Li Fang-Kuei
Scollon's work with Li Fang-Kuei on the Mandeville stories led to a period of fieldwork in Fort Chipewyan in 1976–1977. During this period, the Scollons became interested in the ways in which different interactive styles—in the case of Fort Chipewyan, people socialized to an oral narrative discourse encountering people socialized to a discourse grounded in literacy and the European Enlightenment—can lead to misunderstanding and discrimination. This work led Scollon to take a job in 1979 with the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, where he contributed to the development of lexicons and educational materials for several Athabaskan languages in interior Alaska. He also taught in the education program, where in addition to working with education students face to face in a traditional classroom setting, he (together with Suzanne Wong Scollon) developed methods to conduct courses by email and audioconference with students distributed across several of the University of Alaska's satellite facilities.