Tag Archives: indigenous perspectives

M4P5: AlbertaEd – Walking Together & Talking Together

Alberta Education created a very comprehensive and interactive guide called Walking Together that provides educators with the necessary resources needed to incorporate FNMI perspectives into the curriculum.

One of my goals in my final project is to create a teacher self-reflection tool to determine which Indigenous perspectives are addressed in a particular lesson. The self-reflection tool would be a circle, similar to the front page of Walking Together, with the perspectives around the outside divided into pie pieces and then specific keywords underneath each perspective, to help guide the teacher in really analyzing their lessons.

I think this resource could also be used as a student activity, perhaps with the student reflecting on how the participation in the activity aligned with Indigenous perspectives. The student version would have student friendly language and offer sentence starter prompts for each perspective/keyword.

However, before introducing this self-reflection tool, students and teachers would both need to have an awareness of Indigenous knowledge and these various perspectives before the tool would be used meaningfully. I plan on creating an interactive multimodal game where these perspectives will be explored as a part of my final project.

M4P4: MathCatcher – Meet Small Number

“Mathematics Through Aboriginal Story Telling”

MathCatchers is an outreach program for educators and learners, encouraging numeracy through storytelling, pictures, and hands-on learning. They created a character named “Small Number” who ‘engage(s) Aboriginal learners in math and science through the use of First Nations imagery and storytelling.’ Through various videos, the opportunity for various discussions about anything from basic counting and pattern recognition to exponential growth and probability permutations and combinations. These videos will serve as a foundational part of my final project, with many Alberta curriculum pieces being tied to various sections of the video. I envision these videos being part of the regular classroom routine, with students constantly being brought back to the story and encouraged to dig deeper into the math and culture embedded within.

“The main character in our animations thus far is a boy called Small Number. He is a bright, playful kid, with the ability to recognize patterns and calculate quickly.”

M3P4: Mi’kmaq Immersion School

A quote that stood out to me in this video was said by the teacher:

“I don’t know how you expect me to teach young kids their own culture when I don’t even know anything about my own culture.”

Culturally responsive education is important in the revitalization of Indigenous cultures. This video explores how a Mi’kmaq school in Manitoba has achieved “total immersion in language, culture, and community.” The school focuses on math and reading skills. The teacher interviewed spoke about how he has come to remember his “why” for teaching and has also been able to learn so much more about himself and his own culture in the process. I chose to include this video because it affirms the importance of cultural immersion and serves as a model for other programs.

This screenshot shows young students learning about the Mi’kmaq sweat lodge and singing the Mi’kmaq ‘Honor Song.”

M3P3: Indigenous Storywork Protocols

“Educating Heart, Mind, Body & Spirit”

I came across this site after reading about Dr. Jo-ann Archibald’s Indigenous Storywork framework. It shares various resources for educators but also for the public, and it also highlights and shows respect for the Elders who contributed to the website. The educator resources are not typical lesson plans, but rather they are a set of questions that create a framework Indigenous story telling; Dr. Archibald poses many questions that help guide and prepare educators for various protocols for using Indigenous stories. One important protocol she outlines is to acknowledge the storyteller, and the Indigenous culture from which the storyteller is a member, and then provides some contextual and cultural background for the story. This is a good entry point for me to be able to include Indigenous stories in my own teaching practice.

Decolonizing Reflexive Practice Through Photo Essay (M4P5)

The coming school year will be the first time I teach Photography 11/12, and I am hoping this resource will help me prepare for that. The paper, Decolonizing Reflexive Practice Through Photo Essay Aisinai’pi Storying Place (Walsh et al., 2018) outlines a photo essay project that situates the students’ identities with place. A photo essay is “a series of images evoking stories of original peoples and settlers on this land and fuels important questions about identity and belongingness” (p. 103).

An example of a photo essay, representing the importance of (controlled) burns for healthy ecosystems.

In the paper, the authors describe using a photo essay of the City of Calgary to orient students with Indigenous worldviews and a sense of place. Each photo has a theme, and many interconnect. For each photo, they asked students key questions, such as:

Who originally occupied this land?
How do Eurocentric societies and Indigenous societies understand Mother Earth?
What are your beliefs about live-giving forces?
What promotes health and wellness?
How do you understand the notion of all entities to be interconnected and interdependent?
etc.

I think this could be a valuable way to introduce students to both photo essays and to local history. You could extend the learning by having students create their own place-based photo essays.

Reference:

Walsh, C. A., St-Denis, N., & Eagle Bear, A. (2018). Decolonizing Reflexive Practice Through Photo Essay Aisinai’pi Storying Place. Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry, 10(1). https://doi.org/10.18733/cpi29376

M4P5: Youth who inspire

These five First Nations youth are being highlighted for their action in restoring language and culture and ultimately hope in their communities. They are also an example to students of action: it is personal, it takes different forms, and it is in response to a personal connection. As the final project considers using technology to inspire activism in the classroom, all of these youth use technology for their purpose. Exploring who they are, their message, and their delivery offers students a rich experience of activism in action.

Module 4, Post 3

Settler Education

This article describes “Settler ethics” which includes discussing, accounting for, disrupting, analyzing, unsettling, and challenging settler identities and knowledge. The work addresses the settlers’ perspective and how settlers have not been accountable for the actions of their ancestors and things like land acknowledgements are often done to say, “See, I did something, I’m fixing it”, but they are like empty promises that only really help appease the conscience of the settler, not actually enact change for the colonized.

I think that settler ethics are an important thing to address and recognize as my partner and I look to build a unit based on creating teacher confidence using Indigenous ways of knowing and doing. We need to make it very clear that we are not the owners of these practices and give credit and recognition to Indigenous Peoples.

Using Anchor texts for perspective M4 P4

While this is not an Indigenous story, the idea of using anchor texts to start conversations can be very powerful. They All Saw A Cat could be a fantastic simple story that could be used at even middle school or higher levels with the right structure around it as a starting point to looking at perspectives. It would be a great time to talk with students about the perspectives that are taught in Canada now and historically (Euro-centric) and how we are attempting to honour and learn through other perspectives as well. Following a discussion about this book followed by a book or story from your local Indigenous nation and seeing how the perspectives might be different would be powerful and a safe entry point for teachers.

https://youtu.be/-N9TU20EJus

M3P1: Indigenous Math Games

I came across this resource, and I plan on taking at least one of each type of game and incorporating it into the Alberta Program of Studies.

The game “Hubbub” caught my attention. Players take turns tossing the dice and collecting point values, represented by the sticks. The game ends when all of the counters are gone, and whoever has the most sticks at the end wins.

This is a very simple game that opens up lots of discussion about probability, at many different grade levels. I can see it being used in elementary for patterns and collecting data; in the middle school level for simple probability; and at the high school level for statistics and probability.

http://mathcentral.uregina.ca/RR/database/RR.09.00/treptau1/mathcontent.html

Building Resiliency through the We Light the Fire Project (M2P5)

Fanian et al. (2015) evaluate the role art plays in building resiliency through the Kots’iìhtła (“We Light the Fire”) Project. The participants were Tłı˛cho˛ youth (of the Northwest Territories), facilitated by Indigenous youth artists/mentors. While the project’s original goal was suicide prevention among youth, participants steered its course by choosing issues that were important to them. During the workshops, “participants began to share about challenges such as alcohol use, cyber bullying and suicide and employment, as well as positive aspects of their community and visions for their own and collective future through the artwork and in conversations” (p. 7). Projects ranged from visual arts to music, film to photography. At the end of the project, the particpants’ creations were shared with the community. The project was deemed a success, as both participant self-reflections and mentor observations saw an increase in participant confidence and resiliency. Additionally, participation in art-making was found to have the potential for facilitating bonding and sparking conversations for change.

Art as a vehicle for social change + art as a vehicle for promoting healthier minds, bodies, and spirits = Kotshiihtla

Reference:

Fanian, S., Young, S. K., Mantla, M., Daniels, A., & Chatwood, S. (2015). Evaluation of the Kots’iìhtła (“We Light the Fire”) Project: building resiliency and connections through strengths-based creative arts programming for Indigenous youth. International Journal of Circumpolar Health, 74(1), 27672. https://doi.org/10.3402/ijch.v74.27672