Introduction
This curriculum is a fifth grade science unit and can be taught in a general education or in an English Language Learning (ELL) classroom. I have taught an ELL for the past three years and have had 100% Navajo students in my classroom. My school district is on the Navajo reservation in the northeastern part of Arizona. The district has three schools, an elementary, middle and a high school. There are less than 2,000 students in the district with 99% Navajo student population and 70% qualify for free and reduced lunch. The school is located in a rural area and some of the students travel about fifty miles to get to school.
My curriculum unit includes the Arizona's College and Career Ready Standards – English Language Arts 3–5 which integrates History, Social Studies and an emphasis on Science and the Diné Culture. It covers the course of four weeks for approximately fifty-five minutes a day. The science portion encompasses bad microbes and bacteria that hinder an individual from walking the path of harmony (hozho) within the Circle of Life.
Also, the Diné Standards includes the Science, Social Studies and Health focusing on healthy self, disease prevention, culture and lifestyle, and identifying and avoiding potential hazards and situations. Although, this unit will be created for Navajo students, I hope other classrooms will be able to use the unit to integrate cultures from other tribes or ethnicities.
Two bacteria and virus illnesses that infected the majority of the Diné population during the early 1900's and into the 1950's were tuberculosis (bacillus), and influenza (RNA virus), two major diseases that impacted the Navajo population. These varied and dispersed sicknesses were a wake-up call to the U.S. government, who needed to recruit military doctors that were willing to reside on the desolate reservation and to treat sick Indians. These Anglo doctors had to learn the culture of the Diné people because the majority of the Diné did not readily visit the government clinics or hospitals. These doctors eventually trained young Navajo men and women to become Community Health Representatives (CHR) to convince sick Navajos to visit the local clinics. I will teach bacteria and viruses in depth to my students, as the background knowledge which is displayed on various charts on my classroom walls.
The human body has billions of microbes within and on the body. These good and bad bacteria and viruses help keep the body in check balancing when an individual is following the natural goal of living a long life. In the Diné traditional culture there is such a concept of living a long healthy life. The Circle of Life is a daily and long life concept our culture utilizes to stay on the circle path. Students need to know and use the Circle of Life concept because it connects to their past generation and history, present day life, and lives of their future children and grandchildren.
The Circle of Life is an intangible concept used in comparison to other concrete resources like the Navajo basket (t'saa'), the traditional Navajo home (Hooghan), our sand paintings (iikaah), jewelry (yodi naalyei), flags and seals (danaat'aa), and our Mother Earth (Nihima aszaan). These resources have the circle path, cardinal directions, and the sacred colors with sections. These circle illustrations are compared to the Circle of Life diagram created on charts paper which are visible in the classroom. I am able to refer back to the Circle when I teach the history of the influenza and the tuberculosis outbreaks in relation to the micro-biome in the human body. Every action of a person connects to their whole body, even to the microbes. Breathing, giving birth, death, defecation, the raising and consumption of food, these and almost everything else that a human being thinks, says, or does, are, in a sense, "scared" acts.¹
After the Circle of Life visual input, I will present the basics of microbes by explaining the three domains of life (Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukaryotes). Then I will focus on bacteria and viruses and how they connect to the micro-biome, and to influenza (RNA virus) and tuberculosis (bacillus) diseases. The history of how bacteria and viruses infected and affected world and local (Diné Reservation) populations, and understanding how the different epidemics and pandemics impacted these populations through time are keys for learning about microscopic life. Students are able to see the tuberculosis history and the effect of the disease on the reservation compared to the U.S. nation, and how a Diné woman (Annie Wauneka) took the initiative to help her people during the 1930's and into the 1950's with her tuberculosis campaign.
Finally, my unit focuses on what research medicine is doing today with influenza and tuberculosis preventive medicines, and with educating the public. This is when I want my students to think about progressive changes that have happened since the 1900's to today. Are these changes beneficial, or do they hurt our people in terms of culture and keeping up with the rest of society? Our students need to begin to think about how they can help by considering areas in the medical field of study they would like to pursue. My students are in the fifth grade and they need to begin to think about what they would like to do to prepare them for the future. Many of our high school graduates are pursuing the medical field because within our local town a hospital is currently in construction. Not only hospital, also dialysis clinics, rehab treatment centers, and diabetic clinics are established.
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