ABOUT OUR PROGRAM
For three months every summer, college students work as AlterNATIVE facilitators, traveling to reservations across the country to conduct youth empowerment workshops and college preparation courses. Our curriculum addresses Native histories, governments, arts, and current events, all of which are topics seldom discussed in the typical classroom. This project seeks to empower Native students as community members, individuals, and agents of change, especially by encouraging Native students to seriously consider higher education opportunities.
Our program continues throughout the year, as our volunteers act as mentors, helping students during the school year and and hosting Native high schoolers during week-long college trips to New York City.
OUR APPROACH
In structuring AlterNATIVE’s curriculum, one of our main goals is to help students develop a critical Indigenous consciousness. Given the length of the program (5 days at each site) and the ambitious task of decolonizing education, we approach our actions through a lens of decolonial pedagogy with an awareness of our limitations as students and facilitators. With the overarching goal of helping students to develop a critical Indigenous consciousness, our curriculum aims to center land, community, storytelling, and dreaming in discussions and teaching.