Renuka de Silva speaks at 2026 Project Directors’ Meeting of the Department of Education’s Office of Indian Education

Renuka de Silva, associate professor of Teaching, Leadership & Professional Practice, was invited to speak as a panelist at the United States Department of Education’s Office of Indian Education on Wednesday, May 6, in Washington, D.C., to an audience of more than 300 attendees from across the United States. De Silva was invited by Julian Guerrero, Jr., director of the Office of Indian Education.

The event commenced on Tuesday with the keynote speaker, Kristen Baesler, assistant secretary of the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education at the Department of Education. Baesler emphasized that educators must center children, lead with purpose and act with integrity, because for all children, identity is central to learning and they need to be seen, valued and believed within their school setting.

As the principal investigator of her most recent DOE Native American Teacher Retention Initiative grant, “Knowledge, Utility & Access”, de Silva was asked to speak on behalf of all NATRI grants across the U.S.

The discussion focused on the importance of recruiting and retaining Native American teachers in the rural Dakotas and on outlining her NATRI grant. Beginning with the grant’s goal and purpose, de Silva emphasized the need to support the “front-line, in-service teachers” as a first and necessary step toward providing culturally relevant and meaningful tools that optimize their health and well-being. To this end, de Silva discussed a recent three-day interactive self-care workshop, Returning to Ourselves, delivered at UND’s Indigenous Student Center by Terrance Lafromboise (Blackfeet Nation), a trauma counselor and adjunct professor at the University of Montana.

From there, de Silva shared details about other upcoming workshops (Dakota language curriculum mapping, Indigenous Arts and Music, and Indigenous STEM), both in-person and online, to support what teachers requested. Through such activities, de Silva said, teachers can achieve excellence within themselves and in disseminating their best practices that would center Native American students, which is a critical element of Native American teacher retention.

Discussions about the grant also covered the scope of the work, learning opportunities within the grant framework, challenges and preparedness to address these issues to continuously improve a sustainable model that can be applied to future grants.