One of the students’ first introductions to contemplating Indigenous ways of knowing was through a fieldtrip I organized to UBC Farms. The tour guide showed them the Indigenous Health Research and Education Garden where food and medicine are grown. The garden is shaped as a medicine wheel and the guide explained to the students what the significance of each of the four quadrants is and how the plants being grown in each part of the garden are reflective of the quadrant that they represent. The students really enjoyed this part of the tour at UBC Farms and many of them wrote about it in their reflections after the fieldtrip.
I was doing a Social Studies Unit on community and found many opportunities to integrate Indigenous content and ways of knowing into the classroom. I read stories about different Indigenous groups for the students to gain a better understanding of their daily life and respect for their elders, the environment, and their ceremonial traditions. This in turn got students thinking about their own cultural traditions and how they are both similar and different to those of Indigenous people, as well as ways they can better show care and respect for the environment and why it is important to do so. Before I began my first lesson on Indigenous Education I was quite nervous because I know it is a topic that my class is not very familiar with and has not been taught before and I was worried that they would not be engaged. I started out by reading them Indigenous stories and during the reading is one of the quietest times I had seen them. They were so engaged and raised their hands to ask really great questions related to the stories and Indigenous peoples’ way of life. Some of the questions I didn’t even know the answers too but I made sure to answer them as best as I could and research what I didn’t know and try to find stories that would perhaps make their questions more clear. I was so pleasantly surprised at how engaged and interested the students were during this time that I made a conscious effort to incorporate a lot of Indigenous content into our community unit.
During my extended practicum I went to a workshop at my school by BC literary expert Faye Brownlie. She gave us many strategies for developing literacy in our students, and one of her ideas particularly appealed to me that I wanted to use in my class. She brought out an Indigenous story, and before she started reading each page, she had us just study the illustrations and think of questions that we had regarding this image that we were curious about and that could perhaps be answered through the story. She encouraged us that there were no right or wrong answers to get everybody participating. The pictures were so vivid that they evoked a lot of discussion and every person had a different questions to add, such as “what is the significance of _____.” Then when she read us the story we were more engaged as we were waiting to see whether our questions were answered and in turn we found out more about another culture. The next week, I tried this strategy in my own classroom and was pleasantly surprised with the results. At first the students were unsure of what questions to ask, but as they heard more of their classmates asking questions and saw that all the questions were valuable and interesting, they all began to participate and ask engaging questions.