Indigenization, Decolonization, Reconciliation
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Sing Me Your Song
I recently attended a KISS concert where the familiar tunes triggered a nostalgic trip to my teenage years. I realized that I had grown older with two of the performers, and that very moment of realization had impacted me more than I had bargained for. As the music played, I found myself captivated by the diverse crowd that had also aged alongside the band and many had brought younger versions of themselves to indulge in the shared nostalgia. My party, spanning three generations from my late grandmother’s brother to my eldest daughter, shared in this representation. The two hours of non-stop music reconnected me to stories of a younger me;…
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Relationship: A Key Component of Indigenous Student Success
The current reality faced by Indigenous students is the focus of discussion from pre-kindergarten to post-secondary. Across the country, education for First Nation, Inuit, and Métis people is a different experience. Numerous factors contribute to this reality, many of which are within the control of education authorities and classroom personnel. The call to address systemic inequities has been the focus of education since the early 2000s. While systemic change can often take additional time, personal adaptations can begin when you are ready. Growing authentic, trusting relationships between educator and learner will improve student experience. Educators can use the Reciprocity of the Relationship model to support the Indigenous student experience. The…
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Indigenization and Assessment – Rethinking Traditional Practice
“Education got us into this mess, education will get us out of it.” – Honourable Justice Murray Sinclair, Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, December 2015 Higher education is embarking on a journey of Indigenization, decolonization and reconciliation (IDR). Location will impact understanding of how to accomplish IDR and who will be involved in actualizing the initiative. One thing will be consistent, how we define assessment. Merriam-Webster’s definition is “the action or an instance of making a judgment about something.” This definition highlights the challenge when educators work to Indigenize assessment actions that may be subjective. In a world where people of First Nation, Inuit, and Métis identities face bias…
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USask spaces that flex with the type of learning
Many USask classrooms have been designed with one thing in mind – successful transmission of information from the faculty member to the students. Even as technologies changed over time, that model did not – we just added screens, data projectors for our slideshows, and cameras and microphones to capture a lecture. Current theories of learning tell us that people learn some things well by hearing about them, but they need to pair that with talking to others about it, practicing and getting feedback, and actively doing for most types of learning. We are now designing flexible classrooms that can do each of these types of learning in a sequence, all…
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SDG 15 Life On Land – Embedding the Sustainable Development Goals in Learning
This blog post is part of a series around the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Each post will dive into one of the goals and how we as educators can strive to embed these into our own courses. It is in the author’s opinion that any course or class can connect with one of the 17 goals or 169 sub-targets. By providing this blog post series, we hope to elicit some ideas of how you might also integrate a global goal into your teaching. Please refer to the USask SDG Teaching & Learning Workbook, review the USask Sustainability in the Curricula website, or scroll down for more information about the…
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Imagining Reconciliation
The following was created as an introduction to a panel discussion about how to build pathways toward reconciliation. What are the qualities that help people along this journey for a more inclusive society? As a Manager at the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning, I have been helping the University move forward in building reconciliation for more than 5 years. Over this time, I have witnessed our institution take significant steps forward. Unlike many other universities, we are well on our way to acknowledging the truths about colonization and the harms that Canada has committed against Indigenous Peoples. So many educational institutions, including our own, have not provided culturally…
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Orange Shirt Day
Orange Shirt Day began as a result of a residential school commemoration event held in Williams Lake, BC in the spring of 2013. It grew out of Phyllis Webstad’s story of having her shiny new orange shirt being taken away from her on her first day of school at the St Joseph Mission residential school, and it has become an opportunity to keep the discussion on all aspects of residential schools happening annually. Sept 30th was the date chosen for Orange Shirt Day, as it was the time of year when approximately 150,000 children were removed from their families and communities and taken to one of the 139 residential schools…
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Online Sharing Circle
Technology is excellent at allowing us to work remotely, but it can be more challenging for building community or keeping a community strong. Technology’s strength is for communication and is not as robust for building connection, especially with larger groups. Purpose The goal is to create the ‘lunchroom’ experience where people share and ground themselves within their respective working group/community. We believe that this type of opportunity will contribute to the art of kiyokiwin, coping with the social isolation, allowing people to raise topics outside of work priorities, better understanding of each other, and so much more. Online sharing circles could be used by instructors to facilitate “courageous curiosity” with…
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Land Acknowledgements – A Reflection 5-years After the TRC Report
By Stryker Calvez and Rose Roberts Five years after the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report, Land Acknowledgements are still gaining strength as an important component of the University landscape. In fact, it is more common to notice when this statement has been missed at an event, meeting or in a course than when it is present. More often than not we have people tell us about how uncomfortable someone got when they didn’t hear the land acknowledgement at the beginning of a proceeding, and the lengths people have gone to right this wrong. These stories are a testament to the power of this protocol, its intended purpose, and the readiness of people and society to embark on the journey toward reconciliation. Five years after the TRC report, the concerns for land…
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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…
