Inclusivity
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From Modelling to Designing Intercultural Curricula
Summary: Intercultural curricula can enrich learning. Discover practical steps and strategies to effectively design inclusive and diverse educational programs. Date of publishing: November 18, 2019 You are on this page because you believe that you have pretty decent intercultural teaching capacities. This is evidenced by your continued commitment to developing an awareness of your own identity and modelling perspective-taking. Students in your course have the opportunity to interact with different worldviews because you know that makes them smarter. You actively create opportunities to build relationships between ‘others’ and can recognize barriers to student participation – you’ve essentially applied using your intercultural capacity to inform teaching practices. So now you must…
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Graduates with perspectives and approaches the world needs
We often talk about the skills our graduates will need for success in their work and within our communities. As we aspire to be the university the world needs, we can’t overlook how essential perspective taking and cross-cultural competence are in our increasingly diverse world. In this place, we have a collective commitment to improve the situation for the First Nation, Metis, and Inuit peoples, and to truth and reconciliation. And we can also see the impacts of nationalism and nativism on the global stage, a problem that is prompting us to equip our students with the skills they will need to respond.This post is one in a series related…
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Fostering Successful Intercultural Group Work: A Summary and Response to article “Rethinking multicultural group work as intercultural learning.”
By Tereigh Ewert When I read the above article, I was immediately reminded of an article I read a few years ago, called “’I know the type of people I work well with’: Student anxiety in multicultural group projects.”[1] The authors of that article identify the “cognitive anxiety” and “affective anxiety” of students doing group work with diverse cultural representation within the group (anxieties that seem to be higher among domestic, rather than international students). Each form of anxiety is attributed to “uncertainty…the phenomenon affecting the way we think about strangers” (Strauss, et al, 816). As a result of these anxieties, English-first language speakers were far more likely to, if…
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Why Do We Acknowledge Treaty 6 & Metis?
[social_share/] [social-bio] A session on this topic will be held during the Fall Fortnight on Monday August 29, 2016 from 9:30 – 9:55. Register here. Many of you may have noticed that across the campus that there has been an increase in number of people who are acknowledging “that we are on Treaty 6 Territory and the Homeland of the Métis. We pay our respect to the First Nations and Métis ancestors of this place and reaffirm our relationship with one another”. One year ago the University of Saskatchewan’s academic governing body, the University Council, agreed to use specific language to acknowledge that the University was built on Indigenous peoples’…
- Assessment and Evaluation, Curriculum Development, Educational Technology, General, Graduate Education, Inclusivity, Indigenization, Decolonization, Reconciliation, Instructional / Course Design, Instructional Strategies, Open
Gearing Up With Fall Fortnight 2016
[social_share/] [social-bio] “Happy New Year!!” That is how I think of September and the new school year. This often coincides with a strong pull to stationary stores, tidying my office, organizing my supplies, reading new books, and pulling out sweaters and warm socks. Gearing up for the Fall Term is exciting. There’s often anticipation, hope, renewed energy for trying new things and looking forward to tweaking things I tried last year. I think about taking a class. There are new “school” clothes, crisp mornings, and longer shadows when I head for home. All of that is bundled together as the new term starts. I think about the new faculty, staff,…
- Curriculum Development, General, Inclusivity, Indigenization, Decolonization, Reconciliation, Instructional / Course Design
Historical Biases in Understanding Culture – A Barrier to Indigenization?
[social_share/] [social-bio] Western society has made significant advances in empirically derived truth and scientific inquiry (e.g., anthropology, psychology, linguistics, etc.) since the Age of Enlightenment (e.g., Descartes, Diderot, Montesquieu, Turgot, Vico, Voltaire, etc.). The impact and importance of this epistemological approach to the world and its mass adoption by Western societies can be perceived in many elements of European civilization and culture (Boon, 1972; Goodenough, 1961; Keesing, 1974; Triandis, 1994). The rise of Europe’s epistemological renaissance occurred during the era of colonial expansion. At the time that Europe was pressing itself onto numerous societies around the world, dominating the global stage, many Western thinkers were using this colonial perspective as…
- Curriculum Development, Inclusivity, Indigenization, Decolonization, Reconciliation, Instructional Strategies
Indigenizing Education Series: Getting started …
[social_share/] [social-bio] As an Indigenous educator, researcher, and scholar, academics have asked me more often about ‘how’ we, the collective we, can improve the situation for the First Nation, Metis, and Inuit peoples than ‘why’ we should do this? While I appreciate the recognition that something needs to be done, I am often taken back when I realize that the reasons for this change, the ‘why’, are not well understood. How do you Indigenize an institution, like the University of Saskatchewan, if you don’t now what the issues are that need to be addressed? Therefore, my response is always preceded by a pause as I contemplate where do I start?…
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Truth and Reconciliation – Call to Action for Educators
[social_share/] [social-bio] Indigenous people and their communities have had a long and contentious experience with Western education. For far too long, schools and education were used as instruments to systematically dismantle Indigenous culture, their way of living and knowing. Generation after generation of children were taken from their homes, sometime forcefully, in the name of providing them with a civilized education. Instead, what many of these children experienced was at its best a destructive education, and at its worse an inhumane brainwashing, aimed at having these children renounce their ‘savage’ Indigenous perspectives for a more ‘sophisticated’ Canadian approach to life. Many Canadian universities are just beginning to acknowledge their role…
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“If Not Us, Who? If Not Now, When?”
By Tereigh Ewert In Peter Stoicheff’s speech for the Presidential Announcement, he posed two questions that inspire the university’s efforts to decolonize and Indigenize our campus (July 9, 2015, http://www.usask.ca/presidentialtransition/). Emphasizing the urgency for action, he asked, “If not us, who?” and “If not now, when?” At the University of Saskatchewan, we have a growing number of Indigenous staff, students, and faculty. Yet the U of S is comprised of a predominantly white settler Canadian campus population, and is set within a traditional Western institution. As we build capacity and become strengthened by the work and contributions of Indigenous staff, students, and faculty, the non-Indigenous people on campus have a…
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What It Means to Be an Ally
[social_share/] [social-bio] As we have recently come out of a week of sessions at the University aimed at making our campus a safer place for gender and sexual diversity and we enter Aboriginal Achievement week I am reflecting on what it means to me to be an ally. Use of the term ‘ally’ in relation to marginalized groups is relatively new to me, however, what the term represents is not new. Being an ally means working in solidarity with a marginalized group that I am not a part of to address systemic inequalities. I’ve tried to boil down what I feel I have to work at everyday in being an…