Group Gets Grant For Cultural Immersion Camps For New Alaska Teachers

The AP (12/2, D'Oro) reports that many teachers hired to work in remote Alaska Native villages quit after a year or two, possibly because for many the state, their career, and the tribal cultures are new to them. The Rose Urban Rural Exchange program seeks to change that by pairing "rural Alaska schools with big-city counterparts," and it earned a $1.92 million grant from the US Department of Education "to launch cultural immersion camps for incoming rural teachers." This "represents a missing piece of the exchange program by introducing new educators to a way of life quite foreign to their own experiences" and "prepare teachers for communities that might have a historical distrust of outsiders dating back to early boarding schools where western education was imposed and indigenous culture was discouraged."