Topics

• Instructor’s blog and review of student blog assignments and commentaries
• Creating a frame of reference for discussions on First Nations
• Your story / Our story

Learning Objectives

At the end of this lesson students will be able to:

• Identify common reference points (social and cultural) for classroom discussion.
• Recognize the roots of some of the difficulties students have when involved in discussion concerning the relations between First Nations and Canada.
• Reflect on and write about the values and stories that define your sense of home.

Lesson Description

This lesson involves some investigation into the difficulties encountered when discussing topics concerning the First Nations in Canada in the classroom.  We need to work toward  establishing a framework of common points of reference for our class discussions, as well as recognizing differences through shared stories.

Assignments

Assignment 2:1/ Please see due dates on the Course Schedule

Students are required to read two student blogs and post a significant and relevant observation or question in the comment box of each blog.

Assignment 2:2/ Please see due dates on the Course Schedule

Write a short story (600 – 1000 words) that describes your sense of home; write about the values and the stories that you use to connect yourself to, and to identify your sense of home.

Assignment 2: 3 Please see due dates on the Course Schedule

Read at least 6 students blog short stories about ‘home’ and make a list of BOTH the common shared assumptions, values and stories that you find and look for differences as well; look to see if you can find student peers who appear to have different values then yourself  when it comes to the meaning of ‘home.’ Post this list on your blog and include commentary please.

 Required Readings

• Student blogs
• Instructor’s blog

Required viewing

What I Learned In Class Today: Aboriginal Issues in the Classroom.Dir. Karrmen Crey and Amy Perreault. First Nations Studies Program, U. of British Columbia, 2007. Web. April 04 2013. http://www.intheclass.arts.ubc.ca

Lesson: Your Story / Our Story

Assumptions are a dangerous thing. They are especially dangerous when we do not even see that the premise from which we start a discussion is not the hard fact that we thought it was, but one of the fancies we churn out of our imaginations to help us get from the beginning of an idea to the end. Thomas King, “Godzilla vs Post-Colonial” (183).

We begin this lesson with the task of creating a more secure frame of reference for our discussions and we do this by identifying reference points that will work to create some common ground. We need to build this secure frame of reference for discussion in order to begin examining intersections where story and literature meet in Canada in an historical context. This is because we begin with Indigenous stories, the first stories about this land we call Canada, and any discussion focused on First Nations is disabled by two major handicaps. One handicap, which I have encountered in the classroom, is the simple fact that very few people have been academically informed or asked to look critically at historical events with an eye to the oppression and severe injustices acted out by the colonizers/settlers in the process of claiming this land as Canada.

Another handicap is like part two of the first, but it is more complex and all wrapped up in feelings about identity. Because First Nations issues are historically and presently culturally and politically complex and laden with racism, many people can be reluctant to speak or even to ask questions. As this course progresses you are going to discover that there are very good reasons for this reticence. There are many scholars and writers, like J. Edward Chamberlin and King, who have been wrestling with articulating good reasons and literary ways to see through the one-sided story/history of this land in so many forms and genres. There is much theorizing around how to de-colonize historical consciousness (or, if that is even possible), that struggles with articulating the complex relations between representation and identity and how we know ourselves through misrepresentations of the Other. We’ll look a little more closely at this theory in Lesson 2:3 when we probe the stories that settled this land. For now it is sufficient to recognize that the crux of the matter is tangled up with identity. One problem for students arises when they become confused on how they identify with the current issues of First Nations land and resource claims (never mind residential school horror stories, or missing Indigenous women in Vancouver, or protests over pipelines or environmental destruction on First Nations territories) – and, for good reasons. And this confusion surfaces and intensifies when students contextualize current media reports on First Nations with the course material which sometimes provokes feelings of guilt or anger, complicity, and general unease. Often this occurs because, as Lorraine Weir puts it quite succinctly, students get a little “rocked” when they realize the history they have been taught is full of “lies and distortions” (What I Learned in Class Today).

One way to overcome these handicaps is to acknowledge these problems at the outset and to produce a shared framework of reference points to anchor our discussions and create a class environment that encourages participation and questions through open-minded discussions within set boundaries. These boundaries will actually free us up to more open discussions.

How will we accomplish this task?

We’ve already begun the process by reading each other’s blogs and gaining interesting insights to different perspectives concerning our assigned questions and storytelling experiments. Next, we need to take a little time to examine more closely our common ground by reflecting on our diversity. You will notice I use the term “we” in lessons above in a way that points to certain assumptions I have about us as a class, which are likewise assumptions held about each of us as individuals. Examining assumptions is a good way to begin creating shared reference points. My use of the word “we” is justified in so much as we are each a part of this course, and as such we can conceive of ourselves as a community with common points of reference as well as diverse points of reference. What are those points? What can we assume we share as common ground culturally, socially, or academically? Can we identify intersections where our diverse backgrounds and worldviews meet? We will return to these questions with our blog assignments for this week, which also ask you to tell a little story about your home —  keeping in mind what Chamberlin tells us about how stories “give meaning and value to the places we call home.”

For now, before proceeding with this lesson, it will be worthwhile for you to list what you think might be common ground for our class community in terms of possible shared  —assumptions that reflect shared values and beliefs. Remember, Chamberlin’s suggestion that “acknowledging what we don’t know is more ethically responsible than pretending to understand.”

Please be sure to refer to the instructor’s blog before proceeding – thanks.