quiet; didn’t really share too much but was always participating—did what she needed to do—and was a really cool kid, just didn’t really articulate a lot and didn’t share too much with her peers or in the classroom setting.

Then she kind of turned a corner, and I remember her mom came back and said, “You know, my daughter, the entire time she was in school up until the time she came, didn’t talk in school, and now I can’t get her to stop talking.” Like total transformation in the sense of now she’s leading classroom discussions; she’s leading projects; she’s involved in different extracurricular activities.

I feel like we— I know from my own personal experience when you’re in a setting that sees who you are and is reflected in what you’re learning, values you, that is who you are and what that is, then you open up and you’re able to not have to navigate—like they worry about like, “How are people perceiving me?” or “Are they going to make fun of the fact that I have to go to a ceremony for a few days with my family and come back?”

All of those things are simple points of strength, and it becomes like just—that's how the school is—it’s not, "Oh, this is how our community has been operating since time immemorial." Let alone the fact that kids can be leading in that space.

That’s like one small story. I remember the worst kind of situation of that is like when you’re in a school setting that’s not valued and it’s actually—like you experience some sort of microaggression and/or a racial slur of some sort, and then that like shuts kids down really, really quickly. So we do see that.

I'd say that we also see some of the students who are involved in learning their language give them a bigger insight into their history as well as their identity, and that helps set them up for later success. Some of our alumni who went to different schools—ranging from Ivy’s, small liberal arts schools, community colleges, tribal colleges—all kind of report back like, “Well, these are the teachers who had the biggest impact on us,” which were largely the teachers who have most of that cultural knowledge and connectedness.

Yeah, and also they, you know, they’re like, “It’s better off like when we went to this, you know—I went to so-and-so school, I started this effort around Native American students—but also all of the other students of color were going through an identity crisis and they were having a really hard time struggling in a different setting.

I didn’t really go through that; I felt super grounded in who I was. A lot of the content we had already engaged with, and so I felt better prepared in that sense.”

So I think that definitely the belonging is a huge piece and also understanding your identity and also—we're talking about generations of folks who've been separated. You think about what boarding schools did to our communities and just not having that be the perspective of education that most students across the country engage with.

Can you give a little bit of that history for folks that aren't familiar with the boarding schools and what that results in?

Kara Bobroff: I um—so there’s like a quote that talks about basically “killing the Indian and saving the man.” So this idea that both assimilation and kind of direct colonization of children being removed from their homes would be more beneficial to Native American communities across the United States, and this was back in the 1800s.

Think about and also iterations of that all the way through the time that we are now and today. So I think of it a couple of ways: one, you know, pre-contact there wasn’t any kind of interaction between Native communities and westernized culture, and there wasn’t even an institution of education.

We call that like Indigenous education. Then we did have like the treaties that were negotiated across our—across the world, across the country. I think of my tribe, you know, the Navajo Nation in particular—and one thing that holds true in that sense is that the way I was told was that our leaders at that time were forcibly removed, and all of our people from one side of our state to the other, and imprisoned and encamped.

In that encampment, in order to go back after two and a half years, they had to negotiate a treaty. Part of that treaty negotiation was that the Navajo Nation would take on one teacher for 25 kids that would be provided by the United States government, and the leaders were having this discussion in Navajo with a Spanish interpreter to Spanish, and Spanish to English, and English back to Spanish.

It was quite, you know, something that was a great concern. Otherwise, we would have been removed to Oklahoma or potentially Florida. So in order to go back to our four sacred mountains, they said yes, but they asked like what are the patterns of this education system? How does it work? How does it function?

Before that, learning was seamless within communities and also within like the origins of our seasons, so that’s one example. As we move through, like as you get into the 50s and 60s and 70s, there’s a resurgence of tribal colleges, as well as other schools focused on language and culture through self-determination. You started to see schools like NACA, referral demonstration schools, and the Rehoboth day school that started to bring language and culture and community-based education back into communities versus having students leave their community.

Now we’re in a time where I feel like there’s such a movement around Indigenous people and also recognizing the importance of culturally and linguistically responsive education, as well as what’s being taught that’s really, really important.

And so—and it’s important to kids first and foremost. I think that’s what makes their education better and helps them be more successful at being able to do what they need to do knowing who they are and understanding that history, and also all students, I think, need to understand that for sure.

But yeah, and so that leads to then the question that I do—do all students need to understand this? How do we take the things that you've learned through NACA and think about scale and where those are? I know one step was the NACA Inspired School.

So tell me a little bit about that.

Kara Bobroff: Yeah, so like within the first two years of NACA, we were asked several times, “Can we start a NACA in our community?” So when people come to visit, they're like, "Oh my God, this is possible! This is what people were writing about in the 50s and 60s! This is what our elders were saying needs to be incorporated back into school!"

So we were like, “Yes, but it needs to come from your community.” So we’re like, "How do we do that?" We put together the NACA Inspired Schools Network. I worked with some folks to think about what that would look like.

Basically, we support fellows who work with their communities and engage them in a similar process as we did at NACA to come up with their own mission and vision of a school that makes sense for them around Indigenous education. So there’s maybe five or six schools in New Mexico right now, some up in South Dakota that are coming online, Denver, as well as another one down in the U.S.

Really, it’s just like having a conversation about if we were to build something for our children—and Native American kids like wherever that may be—what would that look like? What would we want to accomplish? How would we go about that?

Some schools are really heavily focused on language and culture, some are really immediate dual language models, some are focused on immersion, all have components of holistic wellness culture and Indigenous perspectives; some are really focused on land-based learning; others are doing internships and different things like that.

It just depends, but that’s one way we started to share the others. We created the Indigenous Knowledge Management Hub, which is open to anybody to find what our teachers have created and to contribute or just utilize those types of lessons K through 12.

I feel like so much of this is like equally important to students that are in a traditional maybe comprehensive elementary school, middle school, or high school to understand not only the content that we have provided but also just being able to understand the history of our environment of the United States and the role that Native people have played and continue to.

So those are some things that we've done to help share.

Can you say the name of that again that has all the lessons?

Kara Bobroff: Oh yeah, it’s on the NACA Inspired Schools website. It’s called the Indigenous Knowledge Management Hub, which is probably not the most so if anybody out there has a suggestion on what to name that, feel free to send that back right away!

Excellent, excellent. So you, Doc, a couple of times had mentioned that now I've forgotten what it’s called, but the land-based teaching—can you just tell us a little bit about what that is and what that looks like?

Kara Bobroff: Yeah, so when we first started NACA, we started with a focus on experiential education as well as a project around healthy food and Indigenous farming in gardening.

So getting kids involved in actually working on the land to center their learning—that was like the first kind of iteration of that. Now that has grown into a team at NACA that started focusing on things such as water, and water defenders and understanding what the importance of water is within our communities; medicine, and how do we identify medicine when we’re out and about in different areas, whether that’s in our home communities or within the city or within the mountains next to us, as well as food and understanding the importance of food and healthy food—how food is grown, how food systems work, and how do they exist or not exist within our communities as well.

Then also thinking about just other ways to blend learning around sciences, whether that’s through literature, whether that’s through math, whether that’s through different content areas that teachers can connect to by taking their students out to the land to be able to do that.

So, you know, whether that’s an inquiry-based science project or it’s taking a group of students to harvest pinyon for that time and understanding the significance culturally and also the significance of pinyon within the community—what that means and then distribution—what does that mean as well.

So part of that, we actually are now launching an Indigenous Farmers Hub, which is building out a CSA model to then grow food and be able to provide that food back to our students and families, and community at large, where students are actively engaged in understanding how to develop a healthy food system and what it means to grow, harvest food, and create those opportunities in Indigenous farming.

So that’s an example, but something I think that also connects our students to land and to other people within our community who may not be a traditional teacher in the sense that they come up through a pipeline that might be through a university, but there are those community members who hold all this different knowledge and expertise that they can learn from.

Great! So if you think about teachers in maybe a traditional public school and where those are who want to do and bring more of this into their classroom, what advice do you have for them about how to think about making their classrooms more culturally responsive?

Kara Bobroff: I think knowing your students and families and starting there and just—I mean—and really getting to build a relationship. When I think about being culturally responsive or culturally responsive in education, this is something, you know, I've spent about 18 to 20 months at the state thinking about what are the lessons learned that we can share.

One of those is like really understanding what the historical context of the community in which you serve is, as a teacher, whether you have to do that in isolation or you can do that as an entire school.

Two: engaging your community and what it is they want to see for their children and getting an understanding of that so it helps guide the processes, protocols, and outcomes that you're aiming for.

I also believe that we have to have open conversations and courageous conversations, and we never want to set up a student to come into a classroom where they feel like they don't belong. So the sense of belonging within a classroom setting and/or a school setting is something that is really, really important in opening up your curriculum so that students can explore that in a way that’s healthy for them and safe, and also that brings in the different dimensions of all the students that you serve.

One of our parents reflected back to us in our first year: when you said you were going to serve 62 different tribes and 13 different ethnicities, and be able to do that for your curriculum, I thought it was like—I wanted to see that. I also was incredibly ambitious, and I had no idea how you were going to do that with many different tribes and perspectives.

We talked about like how our teachers were able to facilitate open-ended, kind of universal questions, enduring understandings, and essential questions that lended themselves to students being able to do that.

When he, then a focus group, came back and told us, “My son comes home and he tells me not only did he share about where he’s from and what he knows about our family and our culture and our background and what he was reading, he also heard from the other 15 students in his cohort about what it was that their family’s experience was.”

So then it becomes just a way to share that without any kind of hesitation. I think that you know students now really understand their own identities in ways that I don’t believe many of us ever had that opportunity in school to be able to do that.

So creating real community and being open-ended in how you’re thinking about teaching and also letting students lead is a good place to start.

Yeah, I’ve heard that community message from you coming through loud and clear—that it really has to be everything based on understanding that the community you’re serving in and where those are. How do you—if you have new teachers coming into the school, how do you prepare them? What kind of training do they go through?

Kara Bobroff: So a couple of things. One, you know, as we were growing the school, every year we'd have a new set of teachers coming in. That’s a lot of it, just modeling.

So like when we started the first day of school, it was very different. We started with a song from one of our Navajo instructors, as well as a song from one of our Lakota instructors, and we were outside in a circle with families and students at the same time—really just acknowledging this is very different, but this is like—it shouldn’t be different, right? It should be the norm, and it is now the norm, right?

So just like being able to have—and I would always invite our new teachers to those types of experiences before they come on board so that they’re seeing how maybe we close the end of one year out and those significant traditions that we have—whether it was like, you know, our ceremonies at the end around student recognition and graduation and what those look like—whether it was like a community kind of event of some sort too, whether it was the annual powwow or feast day that we have in the fall.

But other than that, it’s like building in the time to give teachers three hours a week to be able to have time with their teams, having a mentor within the school that understands the school culture, core values, and what does that mean when we talk about Indigenous perspectives in education if you’re Native or non-Native and you’re a teacher at the school?

We also created a couple of different things: one is called Growing Educators for Native American Communities, where we co-created with a community college a certification program that uses the NACA framework, a curricular framework to redesign all of the courses that those teachers would take, and then we took that and that’s our professional development model now.

So it’s grounded on the notion of "Ké," which is a word from the Diné Nation that talks about relationships, and then goes into like the cycle that is a Navajo learning cycle, which is aligned with the four directions, which basically is about reflection, planning, implementation, and then reflection again—which is something that has been in place within our communities for a very long time.

The second was the Indigenous Educators Corps, which is like an AmeriCorps program that gives 20-some young folks or elders the opportunity to be within schools and to serve alongside educators in these different schools that we support and then hopefully becoming teachers themselves.

But I would say by being connected, having the time to do that, and realizing that there’s not a book or a textbook you can pick up that’s going to be able to say that's how you like indigenize education. Eventually, maybe somebody will write that. One of us should probably do that at some point, but working collaboratively and being able to show what that’s like and then always having many resources within the individuals who are around our students and families that want to see this happen has always been helpful too.

Great! Well, I could talk to you all day, but we are already at the end of our time. Thank you so much for sharing your work. It is so interesting and inspiring to hear!

So thank you for all you’re doing.

Kara Bobroff: Well, thank you, and thanks for this opportunity. Huge fans of all the work that you all do in the world too, and so I appreciate this and I hope you all have a good rest of your month and day!

Thank you! And for all those listening, we do have another show on Thursday with Pedro De Brugeir, he’s the author of Urban Myths about Learning and Education and more Urban Myths about Learning and Education, and he will be announcing for the first time his new book.

So 12 p.m. Pacific, 3 Eastern on Thursday to hear more. Thanks all for joining us!