My journey through education grows increasingly complex. Having recently left the public education system, I am currently a Curriculum Coordinator for the First Nations Education Steering Committee in BC. This involves, among many other things, guiding the development of teacher resources and facilitating workshops for teacher professional development (for BC teachers and educators in the First Nations education system) along with supporting curriculum development teams at the BC Ministry of Education.
My professional experience includes 14 years teaching in both the K-12 (secondary English and Humanities) and post-secondary systems in British Columbia, in addition to working as an Advisor to the BC Ministry of Education, a Policy Analyst with FNESC, and serving as a Faculty Associate in Simon Fraser University’s Teacher Education Program. Over the past two decades, I have been actively involved in the areas of curriculum and resource development and writing (provincially and nationally), professional learning through inquiry networks, and literacy development education at the secondary level.
Amid all this I am soon to be completing my Masters in Educational Technology. My flight path for this course echoes my reason for undertaking this course of study from the outset. I chose this field of study for my Masters because I knew little about educational technology and wanted to learn more. My learning was for me alone – not to meet any specific professional goals.
Along the way, anidea began to grow in my mind. I am a proponent of trying to help other educators understand concepts of teaching and learning that extend beyond the generally Euro-Western model Canada has inherited. One of these frameworks is found in the First Peoples Principles of Learning (FPPL), a set of principles of education that reflect the shared understandings of the First Peoples of BC. A prominent construct included in these principles is the understanding that living and learning is inextricably tied to sense of place and connection to the land. The community and natural environment are regarded as the “classroom”, and “land was regarded as the mother of all people” (Kirkness, 1998, p. 10). In a similar vein, constructivist theorists view learning as highly contextualized; knowledge does not exist independent of the culture and history of people and place (John-Steiner & Mahn, 1996).
Since the recent changes in the BC education system (specifically with regard to curriculum changes) have enabled the FPPL to gain more prominence, the idea coalesced as a question: is there a way to integrate educational technology in the schools in ways that could still honour the FPPL? And, in my perspective the most challenging scenario would involve creating an on-line learning course that also explicitly honours the student’s relationship to place (including their natural environment) and others.
Another question has emerged alongside that original query: is there a way to use technology to create a learning experience for other educators to help them understand how to integrate the FFPL into their classrooms? In many of the workshops I currently facilitate, educators frequently express interest in being able to continue their learning in informal ways with other teachers around the province. A short time ago I created a WordPress blog to help teachers who were just beginning to explore the FPPL. It can be found here. The purpose of that site is to be informational, rather than interactive. I am now wondering if there is an additional way to support educators’ continued learning in this area.
These are the two questions that inform my flight path for ETEC 565A.
In this course I am interested in learning what I can about learning management systems, and seeing if a course could be designed using one of those systems that can still reflect the FPPL. Because experience with distance learning technologies has been limited to this program, my goals are simple:
- Learn what I can about creating a Moodle or Blackboard learning space. At this point I am more interested in focusing on Moodle, as I am somewhat familiar with Blackboard from a learner’s perspective (as a student in the MET program).
- Gain some hands on experience with more multi-media for educational purposes. I am interested in media that is very easy to use. As indicated in Bates’ (2014) SECTIONS model, people are “more likely to use technology that is quick and easy to use” (p.271) and that require little to no time for people to learn to use.
- Explore the possibility of setting up formal learning experiences via social media. As Bates (2014) indicates, recent developments in social media have increased the potential for using it to supplement other learning spaces, or to use it exclusively as the learning space.
I anticipate that the resources I need would simply be some general guidance in the use of the previously mentioned technology and media, and time to play and explore (as that is one of the ways I learn best). In some sense I am approaching my learning through a lens of unstructured inquiry guided by my own questions. I anticipate that I will attempt to learn what I can from the structured activities in this course and determine what elements of that learning I can apply to answering my questions.
References:
Bates, T. (2014). Teaching in digital age. Retrieved from: http://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/
John-Steiner, V. & Mahn, H. (1996). Socio-cultural approaches to learning and development: A Vygotskian framework. Educational Psychologist, 31 (3-4), 191-206
Kirkness, V. (1998). Our peoples’ education: Cut the shackles; cut the crap; cut the mustard. A Canadian Journal of Native Education Canadian Journal of Native Education, 22(1), 10- 15.