Community education tailors learning experience

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Bringing in adult education programs to this southern Alberta community has lowered students' blood pressure as well as raised grade levels. Presently 15 students are enrolled in the full-time study program, which has four starting dates a year. Many have been out of school for five to 10 years before coming back to upgrade, said David Aloma, head of the Morley learning centre. And their high school experiences were often "less than positive" due to racial discrimination or the stress of being away from home for those who were boarded out to city schools.

The Morley program also tends to be more geared toward motivating students to increase their knowledge, rather than test them.

"Tests tend to be judgment. Here, they're more a tool for evaluation," he said.

The second motivator behind his program is to develop ownership of the

materials studied. An invaluable help in this has been Ann Lefthand, a Stoney nation member teacher's assistant. Lefthand helps develop appropriate cultural curriculum and translates traditional stories into English for use in classroom studies.

"We have to try to generate the concept that education is for all cultures. We bring Stoney culture into the classrooms so that we don't just learn from books but from our own experiences and our own past," he said.

This holistic approach to teaching gets students involved in diverse projects such as one linking Native and non-Native cultures, or another in which students interviewed local Elders on oral history. Bringing learning close to home helps erode barriers formed by bad experiences in

outside schools, while promoting reading, writing and presentation skills. All that combines to increase adult students' opportunities to better their lives, said Aloma.

"The future comes with education. I have a better chance, not just me but my family," he said.

One of the biggest challenges Aloma faces as an administrator is charting a course over the scholastic year. Teachers sketch course outlines, assigning blocks of material to be covered during specific times.

"On the reserve there's a very strong traditional base that when someone is hurting, everyone rallies around. And school becomes secondary," he said.