Thanks for popping by to read my blog for this course. Hopefully following along on this journey offers you some insight into how we can support Indigenous students in our current Education system and social situation here in Saskatchewan. I am excited to be continuing my journey towards completing my Masters Degree in Education. I am currently working as a full-time teacher in Regina. I helped start and continue to teach in an immersive High School Arts Program. If you want to find out more click here!!
This blog will document my learning and thoughts each week as I continue to grow as an educator, through my work towards the completion of my Masters degree and through my work in the classroom as an active full-time teacher.
Week 1:
For the first week of the course we spent some time getting to know our classmates and discussing the intent of the course and the plan for our learning. I look forward to this class as we have a diverse group of students from all over the province and in all kinds of differing roles, from administrators to teachers and everywhere in between. There is a great diversity of teachers in all areas, grade levels and experience. It is also exciting to see our group at different stages of completion in their Masters programs. I look forward to having discussions with and learning from everyone in this class.
Our text for this semester is “Teaching Each Other: Nehinuw concepts & Indigenous Pedagogies”. I think that the title of the text reflects not only my excitement to work with and learn from our instructor but also from the other professionals in this class but also how we need to approach teaching and learning in the classroom. In the first couple of chapters of the text we are introduced to its authors Linda & Keith Goulet. This introduction continues to expand on the theme of teaching each other. Linda & Keith are a husband and wife team both from different upbringings. Linda is a Euro-Canadian educator who has worked in several different settings including in Indigenous Education in Saskatchewan. Keith is and Indigenous man born and raised in Kaminstigominuhigoskak (Cumberland House) who also worked in education and politics. Together Keith & Linda have created a work that bridges these two perspectives. It is clear from the start that Keith & Linda have both learned from and taught each other in their years together as a married couple. If you want to find out more or watch them in action check out the video below.
My Takeaways from this week’s reading:
So much of what we read this week is a great reminder of the work that we are doing and that continues to be done in our province. The chapters are dedicated to setting us up in terms of establishing where we are in Indigenous Education (Ch.1) and where we’ve been (Ch.2). This glimpse into Indigenous education at the time the book was published (2015) is a good snapshot of Education in our province. It is interesting to think about if anything has changed all that much in seven years in our province. It is also a good reminder of where we have come from in Canada and in Saskatchewan in terms of our values and understandings around education and in particular Indigenous Education.
I find it interesting that much of the research that is shared in these first two chapters has been relevant in many of my previous courses, in the work I have done towards writing and researching a thesis and in the work I do as a Following Their Voices lead teacher here in Regina. I appreciate seeing familiar names like Gloria Ladson-Billings and other international researchers including those who did work in New Zealand, in the research that laid the foundations of what would become the Following Their Voices program. However I also appreciate the local connection of the text and seeing names of researchers like Sherry Farrell-Racette, Verna St. Dennis and Andrea Sterzuk. This brings me some hope knowing that the work that is being done in our province to support Indigenous students is backed by research and perhaps that research may even be leading the way in how we view, shape, shift and create culturally responsive pedagogy to support holistic student success for those students that have been previously let down by our education system due to issues of systemic racism, colonial legacies, past harms and a separation from language and culture.
I appreciate that this text acknowledges both the perspective of Indigenous and non-Indigenous educators and continues to seek to support all those involved in teaching our youth, in becoming more effective educators, specifically in how we learn to incorporate Indigenous pedagogies into our practice. In particular, I resonated with reminder that “effective teachers reject deficit beliefs about [students]; instead, they ‘care for the students as culturally located individuals; have high expectations of the learning for students; manage their classrooms to promote learning; engage in a range of discursive learning interactions with students or facilitate students to engage with others in these ways; implement a range of strategies that can facilitate learning interactions; promote, monitor and reflect upon learning outcomes that in turn lead to improvements in [student] achievement and share this knowledge with students” (Goulet & Goulet, Teaching Each Other, p. 39)
I look forward to learning more from this text, from our guests, from our instructor and from each other as we continue “teaching each other”!
Will Whitten 