Professionalism and Leadership

Description

For learning outcome 3: Professionalism and Leadership, I have selected a Strategic Planning Document for our Cherokee Language Committee. This document was created to meet the objectives of the Administration for Native Americans (ANA) grant called Native Language Community Coordination (NLCC). I facilitated this committee with the purpose of completing the objectives of the NLCC grant which I wrote to address the needs of the Cherokee Nation’s Language Programs.

Before this grant was written, all of our language programs were scattered through three various departments within the Cherokee Nation. The real reason I wrote the grant wasn’t necessarily to meet the objectives, but to create alignment and force us to work together. Our language program wanted common objectives and goals and to prevent service overlap. The goals of the grant were to create a strategic document and put the committee together that represented all of language program leadership. The other language programs in the Cherokee Nation agreed that this was an important step to ensure we could officially work together despite having different administrations in our separate departments. We received letters of support and I was selected to write the grant. We received the award for NLCC in the fall of 2016, and we are in our sixth and final year of implementation.

The first order of business after receiving the grant was to assemble a committee of Cherokee language representatives from the leadership of our various Cherokee language programs within the three departments. We then selected representatives from departments associated with Cherokee language and culture. This committee immediately drafted a strategic plan over the winter of 2017 and into the summer of 2019. Since this original draft, every year the plan has been reviewed and updated, with the latest iteration being finalized and approved by the executive administration of the Cherokee Nation last summer. This Strategic Planning Document shows a 50-year plan. As described, the goals were for the Cherokee Nation to experience:

• Programming shifts from language enrichment and partial immersion to total immersion, with a focus on conversational proficiency.

• Increased focus from overt language teaching to inherent language acquisition.

• Cherokee becomes the first language of the home, and in our families.

• Cherokee [will be] the language of business, in and throughout the Cherokee Nation. (Cherokee Language Committee, 2021, p. 2)

The creation of this document took 1.5 year, but we did it through consensus, which reflects the traditions and values of the Cherokee people. We also had to have buy-in from every representative, which provides the motivation for them to carry out their own ideas and ultimately, to lead to the success of the group.

Rationale

Because of this strategic plan, we have seen progress towards our main goals. For example, prior to this project, none of the Cherokee language programs had produced highly proficient Cherokee language speakers. We had been focussed on language enrichment, and exposing as many Cherokee citizens as possible to our language programming. For more than twenty years the Cherokee Nation had focussed on Colors, Animals, and Numbers (CAN), not on creating a new generation of Cherokee Speakers. Some of our programs associated with the Cherokee language were under the business arm of the tribe for promotional purposes, others were in our Education Services Department, Some were in Community Services, and our Adult Language Immersion Pilot, the ᏣᎳᎩ ᎦᏬᏂᎯᏍᏗ ᎠᏂᏫᏒᏍᎩ Cherokee Language Master Apprentice Program (CLMAP) started when I was in the Executive Administration Department, so we were completely isolated programmatically. We weren’t focused on the right goals and we didn’t have a way to get everyone in the same room and on the same page. With this strategic plan, we had focused conversations about the future of our language and what we needed to do to ensure its health. We also met yearly to reflect and evaluate our progress and we update our strategic plan. The document that is being shared in the portfolio is the most recent plan.

I’m really proud of the document. While they are not all my ideas, I contributed to bringing the group together and pulling forward a paradigm shift focus on language speaker production. I took what I learned from my TESOL program to inform the process. For example, we bought copies of Brown (2014) to have required readings of specific sections before key committee meetings. These readings are important because they give us a basis for language acquisition processes. We discussed the readings from academic articles that we had used in my coursework and had long debates about Krashen’s Comprehensible Input theory as described in Brown, (2014). Ultimately we created a mission statement, vision, scope, and goals (hopes) and objectives (measurable) to illustrate the vision of our Cherokee Language Committee.

In June 2019, Chuck Hoskin Jr. was elected Principal chief of the Cherokee Nation. He was in the cabinet of the previous administration, and was instrumental in getting the CLMAP program started and supporting the NLCC grant. He knew our goals and dreams and he was backing our language strategy from its inception. Having a good understanding of why we chose our strategies and the educational methodologies associated with our CLMAP programs was a key selling point to Chief Hoskin. He asked challenging questions that we were able to answer with the evidence that I had gained through our coursework.

References

Brown, H.D. (2014). Principles of Language Learning and Teaching: A course in second

language acquisition. (6th ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Cherokee Language Committee. (2021, June). Native Language Community Coordination [Long

Range Strategic Plan].