Tohono O’odham College Visit

The highlight of last week, well there were two actually.

I began my data collection for the research which my colleague Kathy Short and I are conducting, looking at dual language picturebooks with pre-service teachers. It was very exciting to get started and to see the students’ reactions to the picturebooks.

The second was my trip out to the Tohono O’odham College on Thursday. My colleagues Dr. Duffy Galda Diona Williams who work at the College had arranged the day for, and I am so grateful to them. It’s about an hour and a half drive out of Tucson to get to the college which is on tribal land. There are two campuses near a small settlement called Sells with some beautiful new buildings all named in the O’odham language. My first engagement was a workshop held in the library with staff and students, looking at New Zealand bilingual Māori-English picturebooks, and thinking about how the languages are laid out in them. The participants were very engaged with the range of books I had taken for them to examine closely. Two young language teachers arrived near the end, and so I ran through the ideas with them, and they were very inspired to make some books of their own. I sent them off with a copy of one of the Reo Pēpi bilingual picturebooks. The librarian had set up a beautiful display of bilingual books in American indigenous languages and the photo below is of me, Duffy and Diona behind that display.

The evening talk was held in a big hall, and Duffy and Diona had arranged it with a delicious meal for the community to enjoy while I was talking. In that talk I discussed the status of Te Reo Māori in New Zealand, how New Zealand identity is reflected in New Zealand picturebooks, and the range of bilingual picturebooks available. There were some great discussion questions at the end, and some teachers of the O’odham language had brought in samples (or told me about them) of the kind of bilingual picturebooks they make to support their language teaching.

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