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32 The Delta Kappa Gamma Bulletin: International Journal for Professional Educators

20, 2017). The teachers had taken advantage of educational opportunities in their lives
and worked every day to provide education to others. The public schools provided a way to
start educational attainment.
The teachers reflected on their experience, and, in the next school year, master teachers
observed them to witness and document how they used what they had experienced with
their students. Teachers reflected again in February after they had taught for a semester.
Using an interpretivist/constructivist theoretical framework with open and axial coding
categories, clusters of similar comments emerged that allowed the discernment of trends
in key issues in each culture.

Teachers’ Insights
Teachers reported the utility of the knowledge they acquired as clustering around issues.
The Appalachian teachers’ understandings of southwestern Native American culture resulted
in new insights about land policy, tropic cascade, water, conservation and preservation,
extraction and attraction, and economics and the environment. Teachers responded to ideas
about land policy, especially the idea that it is the land of all the citizens. The responsible use of
the land was a significant issue. One said, “I gained information about the Land Management
Agencies, including the responsibilities of the four divisions, and the significant impact of
these agencies from the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Interior” (Vivian,
personal correspondence, March 23, 2018). These rival agencies have competing agendas and
different expectations for using the land. Public policy frequently caused dissension between
and among various interested parties, and the rise of the call for states’ rights sometimes
echoes in the canyon land. The discord can be particularly loud between people who live next
to the land and citizens in other states who value the land.
Land policy disputes and the contending agencies may or may not deliberately impact
a tropic cascade. A tropic cascade was something the teachers had not thought about:
I learned the idea of tropic cascade, and how the removal of a keystone species (grey
wolf) from the western United States had dire consequences to the ecosystem.
Also, how the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone has had a positive influence
down the food chain and that helped to balance to the ecosystem. (Ryan, personal
correspondence, March 23, 2018)
Seeing the evidence of the removal and then the reintroduction of the alpha predator really
provided graphic evidence the teachers used to form their understanding of the issue. As
social studies majors, most of the teachers did not have deep backgrounds in biology or
conservation even though these issues created public policy debates that engaged the
western community members. By learning about issues outside their field, the participants
gained insight into issues that allowed them to make better community decisions.
Another public policy issue that the teachers approached from a conservation
perspective involved water. In the Appalachian homeland, water is plentiful and rarely
thought of as being in short supply—even though the teachers had seen the drinking water
of their neighbors contaminated by chemical spills and mine run off. One observed,
Tragedy of the commons—I learned about a shared resource system where
individual users, acting independently according to their own self-interests, behave
contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling that resource
through their collective action. The most common resource that is an example of
Tragedy of the Commons is water, a very valuable and scare resource in some parts
of the western United States. (Gene, personal correspondence, March 23, 2018)
It is not always a matter of who owns the land but of who can use the water in the West