Author Archives: jennifer mckay

This resource is found on the https://firstnationspedagogy.com/FN_Pedagogy.html website and is a PowerPoint presentation from Sylvia Currie (Nicola Valley Institute of Technology) and June Kaminski (Kwantlen University College) called First Nations Pedagogy for Online Learning. It discusses their project plan that would work towards providing a resource to support teachers and curriculum designers around Indigenous Pedagogy for online learning. On the first nations pedagogy website the authors have documented relevant theories and also link to the First Nations Pedagogy Online website, which lists further pedagogy and its relevance for online learning.

I must admit that both sites were difficult to navigate, with little direction on how one should explore them. Additionally, the online learning resources are far from the pedagogy, making me wonder if they came to the conclusion that online learning is just learning.

I’ve searched for assessment guidelines or approaches to verifying educational technology from Indigenous authors, but so far I have little to show for it. This week I stumbled upon this interesting resource which may be applicable when thinking about educational tool validation. This is a PDF of the Western and Northern Canadian Protocol (WNCP) Common Tool for Assessing and Validating Teaching and Learning Resources for Cultural Appropriateness and Historical Accuracy FNMI* content. 

*FNMI = First Nations, Metis, and Inuit

Within it are 4 major checklists which each focus on:

1. How the resource was produced
2. The authenticity of language and imagery
3. Representation of Indigenous knowledge and worldviews
4. Historical and contemporary portrays of

One question I thought particularly intriguing:

“Does the resource recognize that FNMI people created technologies, such as snowshoes, kayaks and canoes, that still work just as they were originally designed?”

On the same theme as this question, I would pose to an instructional designer whether or not they go into a meeting with their project team (whether Indigenous or not) assuming they are incorporating new, innovative educational technologies versus the Indigenous community’s perceived ‘primitive’ technologies?

The Alberta government released a companion resource in 2012 on collaborative frameworks and building relationships, called “Successful practices in First Nations, Metis and Inuit Education” (FNMI). It includes a model for supporting and enhancing FNMI student achievement and success which is centred around the “whole child,” where in education and learning we have to consider that the mind, emotions, body and spirit are connected, and are not separate.

This 128-page report includes facilitator guides and workshop reports, lesson plans, information on cultivating collaborative partnerships, culturally responsive education practices, and frameworks. They also really emphasize the role of families, parents, and communities in helping a student be successful. I’m most interested in reviewing the Instructional Practices, and the Curriculum and Content sections to analyze their instructional design around guidance for its educational audience.

The University of Alberta’s Faculty of Native Studies hosted a webinar in March 2018 on the Indigenous Canada MOOC Course they designed. Though the presentation is a high-level overview, I found the following sections most helpful when looking for elements of consideration for the instructional design of this type of online course:  “Elements of Indigenous Knowledge” (11:51), and “The work we did” (21:14).

I’ve screen-captured the Indigenous means of sharing knowledge they used to guide the design of their course: positionality, traditional environment knowledge, storytelling, and knowledge keepers. They also touch on pluralism and pan-Indigeneity.

One aspect of their process to build out content I found interesting was a goal to break from the conventional history of Indigenous peoples in Canada and purposely reframe it with significant contrast.

This is British Columbia’s Ministry of Education’s facilitator guide for educators on how to bring Indigenous knowledge, content, and perspectives into classrooms and schools.

For my project context, it serves as an example of instructional design to address Indigenous content, though I’m also looking at it from a critical lens.

The document lists a robust development team, including the First Nation Steering Committees, an Indigenous Education Network, and the Metis Nation of British Columbia. However, from an Instructional Design perspective, guidance for the teachers is not also embedded in the First People’s Principles for Learning (which others have already listed in their blogs).

I want to look over this guide in more detail to see if the principles are within the facilitator materials in a subtle way, or if the instructional design does not in fact reflect Indigenous pedagogy and a more direct perspective from the development team.

Evaluation and assessment are essential parts of instructional design to determine if the curriculum, course, module, or training program is meeting the goals and planned outcomes determined in the development phase. Jane Preston and Tim Claypool wrote the article “Analyzing Assessment Practices for Indigenous Students,” and reviews common assessment practices through an Indigenous worldview. According to the literature, it seems assessment practices over the last two decades for Indigenous students have changed very little.

After reading this article I thought about how assessment tools in e-learning authoring tools, such as canvas, articulate, etc. can be limited quizzes and drag-and-drop methods of testing the learner for retention. Since many of those tools are templates, they are the fastest and easiest to use for assessment, but does the fact that these applications default to those methods of assessment reinforce a western knowledge system, even if the e-learning content is meant to be more inclusive of other ways of knowing?

As an example, I’ve included the only options available for evaluation in Articulate 360 RISE. You only have the option of knowledge checks and there are a total of 5 different applications you can use. Additionally, they have a chapter option where you can build a standalone multiple-choice quiz as well.

Preston, J. P., & Claypool, T. R. (2021). Analyzing assessment practices for Indigenous students. In Frontiers in Education (Vol. 6). https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2021.679972 

Pulling Together: A Guide for Indigenization of Post-Secondary Institutions was developed by BCcampus and the Ministry of Advanced Education and Skills Training. A steering committee of Indigenous education leaders led the project.

I’m focusing on the version of the guide for Curriculum Developers, but there are other versions for teachers, administrators, student services, researchers, etc. The two chapters I found most helpful were Section 2: Meaningful Integration of Indigenous Epistemologies and Pedagogies, and Section 4: Incorporating Diverse Sources of Indigenous Knowledge.

I have been searching for curriculum validation tools or guides from an Indigenous lens suitable to the type of knowledge incorporated, so I was very happy to find this guide. Though light on content from my perspective, the guide provides direction and examples on evaluating whether your education content or activities cross the line into cultural appropriation. You can also evaluate your approach based on whether you looked for opportunities to incorporate local land, knowledge, or language into your curriculum.

Though my research question focuses on instructional design processes, I find that as an Indigenous instructional designer I am curious about the instructional designers themselves who must choose to use those processes, and are entrenched and trained in a non-Indigenous system.

The article, “Agency of the instructional designer: Moral coherence and transformative social practice,” by Katy Campbell, Richard A. Schwier, and Richard F. Kenny, looks at instructional designers as more than purveyors of education and instructional frameworks. Instead, they view them as purposeful educators who have ethical, social, and political views and have moral obligations.

“We maintain that instructional design is a moral practice that embodies the “relationship between self concept and cultural norms, between what we value and what others value, between how we are told to act and how we feel about ourselves when we do or do not do act that way” (Anderson & Jack, 1991,p. 18). Instructional design involves the ethical knowledge of the designer acting in moral relationship with others in a dialogue among curriculum, the sources and forms of knowledge and power, and the social world. As ethical actors in that world we use the language of design in collaborative conversation with our colleagues, our clients, and our institutions to create an alternate social world of access, equity, inclusion, personal agency and critical action.”

The references reveal the influence of feminist theory which serves as a critical lens on this research. Though only one of the instructional design examples notes a designer working with first nations, the authors in both examples challenge the expertise an instructional designer brings to their work as it is entrenched in just one knowledge system. They call for instructional designers to be aware of their cultural biases, values, sense of morality, and the political implications of their choices.

They quote an excellent line from Kugelmass (2000, p. 179) – “Who am I, why am I practising this way, and what effect does this have on others?”

Campbell, K., Schwier, R. A., & Kenny, R. F. (2005). Agency of the instructional designer: Moral coherence and transformative social practice. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 21(2). https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.1337

In collaboration with communities and other organizations, The Gordon Foundation has developed an online resource website called https://understandingtreaties.ca/ to support learning about Treaty negotiation through simulations. This interactive learning exercise reminds me of model UN clubs, and seems like a great exercise for students to practice self-determination whether offline or online. It is designed with actual negotiators from band offices and grounded in the histories of treaty negotiation in Canada.

The program uses plenty of mixed media, including these illustrated texts: https://understandingtreaties.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Series-1.pdf 

I discovered this initiative through a YouTube video recording of Nisga’a Nation youth participating in the treaty simulation.

In the pressbook e-publication, “Toward a Critical Instructional Design”, authors Johanna Sam, Jan Hare, Cynthia Nicol, and Leanne Petherick write a chapter called “Indigenizing Design for Online Learning in Indigenous Teacher Education“.

They explore these two questions in the context of an Indigenous Teacher Education Program:

• How do you bring Indigenous knowledges into learning management systems (LMS)?
• How do you weave Indigenous perspectives in the course design while using a LMS that can be seen as dominant/Eurocentric?

To conduct online instruction and learning environments for the teachers, the team created four pedagogical principles for Indigenizing design:

1. Indigenous knowledge frameworks
2. Localization
3. Multimodalities
4. Design for relationship

A lovely day in Steveston, Richmond, BC.

I particularly enjoyed this paragraph near the end of the chapter as it spoke to an exploration, not a replication, of relationships that can be cultivated online:

“Space, voice, and agency are given to Indigenous people when their knowledges are upheld in digital forms. While the digital space is not a replacement for the experiential pedagogies that occur in physical and material worlds, we suggest alongside Morford and Ansloos (2021) that new relationships can be formed with land through online experiences. Digital environments serve to repatriate land, languages, and traditions (Wemigwans, 2018).”