Change from the Inside Out: A Story of Transformation in a Navajo Community School

This article combines the perspectives of bilingual teachers, teacher assistants, school administrators and an outside researcher on the 10-year development of a K-3 Navajo bilingual/bicultural program at Rough Rock Elementary School. Growing out of an original collaboration with the Kamehameha Early Education Program, Rough Rock expanded KEEP’s notion of cultural compatibility to include instructional content rooted in the local language and culture. Here we examine transformations in curriculum and pedagogy emerging from the Rough Rock program, and the social and political process by which those instructional changes occurred. Lasting instructional reforms, we argue, involve more than changes in curriculum and pedagogy, but must also reconstitute the relations of indigenous educators to the larger school power structure. Bilingual teachers must “own” the program and their work in it; change must occur from the “inside out.” We conclude with a consideration of the implications of the Rough Rock program for Navajo and other indigenous schools.