Life in the Navajo Nation: Role Models, Heroes and Celebrities
July 13, 2010Daniel 1 Comment »Over the past five weeks I’ve been part of a team of Duke students that’s been running a college-prep program for Navajo high school students.
As part of the program, we’ve been doing standardized test preparation, teaching college life skills, going on college visits and working on college applications.
The response from our students, however, hasn’t been as positive as we’d initially expected. They occasionally fail to complete the assigned work, they sometimes lack motivation (it’s summer time and they’re enrolled in an exhilarating college-prep program, but still…), and they don’t always show up for class.
I’ve concluded that a big reason for this is that we are not role models for our students.
It’s not that we don’t try to be– it’s that we can’t. We don’t know what it’s like growing up on a Reservation, we don’t fully understand Navajo culture, we don’t know what high school is like for them, our family life is nothing like theirs. We’re simply too different from them for them to want to be like us.
And this college-prep program, in a sense, is about inspiring our students to be like us, to want to go to college and to overcome the apprehension of leaving home. It’s just that we’re probably not the right people to motivate such desires. It’d be a different story if our team consisted of Native American Duke students.
In thinking about the problems we’ve faced running the program, I came up with this Venn diagram (I know, I know… slightly geeky 
) which illustrates what I believe is the relationship between role models, heroes and celebrities.
Because of the influence and pervasiveness of the mass media, there’s been a dramatic rise of the celebrity. It used to be that famous people were famous because they had done something courageous, selfless, inspirational or otherwise remarkable. These people were heroes.
But today’s celebrities have big names, but they are not necessarily big people.
On the other hand, a role model is someone you both look up to– a hero– and want to be like.
We are attracted to celebrities, we admire heroes, but we aspire to be like role models.
As John Maxwell says, change is inevitable but growth is optional. The last five weeks have taught me that we can’t be role models to everyone even if we try our very best, but day by day we can choose to grow so that we serve as role models to as many people as possible.
July 23rd, 2010 at 9:42 am
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