ERGATIVE AND ART FOR NATIVE AMERICAN COMMUNITIES

What is proposed is an online program that teaches people to use an aspect of their
language to understand and gain valued technical skills. The program would start with the
ergative, an aspect found in several languages in Latin America. For example, Maya uses the
ergative and is a language found in Mexico and Guatemala as well as other neighboring regions.

The ergative can readily be described as an agentive tool. The baseball player hits the baseball
is a form subject and object easily understand in English and Spanish. The following phrases,
however, give an example of agentive aspects of the ergative :

The boat sinks.

The glass breaks.

In Maya, the above sentences would essentially mark the ergative by means of a change or
conjugation of the subject.

In systems engineering, there is the designing for changeability (DfC) in engineering. “four key
dimensions of changeability: robustness, flexibility, agility, and adaptability.”
(Frick, Schulz, 2005). This gives complex mechanical and electronic systems a characteristic that
borders on animated. People raised on languages that incorporate the ergative have a resource in
that this is something, as students, they may be able to connect and relate to. What is envisioned
is an online course that would allow these same students to then become familiar with systems
engineering concepts as a future job skill.

HTML Programming and Art

The next stage is to train students on how to write a computer program. Rural students will
tend to be at a disadvantage to urban center students in terms of access to computer programming
education. What is proposed is where students can capture image of wildlife in the rural settings
and create websites by means of HTML programming. HTML incorporates a great deal of
symmetry in the use of code. The beginning and the end of a section of code surrounding an
image or text are essentially the same characters:

body Paragraph 1 Paragraph 2 body

With graphic design, students can be introduced to programming from the visual arts
perspective.

Reference: Fricke, E. and A.P. Schulz, “Design for changeability (DfC): Principles to enable
changes in systems throughout their entire lifecycle,” Systems Engineering, vol. 8, 2005, pp.
342-359.