Case Study: Pro-D
Lenora is a grade 4 teacher at the Eliza Archie Memorial School, located on the Tsq’escenemc Canim Lake Band reserve. Last year she attended an anti-bullying professional development (pro-d) workshop offered by SD 83 (North Okanagan). There was a lot of valuable information in the session, but Lenora felt it often wasn’t culturally relevant for her community. When she discussed her experience with peers in the Cradleboard Teaching Project Teacher’s Circle (http://www.cradleboard.org/), others agreed. And many had stories to share about bullying in their band schools.
Indigenous online communities of practice like Cradleboard have really helped Lenora develop her own reflective practice. She’s decided to create an online anti-bullying resource for band teachers – a sort of online pro-d day – that offers support and suggestions from other Aboriginal educators and their allies.
But Lenora’s web access is dial-up only. It can take a really long time to upload and download files. Plus she’s never created a web site before and doesn’t know anything about where one puts a website.
Social Media is the Way to Go
Having spent a great deal of time on the issue of bullying and, in particular, cyber bullying at my school this year I strongly feel that Lenora needs to find a place where her students and colleagues are already going. Lately this has tended to be a social network site – at my school it is Facebook. Most of these social media sites will have the ability for Lenora to create a site or page with little knowledge of website creation or code. Whichever, social media site she chooses, she needs to make sure her students and colleagues are already going there. If she chooses a site that they are not familiar with they are far less likely to view the information she wants to get across. Furthermore, she will then need to address the usage of these sites as they are too often unmonitored and appalling – which scares people away. They need to be understood that they are public spaces. They also have the ability to communicate in real time, which might help alleviate some of the time issues that dial up will present.
While the dial-up issue will be a big one, so will equipment. While access to dial-up will hinder things, not having a computer to do the dial-up can be even worse! Budget dependent I would recommend a cheap alternative such as netbooks or something similar that could be put in the hands of key people trying to tackle this problem.