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.
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.”
After reading Ginsburg’s Rethinking the Digital Age, I wanted to find more about Indigenous media local to my area.
Danielle Black grew up in Calgary, and is a member of the Siksika First Nations, a part of the Blackfoot Confederacy, Plains people, Treaty 7. She is an Indigenous artist who is using film to change perspectives and tell stories about Indigenous past but also about modern Indigenous people. She created a short film titled A Love Letter To My Unborn Child, “which speaks to her future child about the joys and trials that will await him/her as an Indigenous person navigating the world.”
I chose to include this in my research for my final because it displays resilience, strength, and hope in the face of adversity. This is a good piece of media to analyze with students, as it features Indigenous youth and offers a modern perspective on the struggles that Indigenous peoples face, and I think it shows many values of Indigenous knowledge and cultures. There is a lot to unpack in this 7 minute video, and I think it is worth unpacking and diving deep into the meanings.
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
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.
Using the art of storytelling, this BCTF resource focuses on Gladys, an Indigenous girl from Spuzzum, and her life in a residential school. I appreciate its BC centered focus relating it directly to where students live and explore. It links to additional sites throughout the each lesson that enhance learning, but the information provided within the resource itself is rich. Each lesson is easily adaptable to earlier or older grades and provoke students to make connections to their lives. It is also available in French for those teachers who are in an immersion classroom.
In their paper, “Digital Storytelling as Arts-Inspired Inquiry for Engaging, Understanding, and Supporting Indigenous Youth”, Englinton et al. investigated how youth explore their personal and cultural idnetities trough multimedia narratives. The creation, reflection on, and sharing of these stories provided “opportunities for these youth to represent, perform, and thus construct their identities using the cultural artifacts available to them” (p. 14). The authors argue that this medium, in this case short (under 5 minutes) multimedia narratives, is a powerful amplifier of marginalized voices. They base their workshop on the Freirean model which uses images to spark dialogue and illuminate collective themes or issues.
This process can be taken a step further into the digital-art niche by creating such narratives with animation. There is an abundance of support for stop-motion (sometimes called slowmation) animation for supporting learning. Pavlou (2019) details its strengths for facilitating digital storytelling, such as its power to encourage creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration. For an example of an Indigenous stop-motion, see the video below:
From the Video’s Description: This animated documentary follows the journey of an Indigenous photographer as she travels through time. She witnesses moments in her family’s history and strengthens her connection to her Metis, Cree and Anishnaabe ancestors. This is a personal story told through the eyes of director and writer Amanda Strong. The oral and written history of her family reveals the story — we witness the impact and legacy of the railways, the slaughter of the buffalo and colonial land policies. Four Faces of the Moon contains no English language, relying on sound, image and Indigenous voice to tell the story. This multi-layered approach to storytelling may leave you with more questions than answers: it is an invitation to look into your own understanding of history, legacy and the importance in knowing who you are and where you’re from.
References:
CBC (2017, March 21). “Four Faces of the Moon” – Canada’s dark colonial past | Animated Short Doc [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/rWe–sysNkk
Englinton, K. A., Gubrium, A., & Wexler, L. (2017). Digital Storytelling as Arts-Inspired Inquiry for Engaging, Understanding, and Supporting Indigenous Youth. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 18(5). https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1136731.
Pavlou, V. (2019). Art Technology Integration: Digital Storytellying as a Transformative Pedagogy in Primary Education. International Journal of Art & Design Education, 39(1), 195–210. https://doi.org/10.1111/jade.12254
The stories that are often used in Indigenous teaching are often oral, so having a source when bringing in an elder or stroytelling isn’t possible is great. While always having the stories told in person by an elder or someone who understands the values and lessons involved is always best, but this source gives a good summary of some of the meaning behind different stories. It’s also arranged by general learning levels as well as by topic or theme. With a summary and context for each book, it becomes much easier for a non-Indigenous teacher to select which ones they think would be great for their classroom.
In the study, Litts et al. (2021) examined the affordances and constraints of a novice programming platform called Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling (ARIS) for community storytelling in a summer workshop with forty-seven Native American youth (38 fully consented to participate in the research). The indigenous youth built their place-based stories on a storyboard and then developed their games using ARIS. The researchers reported three cases underlying different narrative structures that youth used in their storyboards and the design process while using ARIS:
1- Branching narrative: In this structure, the students follow the linear flow where the player is guided from one element to the next. They were able to execute their game with ease as their structure aligned well with the logic embedded in the platform.
Screen capture of “Figure 2: group students work using the existing branching logic in the ARIS editor” ( Litts et al., 2021, p.850).
2- Sandbox narrative: In this narrative structure, the students desired to give the player a big open world populated with opportunities for exciting interactions. The player isn’t constrained to a rail-like linear plot but can interact with the world in any order that he/she chooses. While the idea is doable, however, it requires a certain level of familiarity with ARIS and computer science principles that the students lack. Thus, the students couldn’t work out their idea on the platform, and the result was a narrative that they didn’t initially intend.
Screen capture of “Figure 3: Visual representation of sandbox narrative structure” (Litts et al., 2021, p.851).
3- Hub-and-spoke narrative: it is a non-linear narrative tightly connected to the Indigenous culture. Also, here, the group of students couldn’t execute the game as desired (only completed one spoke) as the structure of the tool didn’t support the form of their narratives (Litts et al.,2021).
Screen capture of “Figure 4: Visual representation of hub-and-spoke narrative structure” (Litts et al., 2021, p.852).
The latter two cases explicate the epistemological tensions in this computational tool (its Western orientation), which negatively impacted these groups’ participation in computing. The message that stood out for me in the article is that “it is not enough just to broaden who participates in computing; we must also broaden the epistemologies and cultural practices that are valued within computing. As such, we must expand who designs tools in the first place” (Litts et al., 2021, p.853). The article is significant to my research project as it considers the design of learning tools as a core pillar in broadening the participation of Indigenous students in the computing field and reveals that more efforts are needed to design culturally responsive computational tools.
Reference:
Litts, B. K., Searle, K. A., Brayboy, B. M. J., & Kafai, Y. B. (2021). Computing for all?: Examining critical biases in computational tools for learning. British Journal of Educational Technology, 52(2), 842-857. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13059
Voices on the Rise: Indigenous Language Revitalization in Alberta is a 3 part docuseries made in collaboration with Telus and Victoria filmmaker/visual artist Eli Hirtle ((nêhiyaw(Cree)/British/German). The series follows Eli and his journey of self-actualization by visiting his ancestors’ communities and learning more about his language. He focuses on the revitalization of Indigenous language and its intimate connection to culture, family, and life. Much can be learned from Eli’s story for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples alike.
