Written by Reflection. It’s a thing. I know it’s a thing, but yeesh, it’s really a thing. It’s hard to process that I was a Season 3 participant and now we are on Season 13. And, while I am by no means someone with blogging prowess, as I reflect, the main thing that keeps resurfacing for me is a deep feeling of gratefulness, part of which has me feeling grateful and excited to have an action plan that I will work through whilst back as a facilitator for this season. And that yes, it will involve hopefully more consistent blogging attempts!
I have chatted with many folks from our wonderful Cohort 21 community about the evolution a number of us have had since joining the Cohort 21 community. My journey through different parts of the edusphere – from being a high school math, science, tech, and computer science teacher, to a K-12 technology integrator, to my current role as Shad Canada‘s Director, Digital Programs where I oversee the development, growth, and execution of our month-long online STEAM enrichment, community, and leadership summer program – has always involved me contemplating my fascination with why we are doing what we are doing when we are doing it. This fascination has led me to explore assessment practices, co-create action-based professional development, and rethink my stance on teaching students skills first and exploring problems second (specifically in math/science contexts).
And I’m grateful for it all. For the journey. And for the lessons along the way. I think about how much has changed in our edusphere in the past decade, and while it’s astounding and potentially overwhelming, it’s also exciting. Professionally, what is exciting me most right now is the work I am starting to do and looking to continue to explore around incorporating Indigenous learning and content into the world of STEAM-based learning opportunities for Grade 10-12 students.
Specifically, I am looking to leverage the knowledge and learnings from both the Cohort 21 community and the community of Indigenous educators and experts, as well as delve into research and current secondary and post-secondary approaches in order to examine how we as settlers provide learning opportunities to our students, who are often all settlers themselves. And, because I (and the wonderful team I work with) know that our group of students each year will not always be composed only of non-Indigenous students, the how of it all is incredibly important.
To help frame how I got to this goal, I am going to explain what we did this past year that relates to incorporating and/or creating Indigenous learning opportunities for our students and what we have learned so far as we think about our next iteration:
- We selected 4 books written by Indigenous authors from Turtle Island, 3 of which are by Canadian authors. We picked these reads because they provided a range of both the type and access for a variety of readers. One is a collection of short musings and poems – Embers (Wagamese), another is YA fiction – The Marrow Thieves (Dimaline), one melds Indigenous teachings with botany and the land – Braiding Sweetgrass (Kimmerer), and one retells Canadian history through graphic short stories and the lens of three Indigenous groups – This Place: 150 Years Retold (22 authors and illustrators).* The books are featured in the image of this blog.
- We had our students select which book they were most interested in reading, then sent them the book they chose as a part of the Shad Kit that each student gets with all items they need for our program.
- During the program, we had cross-campus book club discussions based upon which book students selected. We had four campuses and at each campus there were students who selected each book so the activities also allowed them to connect with students from a different campus who had chosen the same book to read. Some activities had small groups of students chatting about the book through discussion questions, while others involved creating a digital poster (for lack of a better word) as a form of discussion.
- We collected feedback about the program from our students, and it was overwhelmingly positive when they reflected on the book club and cross-campus nature of the activities. There were no negative reviews, and if anything students wished there had been more time to meet and discuss.
Naturally, with the feedback and our own desire as an organization to maintain and increase the amount of Indigenous learning opportunities that happen within what we do, we were excited to move forward with something similar for next year.
Important thing to note that we knew, but had not properly considered: none of our students self-identified as Indigenous for the digital program this past summer.
My awareness around this should have existed in a more concrete way before recently, but it was while I was presenting to our Board of Directors at their semi-annual meeting this October when I was asked a question about this book club by a board member, that made me acutely aware of my lack of awareness around curriculum, content, and experiences that are designed/run by non-Indigenous folks often for audiences that are not only non-Indigenous in nature.
The question I was asked: Did all the students at a campus read the same book?
The question came from a place of already knowing that we have a set of best practices that includes ensuring students who do identify as Indigenous are placed at campuses so that they are not the only person identifying as Indigenous at their campus. Even with this pre-existing knowledge that both the board and I had, it did not lead to me immediately thinking about the underlying problem we have now identified. Instead it led to an organic and wonderfully helpful conversation with said board member about experiences they have witnessed or know are happening around the meaning behind, yep you guessed it, why we are doing what we are doing when we are doing it.
Things we had not considered include, but are not limited to: how the content might be less engaging and/or unnecessary for folks who identify as Indigenous, how the content might be completely different in terms of the trigger warnings required, and also how the reflections on the content might be contextually different for folks who identify as Indigenous.
We had not considered it because we didn’t have to, technically. Because we did not have students in our program who identified as Indigenous this year. As if that is a good enough reason to not consider it. (Spoiler alert: It isn’t. It really really isn’t.) To say I was immediately disappointed in myself would be accurate, but this isn’t about me, it really isn’t. It’s about how we move forward and actually about the ‘not me’, about what we hadn’t considered. So the conversation continued, and I listened.
As we conversed, the board member we spoke with encouraged us to explore what some post-secondary institutions are doing now – for example, at some universities in Canada their first-year Indigenous Studies course is offered in two streams/strands; one for students identifying as Indigenous, and another for students identifying as non-Indigenous.
So, now we are in a phase of researching what might make the most sense. We will not know year to year if we will have students who will self-identify as Indigenous until they apply for the program. But we can consider the options that exist for how we create content/programming, and what those options look like for our community, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous.
One thing the board member we spoke with mentioned was that it is important to consider what our goal is with the learning activities we are putting into our program – is it a goal that makes sense for Indigenous students? Who is the learning for? Why are we doing it? What purpose does it serve? And who are we ultimately trying to serve along the way? All questions I’m looking to explore in the lead-up to our 2025 program. To say I am grateful to our board as a whole, and especially to those who have continued to be willing to engage in this discussion, is an understatement. I am also aware that it would be easy to just continue to ask a couple of people to be our sounding board, but I am wary about tokenizing experiences and I know I need to do the work, our team needs to do the work, we all need to do the work.
This is a fairly large pivot from where I was at during our first F2F this season – it means that my action plan will land in the strand HMW further ensure that our schools are responsive to DEIJ challenges and opportunities? and will involve collaborating with my team and our Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion Manager. Is it important? Yes. Is it urgent? I think so. Will it be meaningful? I hope so.
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* All four are amazing reads – strongly recommend them all, just now aware that who I’m recommending them to might be something I can’t fully identify yet if I also think about why I am recommending them. More to come!