PSA DAY

I attended the Classrooms to Communities conference on the Oct 23^rd Professional Development Day.  The sessions I joined were: Elders Outdoor Education Camp, Ocean Literacy Stories, and Conceptualizing, Theorizing, and Disrupting the Individual-Collective Dialectic in Transformative Learning, as well as both the opening and closing keynotes.  In this blog post, I will just be talking about the Elders Outdoor Education Camp and the Ocean Literacy Stories sessions, as my internet cut out during my third session and I missed a large chunk of it.

ELDERS OUTDOOR EDUCATION CAMP

This session was about the McBride Centennial’s Annual Elders Outdoor Education Camp.  The camp takes place over two days every May at the Beaver Creek Cabins, where the whole elementary school attends and is broken off into groups based on their grade.  The level of learning is different for each grade level, but the learning objectives are the same.  The students are taught bush survival skills, plant and animal knowledge, and the technology of natural materials.  The entire community gets involved, from elders leading the programming, to community sponsors and volunteers, to the organization of the event by the teachers and school staff.

The Elders Outdoor Education Camp focuses on Indigenizing the curriculum by way of place based learning.  They ask the students to ask themselves: What will you leave behind?  What is our legacy?  The goal of the camp is for students to connect themselves to the land, and to keep that connection in mind when going through their lives.

While a camp as intense and involved as this isn’t realistic as an immediate goal, there are aspects of this camp that can be brought into my teaching pedagogy.  Creating an entire camp might right at the beginning of my teaching career, I can work with elders and the community to bring place based learning into my own classroom.

OCEAN LITERACY STORIES

In this session, I learned that thinking of the ocean as many different seas and oceans is a very terrestrial view.  In reality, all the oceans and seas are connected, and are really just one ocean.  In thinking of the ocean as more than one, it allows for differences in how different countries treat the ocean.  While one country might be trying to protect the ocean at their shore, another might be doing little from stopping their people from polluting or otherwise harming the ocean there.  There is currently no standard for how the ocean is treated.

In the session, one of the speakers talked of an ocean literacy survey they’d done, which gave the shocking results that those who took the survey in Saskatchewan were shown to be more ocean literate than those in the coastal provinces.  After further investigation, it was shown that media and news had more influence on people’s ocean literacy than hands on experience.  A lot of people don’t realize how interconnected we are with the ocean, and thus those who have the opportunity to learn more about the ocean by interacting with it don’t take advantage of that privilege.

In communities near the ocean, Indigenous-led place based learning is a great way to enhance students’ ocean literacy.  As I plan to live and work on Vancouver Island after finishing my teaching degree, I hope to be able to tie ocean literacy into my teaching practice.  From having elders teach about he ocean’s past and our connection with it, to having hands-on lessons at the beach in, say, identifying sea creatures, to reading and researching ocean current events, there are many ways I can tie ocean literacy into my teaching.