Serving Native American Children and Families

As a group, Native American people are perhaps the least understood and most underserved populations in schools. Native American is a collective term, representing a large variety of cultures, language groups, customs, traditions, levels of acculturation, and levels of traditional language use. In the context of this variation, I raise and discuss a number of common patterns in their traditions and histories: world view and belief systems, acculturation stress, school-home discontinuity, learning styles, and communication patterns, which are useful reference points from which to develop more culturally compatible evaluation approaches. The ecosystems and dynamic/mediational approaches are suggested as promising.