Starting this experience I have been racked with apprehension and anxiety.  I feel like it’s normal reasons behind this: starting a new position, leaving an old one, having almost no idea what I would be doing at the gallery.  Thankfully meeting up with my supervisor allowed a lot of those issues to go away.  We met up and had lunch, went over the expectations, and shared resources to help me start moving forward with the community field experience.

Today’s experience was actually pretty fun too.  The Bill Reid Gallery folks were going to a couple of schools to put on short presentations for the Pro-D days going on in several of the districts, and it really resonated with what is expected of me.  Essentially they presented teachers with the opportunity to take their classes, their expectations with education, and their knowledge of pedagogical theories, and apply it within the context of the gallery.  What they were looking for is to use the facilities, the artifacts, and the space of the Bill Reid Gallery to help the gallery develop better programs to help students who come to their gallery to better engage with the material.  Teaching indigenous issues can often be very challenging for teachers who generally come from a non-indigenous background.  Many find it uncomfortable to teach about things they don’t know enough about.  What the gallery was proposing is to make dialogue with teachers in order to empower them to take on the challenge of educating their students about things that may be uncomfortable, like indigenous issues, by interacting with the materials the gallery has.  Very cool stuff, and I’m looking forward to adding my own perspective to helping the gallery achieve their goals.