Department of Public Instruction gives tribal curriculum guides a digital overhaul

Traditional meets digital in a new educational book series about North Dakota’s tribes, set to be released across the state in August.

The first edition of the Department of Public Instruction’s curriculum guide, which came out in five volumes from 1997 to 2002, has until now been published only in print. But the department has been prioritizing the digitalization of the guides to make them more accessible to students. The new texts are also revised to include modern history of the tribes.

Nick Asbury, a website content specialist at DPI, has been working on the project since it began last summer. “We anticipate that a lot of students are going to prefer to use it digitally because it makes your backpack lighter,” he said.

Prior to the update, teachers often exchanged and shared copies of the text in order to teach a complete set. Many teachers didn’t own a copy of any of the books, which includes volumes on the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, the Spirit Lake Tribe and the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewas, plus an overview, “Journey to Understanding — An Introduction to North Dakota Tribes.” Around 25 copies of this second edition, updated with new information, will be ordered for every middle school in the state.

DPI worked in collaboration with the Indian Education Coalition and the University of North Dakota to collect information and digitize the text. “When we handed it off to UND, the first thing they did was immediately upload the scans that we had to Digital Commons so people could find them and that they would be preserved even if we got hit by a meteor,” Asbury said.

Last year, DPI reached out to Zeineb Yousif, the Digital Initiatives Librarian at Chester Fritz Library at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. The department asked for her assistance in archiving the texts, but she advised for them to be scanned instead to make sure there would be a high quality digital version available to students and educators. Yousif said it’s important to have both a print and digital copy of the new books, because it can better serve students who learn in different ways.

“You can tell it was written 25 years ago, but also that it was accurately written,” she said of the original text, which is still included along with new material. “But [the digital version] makes it much more broadly available and accessible, especially for those where the print version doesn’t work as well for them. Here somebody can make the size of the text bigger or listen to the audio.”

The Department of Public Instruction doesn’t usually create textbooks or assign curriculum to schools across the state. “But we made an exception in this case, because if not us, who was going to do it?” said Asbury. “And so DPI decided in the ’90s that it’s on us to facilitate this textbook so that it can be available and help students appreciate their cultural environment.”

Often, textbooks about American Indians solely focus on the past. The purpose of these guides is to give students a better, well-rounded perspective on Native culture and history, with new sections on current events. “The History and Culture of the Standing Rock Oyate,” for example, will address the Dakota Access Pipelines protests in 2016.

“When a kid opens these textbooks, we want them to see a modern culture they recognize,” said Asbury. “This textbook mentions the internet, as opposed to the ’90s one, which does not.”

Since Lucy Fredericks began her role as the director of Indian and Multicultural Education in 2012, updating the curriculum guides has been on her agenda. She credits Cheryl Kules, her predecessor, for creating the first set of guides. “I was just hoping and thinking, ‘How can we update this to make it more current?’” she said. “But again, you always have to look at the funding issue, too.”

The curriculum guides were made possible by the Elementary and Secondary School Relief funds. The ESSR Fund is a $190 billion program created under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act to assist schools with creating healthy learning environments, return students to classrooms and address local needs. Altogether the project cost $50,000.

“When a kid opens these textbooks, we want them to see a modern culture they recognize. This textbook mentions the internet, as opposed to the ’90s one, which does not.”

Nick Asbury- website content specialist at DPI

The ESSR funds expire this September. Before, the department didn’t have the money to complete this project. Moving forward, DPI plans to continue updating the curriculum guides annually.

“Even when the ESSR funding runs dry, we will still be able to do this on an ongoing basis because it will be such a reduced workload,” said Asbury. “We’re only now catching up on a year or two, as opposed to a decade or two.”

DPI is able to freely distribute the curriculum guides as a state resource rather than profit from it like a textbook company would. While the initial printing does cost the department money, in the future all updates will be available digitally. But in the meantime, schools can order the revised printing through North Dakota State University Press, where it’ll be permanently available. NDSU Press will be able to print on demand and offer the text continuously. The public will also be able to access the digital version of the guide for free through the NDSU Press site and various e-book platforms.

“The end goal is to have these guides on various platforms,” said Asbury. “So, whether mom and dad have a Kindle or a Nook account or Apple books or whatever, you don’t have an excuse not to have a textbook.”

Dateline:

BISMARCK, N.D.