Will Whitten

This week, I’ve been sitting with Chapters 6 and 7 of Teaching Each Other: Nehinuw Concepts & Indigenous Pedagogy by Goulet & Goulet. These chapters Weetutoskemitowin (Working Together: Social Systems) and Iseechigehina (Planned Actions: Connection to the Process) pushed me to think beyond how I connect to my students and toward how I connect students to the learning space and through the content itself.

In Week 3, I wrote about relationships; the daily check-ins, the effort to see students as whole people before asking them to perform, analyze, or create. That still feels essential. But I realize and recognize that connection can’t end there. Students also need to feel welcome in the space where learning happens and within the process that guides our work together. Goulet & Goulet remind me that learning isn’t something that happens to students, it’s something that happens with them, through shared experiences, trust, and intention.

Grounding in Space: Who the Room Belongs To

In Chapter 6, the authors describe Weetutoskemitowin as the act of working together and they use Angie Caron as an example of how that can look within a living social system. It’s not about control, it’s about reciprocity; a mutually beneficial exchange . That really resonates with me, especially in a performing arts classroom where the physical and relational space matters so much.

I think back to the first few classes of our Senior Performing arts class where were devising a collaborative theatre project. At the start, I was doing a lot of talking (setting expectations, introducing the tasks, outlining the schedule). It was efficient, but it didn’t yet feel shared. Once I started asking students to co-design our warm-ups, choose the rehearsal flow, and even vote on which sections needed reworking, the room began to shift. The energy lifted. They started owning the space.

That, to me, is what Goulet & Goulet mean by creating social systems of collaboration. The classroom or rehearsal space becomes something we shape together, not just a place students enter and exit.

I see the same principle in the Give Them Their Flowers activity I tried earlier this year in my ELA class. The circle format (students drawing their rose, bud, and thorn, then sharing them with peers) does more than build community. It locates each voice within a shared circle. It reminds me that before learning can connect to content, it has to connect to a place and a space.

When I presented this same activity to my EDL 829 classmates, I framed it as a relational tool for building community and checking in meaningfully. I was honestly a little nervous about how a group of graduate students would respond to something I usually use with teenagers, but they were deeply engaged. They asked thoughtful questions, about how to sustain this practice over time, how to adapt it when students resist sharing, and how to ensure it doesn’t feel performative.

Their feedback helped me see that this tool isn’t just a one-off exercise; it’s a practice of connection. The conversation made me think about how I could expand it: maybe by having students revisit their “roses” and “buds” later in the semester, or by displaying anonymous class roses as visual reminders of our collective growth.

That same day, our EDL 829 class also heard from SUNTEP students, who shared their experiences of learning within small, relationally grounded classrooms. The students spoke lots about connections, to each other, to staff and about their check-ins. That struck me. Not just as a statement about class size, but as a model of relational practice. It’s about treating each person’s presence as necessary to the whole.

Their comments reframed my understanding of connection and that it’s not a luxury afforded by small classes; it’s an intentional practice of seeing everyone, every time.

In the Balfour Arts Collective (BAC) program, we try to embody a similar approach. With our smaller cohorts, we make space for daily or weekly check-ins (sometimes structured like the “Rose, Bud, and Thorn,” sometimes as open circles where students share how they’re arriving that day). These moments don’t always lead directly into “content,” but they shape the atmosphere in which content can thrive, especially in the arts. Students often linger on something that was said during check-ins, continuing conversations or supporting each other in small ways. That, to me, is community in action.

When I think about Goulet & Goulet’s Weetutoskemitowin, I see it clearly in these moments. The classroom becomes more than a site of instruction, it becomes a living social system grounded in respect, reciprocity, and awareness.

When students help arrange the chairs, set the lighting for a scene, or decide how the room “feels ready,” they are literally grounding themselves in the space. It’s not just part of the way we do class —it’s pedagogy.

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Connecting Through Process: Planned Actions, Not Scripts

Chapter 7, Iseechigehina (Planned Actions: Connection to the Process), explores how teachers can plan intentionally while still leaving space for co-creation. Goulet & Goulet talk about making the learning journey visible to students inviting them into the process so they aren’t simply following along, but moving with awareness and agency.

I thought of this recently during My Life advice writing lesson in AP English. Where we wrote a “Dear Abby” style mini advice column. Instead of giving a structured outline, I shared the “roadmap” openly: start with a problem, shift to your own experience or insight, end with a piece of advice you wish someone had given you. Then I wrote alongside and in font of them. I was transparent about the process, the false starts, the pauses, the revisions. This is modelled after writing workshops from Peter Smagorinsky in Teaching English By Design. Students engaged because they could see how the process unfolded in real time.

This, I think, is the essence of Iseechigehina. Teaching is not about being the one holding the map; it’s about figuring out how we get there together.

Another example came from that same devised theatre unit for my Drama 20/30 students. When we started building scenes for our project, I tried to outline a clear creative arc—improv → workshop → script → performance. But I soon realized students were learning more from the detours—the loops back to earlier scenes, the pauses to reimagine characters, the spontaneous discoveries in rehearsal. Instead of pushing forward linearly, I began embracing those loops as legitimate learning and not instead as set backs as I might have seen them before.

Every time we circle back, we deepen connection. The same applies to writing, devising, or even classroom discussion. Learning functions best when it can loop, pause, and return and move forward in spiral.

Content as Relationship

What both chapters underline for me is that connection to content only happens when students feel agency in both space and process. When they sense their ideas shape the direction of learning, content stops feeling like “forced curriculum” and classes start feeling like conversation.

That’s Weetutoskemitowin and Iseechigehina in motion: relational space, shared process, connection to content.

When students connect to content this way, they aren’t just consuming ideas, they’re co-authoring meaning. That shift changes the emotional temperature of the classroom. It feels less like instruction and more like play and creation.

This week reminded me that connecting with students is not just a warm-up to get ready for the “real teaching.” It is the teaching. But Goulet & Goulet push that understanding deeper. They challenge me to think of teaching as a shared act of creation; a process that’s spatial, rhythmic, and reciprocal.

So, as I plan the next few weeks, I’m asking myself new questions:

• Who gets to shape the space we learn in?
• How visible is the process to my students?
• Where are the loops—the chances to pause, revisit, and reshape understanding?

Maybe that’s what connection really means: not just being “with” our students, but building the conditions for learning that belongs to all of us.