Indigenous methodologies for guiding, advising, and educating children have been in place since time immemorial. Those well-honed approaches to education were built to support whole and healthy individual development while also establishing a lifelong awareness and reverence for community, connection, kinship, and reciprocity. In Western cultures,…

In 2006, the administration of a state-run, secure juvenile correctional facility initiated an attempt to transform its institutional culture using a strength-based approach to assessment and case planning. This resulted in a rapid improvement in institutional climate. The current study revisits this setting several years later to see if those…

This in-depth interview study of the schooling experiences of 120 First Nations, American Indian, and Alaska Native students contributes to understandings of their literacy motivation, highlighting tensions between their insights on literacy learning and literacy practices implicated by the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001. With NCLB in…

The Alaska State Department of Education undertook a review of research and literature to determine the optimal starting age or ages for school attendance. This review was occasioned by two events: the proliferation of early childhood education programs in the State and the growing body of research which suggests possible adverse effects of early…

Educational strategies that small rural high schools can use to address important developmental needs of rural youth were explored, focusing on the importance of educational environments outside traditional high school classrooms, (i.e., work-experience programs, student exchange programs, and travel-study). Of the 92 Alaskan village high schools…