During Friday’s seminar, I joined the Land as our Teacher: Changing Engagement for Indigenous Learners (Grade 4-9) session and the Storytelling, Symbolism, and Inter-Cultural Relationships session. I also listened to the second keynote speaker, Dr. Niigaanwewidam Sinclair, however I missed the first keynote speaker due to an appointment.
LAND AS OUR TEACHER
In this session, I learned that with middle school aged children, emotional literacy is something that should be addressed. Children that age are going through puberty and are dealing with feelings they might not know how to address. The speaker brought up an Emotional Literacy Charter, where students are taught to think about who they are and what they bring to the class, as well as to take care of each other and work as a collective, and to connect oneself to the land. This matters because giving kids the tools to manage their emotions in healthy ways will set them up for success outside of school and throughout their lives. My next step in learning would be to further look into how to teach and address emotional literacy in the classroom. This learning experience will influence my teaching pedagogy by making me think more about learning outside of academics.
STORYTELLING, SYMBOLISM, AND INTER-CULTURAL RELATIONSHIPS
In this session, I learned about Indigenous storytelling. The ideal situation would be to bring in an Indigenous person to teach their stories and the symbolism within them. If that’s not possible, though, non-Indigenous people can teach the stories and symbolism, if they go through the process of learning the stories and symbolism, and talk to Indigenous people so that they can respectfully pass on the lessons to students. I also learned how to draw Indigenous art of a wolf. This matters in the context of K-12 education because it is not always possible to do the best, ideal situation—for any context, not just Indigenous education. Knowing the alternatives and how to respectfully teach subjects such as Indigenous education that aren’t my expertise as a teacher will be a key skill in my teaching practice. The next step would be to start making connections in the Indigenous communities so that I will have people I can reach out to that can come in to teach, as well as researching the stories and symbolism to be able to respectfully teach own my own should the need arise.
DR. SINCLAIR
I learned that there are four questions central to the Indigenous education curriculum: Who am I? Why am I here? Who can help me? Where am I going? I learned that in Indigenous education, everything and everyone is connected, and that the process of learning and developing relationships is the goal, rather than the product produced or the grades achieved. This matters in a K-12 context because it helps bring Indigenous education into perspective. It is not something that should be graded on how well students perform but instead on how they interact with each other and their environment and engage with the material. This will influence my teaching pedagogy by making me consider alternative measures of assessment, not just in Indigenous education but across the curriculum. If I work to be more flexible in my scheduling and assessment, this Pro-D day session has taught me that it will have a positive effect on my students.
