Duarte Firm Tailors Texts for a Locale and Heritage

By SIOK-HIAN TAY KELLEY

Oct. 15, 1989 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Eskimo Chief Willie Kasayulie smiled faintly as he recalled a child in his village seeing a moose for the first time--and calling it a cow.

Concern accompanied his amusement.

Textbooks from the Lower 48 states describe skyscrapers, farms and pigs--ideas foreign to his Yupiit tribe in western Alaska. But the familiar moose, berry picking and salmon fishing were never mentioned, lamented Kasayulie, who is president of the Yupiit School District’s governing board.

To remedy the situation, the district decided to buy culturally relevant reading materials for grades 2 through 9.

It turned to Hoffman Custom Products, a publishing firm in Duarte that customizes supplemental reading programs for school districts.

For $400,000, the firm wrote texts featuring maps of the villages, wildlife sketches by a local artist and stories sprinkled with names of residents.

By weaving accounts of time-honored Yupik practices into reading materials, district officials hope to strengthen children’s respect for their elders and a heritage that spans 10,000 years.

“Parents have lost a lot of stature,” Kasayulie said of his tribe on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, 500 miles southwest of Anchorage. “We’re trying to recapture that before it is totally lost.”

Although the customized books are now just supplemental texts for the 307 students in six schools, Yupiit Supt. Brad Raphel said they will replace basic readers by fall. Kasayulie and other Yupik school officials visited Duarte this year to review the texts.

Ada Sullivan, president of Hoffman Custom Products, said nine employees and up to 25 free-lance writers write the texts in collaboration with district officials. The firm has also customized texts for schools in Cincinnati, Detroit, Cleveland and Dade County, Fla.

Reading specialists disagree over how reading materials should be used.

Aileen Johnson, a UCLA reading language specialist, doubts the value of writing texts to fit instructional goals. Reading concepts should be taught using literary works, she said.

“There’s nothing like a good book,” she said, adding that if literature is used properly, no supplements should be needed.

John McNeil, a UCLA literacy professor, disagreed, saying that most classics reflect the culture of a white upper class, denying the experiences of minorities and current issues such as environmental problems and AIDS.

Most of the nation’s 15,500 school districts use a reading textbook with classics as supplements, according to Donald Ecklund, school division vice president of the Assn. of American Publishers.

The content in Hoffman’s Yupik books is more than 75% local and includes passages on native legends, the tanning of animal skins and even False Teeth, the local dog-sled racing champ.

In one exercise, in which students must decide the focus of a story, the ritual of filling a dead seal with snow is explained: “The woman did this so the seal’s spirit would not get thirsty. Then the seal’s spirit could go back to the sea.”

Most lessons are presented in English and Yupik, the first language for the youngsters. Children learn that “assirluku snow-go-m Kitugtellra” becomes “the best way to fix a snowmobile.”

The Cincinnati Public School System also wanted regional information in its supplemental books. The 52,000-student district was searching for supplemental material to help teach reading, writing, listening, speaking and thinking skills in one program, said Reginald Green, Cincinnati’s deputy superintendent of instruction.

Hoffman tailored the program for kindergarten through eighth grade for $900,000, incorporating local tidbits in 30% of the material.

In a writing lesson, the legendary Johnny Appleseed is described wandering along the Ohio River laden with a sack of apple seeds. Elizabeth Blackwell, the nation’s first female doctor and a Cincinnati native, is also mentioned. Green said that teachers have reported their students are progressing faster and that parents have told him their children are reading more on their own.

Ecklund said he has not heard of other publishers who customize textbooks. Hoffman, he said, is “unique; most publishers cater to national markets.”

Customizing for every school district would simply not be profitable for major publishers, said Gail Burns, product manager of Massachusetts-based Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., a national textbook publisher for elementary and secondary schools.

Hoffman, which has produced reading texts and audiovisual aids for two decades, launched its customizing division two years ago, Sullivan said.

The company has also designed computer software for scoring tests in Dade County, Fla., schools and created a remedial reading program for pupils in Cleveland.

The Yupiit Reading Project was Hoffman’s toughest challenge.

The 5-year-old school district, which began using the program in fourth through sixth grades in 1988, includes the villages of Akiachak, Akiak and Tulusak. Surrounded by willow-covered tundra, the villages are in a wildlife refuge on land belonging to the native Alaskans.

Hoffman’s writers interviewed village elders and studied the Tundra Times, a local newspaper, to capture the native flavor.

Michael Williams, Yupiit school board vice president, said students and parents have told him that the project has increased their self-esteem.

The number of books or periodicals checked out from libraries in the villages has leaped from 54 to 1,700 a month, Raphel, the district’s superintendent, said.

The customized textbooks also educate teachers on the Yupik way of life, he said. “A lot of them are from the Lower 48 and don’t know the area, the climate, the people. They would come in, bring their little packets of material and teach what they were familiar with.”

And, he said, the new materials have changed the way teachers view students’ absences for food-gathering trips.

Acknowledging outdoor learning as legitimate and elders as experts, Hoffman has also designed grade sheets for parents to rate their children on traditional skills.

A sampling of the abilities listed would make the average child in the Lower 48 wince: “Can endure continuous berry picking, knows the proper wood for smoking fish, understands winter and cold survival techniques, practices gun safety laws, makes nightly entries into school journal.”

“Learning cannot be isolated from the environment,” because everything is seen through a cultural filter, said Hoffman vice president Carol Bradley, a former educator.

She recalled how an Alaskan teacher’s aide described Los Angeles’ night lights as she flew into LAX: “It’s like berries on the tundra.”

SKILLS YUPIKS MUST LEARN On hunting trips

Repair boat motors

Identify poisonous plants

Use winter or cold-water survival techniques

Estimate dates of return with basic map skills

Communicate with travelers and fellow hunters in Yupik

During berry-picking season

Identify plants used for medicine

Pick berries with few stems and without bruising

Endure continuous berry-picking

On salmon-fishing trips