Iñupiaq and Yup’ik educators discuss teaching children in immersion settings and gaining fluency as adults

Starting an immersion program in an Alaska Native language comes with challenges: An educator often needs to create the curriculum and teaching materials themselves, and they sometimes need to work on their own fluency.

In November, language experts from the Bering Strait and North Slope regions met in Nome to discuss methods for teaching and learning Iñupiaq spoken in most of the villages, Central Yupʼik spoken in St. Michael and Stebbins and St. Lawrence Island Yupik (or Akuzipik) spoken in Gambell and Savoonga.

The three-day-long gathering — called Ilichaqtuut Katiłuta, “We learn together” in Iñupiaq — focused on teaching from an Indigenous perspective, building curricula and helping kids grasp different aspects of grammar.

“It was really nice to see people so very focused and so dedicated to ensuring that the children of the region have the opportunity to hear the language and learn the language of their ancestors,” said Jana Harcharek, one of the speakers and a longtime Iñupiaq educator from Utqiaġvik. “It was just very heartwarming.”

Before the pandemic, three departments at the Bering Strait region tribal consortium Kawerak Inc. received a grant from the Administration for Native Americans for language revitalization in White Mountain, Golovin and Elim, said Bernadette “Yaayuk” Alvanna-Stimpfle, director of the Kawerak’s Eskimo Heritage Program. To bring language educators together, they organized the first gathering in August 2023 in Nome, which, among other things, highlighted storytelling techniques in immersion programs, Alvanna-Stimpfle said.

The second gathering this November focused on training educators and Head Start teachers across the region on how to teach in an immersion classroom: the one where students not only learn the language but also learn in the language.

“We focused our efforts on helping them to try to begin language immersion care,” Alvanna-Stimpfle said. " We had worked so hard to make a successful training for Head Start teachers and being guided by the Elders."

Language at the center of education

When a child participates in a language immersion program and grows up bilingual, it benefits their academic and cultural development, Harcharek said.

“Being able to provide that opportunity for children will open so many doors for them, not only in the development of their identity but in the way they look at the world and how they express themselves,” Harcharek said.

There are no immersion programs in the Bering Strait School District, but the district is looking into starting and re-starting them, said Amber “Attasiaq” Otton, the district coordinator of cultural integration. Two schools have been exploring their options to start a kindergarten immersion program: John Apangalook School in Gambell and Tukurngailnguq School in Stebbins, Otton said.

To support educators who are building immersion classrooms, Harcharek shared her experience promoting language immersion programs in the North Slope region.

“I shared with them how important it is to honor the identity of our children in the school setting,” she said. “Part of that identity is language because it is through language that we express how we look at the world.”

Harcharek, who has worked at the Iñupiaq Language Department of the North Slope Borough School District for nearly 20 years, spoke about how the school district started revitalizing Iñupiaq education by asking the people in the region what was important for their children to learn. That became the basis for the Iñupiaq Learning Framework that puts the Iñupiaq language and culture as the foundation for academic learning.

[Longtime North Slope educator honored for putting Iñupiaq at the center of learning]

“I hope that more people across rural Alaska, where these Native languages originated from, continue to see the importance” of the language preservation, Harcharek said, ”and act on the urgency that is there because if we don’t keep at it, we’re going to lose it.”

Tenna “Qaġġuna” Pili, director of Iñupiaq education at North Slope Borough School District, co-presented with Harcharek and spoke about the curriculum, materials and resources her school district uses and what it means to have an evolving language program.

The North Slope Borough School District had an immersion program through the early 2000s. Last year, the district restarted it, opening one classroom for three- and four-year-olds. This year, they maintained that classroom and opened a second one for kindergarten students.

With students thriving in the new program, the district plans to open one more grade-level classroom each year, Pili said. They are also working with villages to determine the possibility of opening immersion classrooms in other places across the region.

“We cannot and probably will not open up classrooms unless we have a full support community,” Pili said.

Traditionally, the Western education systems don’t center around Alaska Native languages, but that trend is changing, Pili said. The state is aligning more with culturally responsive education systems that can help Alaska Native students succeed, she said.

“Our language programs are not just this add-on, or this extra thing,” she said. “We’re making this shift as a state to center all of that — not just our language programs and revitalization of our language programs, but culture and rooting all of our systems in ... understanding the depth of that, the breadth of that, and what that means for our students."

Supporting educators

When Annie Conger and Kiminaq Alvanna-Stimpfle were Iñupiaq immersion teachers in Nome, they had no curriculum or materials to work with.

“We had to create our own worksheets,” Conger said. “We had to work from scratch and build it up.”

Conger said that for a successful immersion program, “you need huge support from the district as well as the community.”

For Conger, who taught in her home community of Brevig Mission and in Nome for almost 30 years, creating an immersion program was a doable task. It was a bigger challenge for a younger educator Alvanna-Stimpfle, who was not fluent in the language, Conger said.

“Having language-speaking teachers is key” for successful immersion programs, she said, “but our age group are the last fluent speakers. That’s a hurdle that we need to work on.”

Harcharek agreed that the biggest challenge in creating immersion programs is helping teachers who are learners of the language. Language classes at Iḷisaġvik College and the University of Alaska system, as well as informal language workshops, are a useful tool for adult learners, she said.

Pili said that it is inevitable that for most teachers in the North Slope communities, Iñupiaq is their second language, and to advance fluency in communities as a whole, teachers need to be motivated to be several steps ahead of their students in the learning process.

“You have this sense of urgency,” she said. “If we want our children to be learning and advancing in the language, then we need to place just as much emphasis on our adults who are teaching them and their language learning and their language journey because the kids are not going to learn by themselves.”

The North Slope Borough School District has been working to fast-track people to teacher certification and planning to implement a mentor-apprentice program for working teachers.

The Mentor-Apprentice Program is an approach designed for highly motivated adults who already know the basics of the language to pair with an Elder for focused one-on-one learning, said Annauk Denise Olin, a linguist and Iñupiaq language educator from Shishmaref.

Olin shared during the gathering how she used the Mentor-Apprentice Program to learn from a renowned Iñupiaq linguist Edna Ahgeak MacLean between 2017 and 2024.

[From 2022: Alaska Native linguists create a digital Iñupiaq dictionary, combining technology, accessibility and language preservation]

The Master-Apprentice Program is designed for an apprentice to take responsibility for learning and structure, and Olin said she wanted to focus on building sentences: a skill that seemed to her less accessible than learning vocabulary.

Olin also tailored the apprenticeship around her interests such as climate justice.

“To adapt to climate change, we need to understand how our ancestors saw the environment,” she said. “I really see learning Iñupiaq as a way of strengthening our identity and having more agency as our climate is rapidly changing.”

Olin met with MacLean for several hours a week — less than normally required for an apprenticeship. To make up for the limited speaking sessions, Olin used such resources as Rosetta Stone and the Ivalu program, worked on MacLean’s grammar books and listened to the recordings of their conversations in her free time.

“Listening to recordings over and over was really about repetition and memory. I began to master certain phrases,” she said. “Once you start feeling confident in basic phrases, you will naturally learn and add more.”

Master apprenticeship stresses learning language through doing hands-on activities, living daily life and hearing the language used, Olin said.

“You don’t need grammar and you don’t need written materials in order to do the master program effectively,” she said. “You need to be motivated, and you need to be very comfortable in the first three months or so with making mistakes.”

For Olin and MacLean, a big portion of communication also happened over text messages.

“In our busy world, we’ve just found a medium of communication that is flexible enough for us to work together,” she said.

While Olin lived in Utqiaġvik in her early years hearing Iñupiaq, she did not become an Iñupiaq speaker until she became an apprentice. The experience, she said, strengthened her relationships with her immediate family and community.

“Learning our language brings us so much wealth in our culture and in our kinship systems. ”Even though master apprenticeship is probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, it has brought me so many blessings and nothing worth doing is ever easy."

To support other adult learners, Olin has been working to put together a toolkit summarizing her learning process through the Mentor-Apprentice Program.

“Our time with our fluent speakers is running out. ... I really encourage Iñupiaq communities to create strong conversational adult second-language learners first,“ she said. ”Then we’re in a stronger position to provide immersion across multiple grade levels so that multiple generations of children can learn in a true immersion environment.”