Educators engage in professional learning.
During my practicum, I had the opportunity to observe another class in the school, a grade 3 class taught by Mrs. G. On this day, her class was going on an Indigenous studies fieldtrip. With covid, this fieldtrip was changed from how she usually does it, and the fact that parent chaperones weren’t allowed meant that she was very happy I was able to come along and help supervise.
The afternoon before the fieldtrip, I went over to her class to observe the initial lesson. As per the grade 3 curriculum, her class was learning about the salmon life cycle (they have a tank of baby salmon that they’ll release at later point in the year), and at this particular stage they were learning about Indigenous fishing weirs. I’m not going to spend the time explaining what K’ómoks fishing weirs look like, but you can follow this link to see SD71’s informational site about them. In short, though, these fishing weirs were posts pounded into the sand in or near an estuary below the high tide line. Boards would be put in to turn the posts into a trap—with lead lines leading the fish into the traps as well. The fish would swim into the trap and, when the tide went out, they’d be stuck and the people could collect them.
The students learned these facts the day before our field trip, and watched the videos found on the website, where students can be taken on fieldtrips to the remains of these ancient K’ómoks First Nation fishing weirs in the Comox Harbour. Mrs. G also led a discussion with the class on how and why these fishing weirs worked, and what connections they could make between the traps and other things they’d learned about fishing.
In normal years, Mrs. G said, they’d take a bus out to the Comox Harbour and take a tour led by K’ómoks Elders of the remains of the fishing weirs there, but with covid that wasn’t possible. The tours were not currently happening, and buses couldn’t be booked—which, considering it is a half hour drive to the Comox Harbour from the elementary school, meant that getting there was impossible.
Instead, she’d altered her plans to become a walking field trip to Miracle Beach Provincial Park, where there were also remains of K’ómoks fishing weirs. There were more in the Comox Harbour, which were also more well preserved and came with a tour by Elders, but the ones at Miracle Beach worked just as well for her plans, and were something she usually took her students to as a later fieldtrip after seeing the ones in the Harbour. She recruited the school’s Indigenous Support Worker (Mrs. M) and myself as additional chaperones, and plans were set.
Having gone to Miracle Beach Elementary myself, I had always loved the walking fieldtrips we’d take to the beach or the park multiple times a year, and evidence of that same excitement was clear in the faces of the students as we all gathered in the classroom the next morning, bundled up in jackets and toques and gloves and gumboots (March on Vancouver Island means being prepared to get soaked, even if the weather didn’t specify rain, and even if we weren’t taking a group of eight year olds to a body of water).
The day itself was a great professional learning experience. This was my first time coming to the park and the beach as an educator and not as a student or simply as someone enjoying the scenery. We first went to the Black Creek, where there’s a salmon counting station, and the students spent a bit of time discussing that in terms of what they’d been learning about salmon. No one was working there at the time, but I remember walking field trips there when people were working, either in the fall or the spring, and how cool it was to get to see all the salmon and occasionally help count them ourselves. (This is another fieldtrip that Mrs. G has planned as well.) As the students had been learning about salmon for quite a while at this point, this was mostly self directed discussion, moderated a bit by Mrs. G when the discussion strayed a bit too far away from the topic.
After that, we moved further into the park (pictured below). Miracle Beach Provincial Park is full of old growth trees, due to the island’s tropical rainforest status. In Black Creek, we don’t get much weather other than rain from about mid-September to late-June. This meant that in March, when we went on the fieldtrip, we were on about our sixth straight month of wet weather, making the park vibrant and green. At this point in the fieldtrip, Mrs. M, the Indigenous Support Worker, took over, leading a discussion on the various plants and animals found in the area and their Indigenous uses, followed by a scavenger hunt in which students were given a list of possible Indigenous plants and tasked with finding as many as they could.
After a snack break—and a walk down to the outhouses at the beach—we moved on to the last stage of the field trip. This involved backtracking to the other side of the creek and travelling down to the estuary where the fishing weir was located. Once we reached the beach—the trail let us up a bit of a walk from the estuary—the students were sent on a search to find evidence of the weir—short sticks poking out from the rocks (which you can see in my pictures below). The joyful shouts when students spotted these were amazing.
In a tag-teamed effort between Mrs. G and Mrs. M, students were tasked with standing by each piece of wood, allowing a better view of how the weir might have looked hundreds of years ago when it was in use. (The pieces of wood themselves were no more than a few inches high, and were difficult to get a good picture of on their own). We had a discussion on the weir, bringing in the information they’d learned the day before and putting it into a new perspective now that they could actually see it, and then students were given free reign of playing on the beach and eating lunch before we headed back to the school.
This entire fieldtrip was such an amazing learning experience. I knew that walking curriculum and bringing learning outdoors were things that I wanted to bring into my own teaching, but actually getting to experience just that was so great. I grew up in Black Creek and going to Miracle Beach, and I had seen the pieces of woods coming up from between the rocks on the beach so many times and wondered what they were, but until now, I hadn’t known. This experience made me realize that Indigenous topics could be so easily accessible, and that knowing what is in your community can bring forward so many cool opportunities to either simply bring your students’ learning outside, or to even incorporate Indigenous studies in such a fluid, natural way. I also learned that adapting traditions to covid times is doable, and that making the most of what you’re given to work with can still bring forward amazing experiences.
