Powerful Partnerships: Rural Alaska Native Adult Program
The following essay appears in Powerful Partnerships: Independent Colleges Share High-impact Strategies for Low-income Students' Success a volume of essays solicited and chosen by the Council of Independent Colleges.
Yup’pick (yoo pick) is a typical Rural Alaska Native Adult (RANA) program student. She has worked as an administrative assistant at a one-school school district in the village of Chevak (chee’vak), 130 miles northwest of Bethel, for 14 years. Like 99 percent of Alaska, no road leads to Bethel or Chevak. Yup’pick, a native speaker of the Cup’ik (choo’ pick) dialect, is married with four children, ages 7 to 11, and hers is the family’s primary income. She admires teachers’ contributions to her community and dreams of becoming a teacher, but moving her family to live near a university is impossible.
RANA offered a way to fulfill her dream — she could continue in her present job while earning a B.A. and certification in K-8 education. After graduation, she intends to stay in her current school district or to move to her husband’s home village. In either case, she will teach in the immense delta area formed by the Yukon and Kuskoquim rivers as they empty into the Bering Sea.
Yup’pick has a Pell Grant, support from her school, a scholarship from the Association of Village Council Presidents and a few other sources of funding. As a RANA student, she pays about $2,000 in transportation and residency fees herself and hopes to get a forgivable Teacher Education Loan to cover those expenses. As with most RANA students, she brought previous college credits (in her case, 30) earned from a community college.
Asked about her motivation and goals, she says that the higher salary earned by a certified teacher is important but not what first comes to her mind. She primarily wants to help her community — especially the children. She sees the village “losing its language, losing its ways” and is concerned that most of the current teachers — certified in the lower 48 states — do not know the culture and come and go every two to three years. A Native herself, Yup’pick wants to bring parents and families into their children’s educational process. She wants to serve as a personal example to students — “See, I am the teacher, and I am from Chevak” — and to prepare them for life in Alaska and beyond, “so they can choose.”
Her confidence grows weekly. She says at first, her “heart was going thump thump” as she learned to use the computer to take courses, but now she is very comfortable and has done well in a course about computers in the classroom.
A classroom management course has added different techniques to her repertoire. She has taken both beginning and intermediate algebra and feels well prepared to teach K-8 math. Her advisers and teachers have been in close contact with her every step of the way.
Yup’pick has completed her second semester and has earned 24 credits. Soon she will have her associate’s degree and will continue on to her B.A.
To learn more, read: Powerful Partnerships: Independent Colleges Share High-impact Strategies for Low-income Students' Success (PDF)
| Powerful Partnerships: Distinct program for distinct population
RANA is a distance education program directed specifically toward adult tribal Alaska Natives who live in towns and villages accessible only by plane. Many villages are 300 to 800 miles off the highway. The curriculum focuses on two careers available in rural Alaska: business and education. RANA offers undergraduate degrees in organizational management (OM) and K-8 education. The students are mid-career adults whose lack of a degree limits their career opportunities. Typically, OM students are low- to middle-management employees. K-8 education students are usually paraprofessionals. For Yup’pick and her student colleagues, RANA offers more than increased earning power and social mobility. It empowers Alaska Natives to gain the qualifications to take on leadership positions. The social need for RANA is clear: The rural villages and towns populated by Alaska Natives are fighting for economic and cultural survival. Downturns in fishing, timber, mining and trapping have dramatically weakened the natural resource economy. |
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