Our guest speakers over the past few weeks really tied our course together for me. I am an outlier among my peers in our classroom, and by that I mean that I do not, and never have led a traditional classroom. I have spent most of my career in instructional design, and now find myself in a corporate training setting with adult learners. Similar to other courses in this program, most of my colleagues are either active or past k-12 educators, while my work exists in compliance heavy outcome driven spaces. This has sometimes made it difficult for me to relate to my classmates in practice. 

James Pratt immediately piqued my interest as he described his career consisting of adult education, in a training role. Bonus for me, also in a very regulated industry, policing! One of the strongest themes throughout James’ presentation was the importance of relationships in learning. He emphasized that learning is not transactional, it is built through trust, respect, and connection. This complemented what elder helper Roland Kay told us the week before, that respect goes a long way when it comes to learning. I reflect upon this as a corporate trainer, where learning can sometimes be viewed as a checklist to complete the materials, pass the assessment, and move on. James and Roland’s messages reinforced that learning can be so much more, but without forming that respect and meaningful relationships, learning will be shallow and disengaging, regardless of the age of the learner!

Roland also taught an important lesson, challenging people’s assumptions about elders. While elders carry deep wisdom, they do not “know everything,” and not every elder is the right guide for every situation. Learning, he emphasized, requires finding the right person for the right purpose. This message was important for me to hear. For example, James knew how to talk about adult learning experiences and gave tips in that realm, while others we heard from this semester were more rooted in the k-12 world. It’s important for me to remember that not everything will be directly applicable, and that elders or knowledge keeps will not always have the answers. When I seek out information from them, I’ll need to be deeply aware of if what I am asking is appropriate based on their knowledge and experience. 

Jim left us with a metaphor that stuck with me, the teepee pin. Without the pin, the teepee cannot stand. Upon reflection after this class, I see Indigenous pedagogies as that pin within education for many of our learners. Without Indigenous ways of knowing, education may still function on the surface, but it is structurally unsound and does not speak to all learners. As demonstrated by the oppression experienced by Indigenous learners in Canada for so long, exclusion of Indigenous pedagogies has prevented many from succeeding. It is up to us to put that pin back into place to enable the success of others into the future, “stabilizing” our education system through inclusion and support.

As I closed the book after reading the final chapter, chapter 10, I began to reflect on what connected with me throughout reading the book. I feel like my education in my younger years could have been so much better in order to make me more informed as I grew up. I have learned through his book (and through my classmates wonderful interactive activities), Indigenous pedagogies are easily integrated into everyday actions. One does not need to be Indigenous in order to benefit from these activities/pedagogies. My learning journey could have been much more inclusive to all in the classroom had my teachers read a book like this. It is important for us moving forward to making these changes in our own practices, so they next generation wont be thinking the same thing I am.

Chapter 10 communicated clearly to me that learning does not have to occur using only Indigenous pedagogies, but rather a combination of teaching tools. Tying back to research I uncovered while working on my action project, Albert Marshal coined the term two eyed seeing, to describe teaching with broth Indigenous and European pedagogies. This inclusive approach to education benefits all learners, connecting with students in different ways, and pulls from the strengths of different teaching methods. As a educator, remembering to get out of my comfort zone and integrate different methods of teaching than what I grew up with will be important to always keep in mind.

“Two-Eyed Seeing refers to learning to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing, and from the other eye with the strengths of Western knowledges and ways of knowing … and learning to use both these eyes together, for the benefit of all.”

Elder Shelly Belhumeur’s visit to our class this week tied this together nicely. Shelly talked to our class about the many ways to use the medicine wheel to grow, and the many different things that it can represent. My main takeaway from this session was that the medicine wheel can be whatever an individual needs it to be in order to have themselves grow. When Shelly described the wheel. They mentioned that if one section is off balance, the wheel cannot turn until that person develops that area. Upon reflection, I looked at myself as an educator and formed a wheel, I found that the area I need to develop mine is spiritual. I reflected that I learn myself, and teach in a very objective evidence based way, not thinking much about the way I, or learners can connect to the content in ways with higher meaning. This course has been a great start in getting me to think differently about this, and helping me develop this area.

Educators have a responsibility to connect with our students in ways that make sense to them. Every night we have class I am learning more ways to be inclusive of Indigenous pedagogies, in ways I hadn’t considered or experienced in my past. Many of these activities do not even explicitly describe the Indigenous way of knowing that it is connected to, they are just activities that simply support learning. If we can incorporate these ways of knowing into our classroom to compliment our European practices, we will be creating fuller, more inclusive classrooms for all to succeed within!

“Why do we keep measuring the weaknesses of Indigenous students rather than their strengths?”

Chapter 9 made me reflect on a class I have previously taken on curriculum design. That class taught me how evaluation methods such as standardized testing are unfair and an outdated practice, but commonly used because it can provide data to say “how” students are doing academically. Standardized testing is a very Eurocentric idea that does not integrate into indigenous ways of knowing. As chapter 9 highlights, Indigenous teaching takes a holistic approach including the land, community, and cultural values in their teaching, instead of focusing only on unfair standardized testing.

Like when I was in the curriculum design class, this chapter challenged me to re-think how  educators should define success. If our traditional measures only capture academic output from standardized testing, then we are missing a lot of other important output that standardized testing cannot capture, such as confidence and identity growth. For example, in this chapter Bonnie Werner shared how she was able to design her curriculum through collaboration with parents and the community she worked in. This approach got the students involved in the community and created a more holistic learning experience, showing the students the positive impact of their actions. This type of result is something that simple standardized testing would never be able to capture or replicate!

Moreover, Cheryl Morin’s story in this chapter touched on another concept that is important to me, universal design for learning. Cheryl talked about students having a poor self conception related to “negative school abilities” but how that would turn around and students would relax once learning outside on the land. The idea of universal design is so important in my world of training. If I were to design my training to only appeal to one learning style, my learners could experience negative feelings toward their learning and the task, similar to the feeling Cheryl described. By incorporating multiple approaches to learning in my sessions, I can help learners overcome these negative feelings, and hopefully speak to them in ways that make sense to their learning styles.

As someone who used to work in education, and still very relevant in the training world, I find myself asking the same question over and over again: Am I helping learners become good test-takers, or helping them actualize and apply their learning? This chapter made me reflect upon this question again as it emphasized the importance of looking beyond the results of simple standardized tests. This reflection is important for all educators and trainers alike, we need to ensure we are empowering our learners for success more than just inside the classroom.

Last week we were privileged to be joined by Kelly Daniels in our class who spoke to us about stories in relation to Indigenous ways of knowing and understanding the world. This session helped me gain an understanding of Indigenous worldviews, and provided me a new perspective. It reminded me that everybody has different interpretations of the world around us and I should be thoughtful of this and intentional in the way that I present information. It was an excellent presentation to pair with Goulet & Goulet’s chapter 7 which had a focus on the connection process.  Throughout this presentation I thought to myself that Kelly is an excellent resource for the university to have, and I found myself wishing that I had something similar available to me at my workplace. Luckily for me, and coincidently, I had a training session scheduled with the Indigenous Relations (IR) team this week, giving me the opportunity to explore these ideas.

During the training session, the facilitators went in depth about Indigenous knowledge and how it relates to our workspace. They spoke of the important histories, protocols for interactions, and messages we send through our actions. In this session, the learning felt reciprocal. The facilitators had us share our knowledge and stories, and would also share theirs. This practice made me reflect on our text when the authors talked about learning being a “shared endeavor”, and showed me how this can naturally fit into practice. At the end of the session, I asked this team if we could collaborate into the future (thinking back to my wish for a resource like Kelly) and they were more than happy to help! This made me extremely happy to know that I will have support and collaborators to work with in our mission to create a safe and effective learning space for all.

Reflecting on both sessions, I realized how important it is to approach every interaction with openness and respect. Storytelling, as Kelly demonstrated, is not just telling a story, it’s about knowing how to emphasise certain aspects so that the audience receives an intentional message. During the training by the IR team, I got to witness this in action as they would weave storytelling into their session with specific aspects emphasised for us to interpret key messages. Every opportunity I get to attend a session like these to improve my understanding about Indigenous pedagogies or practices, I get to takeaway something new that I can implement into practice, and notice in the world around me.

Learning not only happens through formal education, but also through opportunities to collaborate with those who are proficient in the subject. This week was a reminder to me to seek out and form these productive relationships in order to foster this collaboration.

This week the SUNTEP student panel stood out to me most. It was really inspiring to hear how these students are engaged in immersive learning, and how connected they have become with eachother over their learning journey. This fit in nicely with this week’s textbook topic and creating relations among students. The discussions in the panel paired with the readings this week provided me insight into fostering environments for promoting these relationships, however, this panel discussion also brought to light a feeling that I have felt and feared myself. This is the fear of appearing as disingenuous in my efforts to incorporate Indigenous pedagogies.

This came up in the panel discussion when Jaxx said something along the lines of there being too many white people leading classrooms trying to teach this material. This is not a direct quote, but captures the point of what was said. To their credit, the co-panellists were quick to give examples of white educators who are respected and properly incorporate Indigenous ways of knowing, to which Jaxx agreed. However, the points initially raised in this conversation is something I fear to be said about me one day. I will not let that discourage my attempts to learn about Indigenous pedagogies and implement them into my practice, but it does make me fear that Indigenous learners will see my attempts as tokenism, when that is not the case.

I’ve been reflecting on how this made me feel, and what it means for me. I’ve been trying to think about how I can build relationships, and not let this feeling get in the way of that. Upon my reflection, I came across a term that resonated with me, it was “Epistemic Humility”. I hadn’t heard this term before, but came to learn that it essentially means recognizing the limits of my own knowledge, and improving myself with this in mind means encouraging new information to come in to help form my knowledge base. This concept can help me cope with this fear. If I embrace that I am not an expert, and encourage open dialog about how I can improve, I believe that I can both build relationships, as well as gradually grow and improve my knowledge. I found a short video resource that talks about Epistemic and Intellectual Humility which describes these concepts quite well in only 3 minutes:

As I continued to reflect on this and think about the chapter as well, I found more and more ways that the idea of epistemic humility fit with this weeks readings. Examples in this chapter include respecting Indigenous culture by including community members, parents and grandparents as curriculum resources. This example is a perfectly demonstrates humility and self awareness of limitation in action by inviting others to contribute to the process and learning from them. Practices such as this will help solidify the relationships among learners as they will feel open to sharing their knowledge and ideas among each other and with me. Overall, this week was more reflective for me than I imagined, but was very useful in giving me a path forward to try my best while addressing my own knowledge limitations, embrace them, and enabling others to help me improve the experience for everyone!

Our guest lecture and course reading this week paired together nicely, focusing on the theme of building relationships with students to enable a safe and effective environment to learn. This made me reflect on my learning experiences. I reflect on which grades I did well in, verses, the grades I did not. Without fail, all my poor experiences are paired with a teacher who did not put effort into building relationships, and took the wrong approach. In our readings this week it is stated that fear can block students’ ability to learn. As I reflect on subjects I did poor in, I realize I did fear them. I feared doing poorly, I feared the disappointed feedback, and I feared failing! Relationship building in this situation would have gone a long way to helping me overcome that fear. In high school I did the bare minimum for math and had a rude awakening when starting university and requiring a calculus class. I was doing poorly, but hired a tutor, who was also a friend, I exceeded even my own expectations after taking this step! Learning became safe. Jodi put it nicely this week when stating:

“You can’t teach anyone until you have a relationship with them, and how you form that relationship really matters”

Overall this week was a great lesson about the importance of forming relationships and the outcome of putting in that effort. Jodi’s presentation left me with new ideas for going about forming relationships, as the way that we carry this out matters. To paraphrase, we want to ensure we are not taking a tokenism approach and instead, genuinely mean what we are doing. An idea that stood out to me was the “pedagogy of tea” where Jodi talked about how it is important to take a step back and not jump right into business, the importance of creating a safe environment and getting to know people. Although this is in the context of parent-teacher interviews, I see how I could relate this to my practice at work when collaborating with indigenous knowledge keepers. This is an actionable task that I can do to strengthen the relationships I form in my workplace. The idea of forming strong relationships with learners and their families is not only beneficial to Indigenous contexts. I found a short 2 minute video published by The Center for Early Childhood Education explaining the importance and benefit of this very concept!

A fantastic resource to come out of this presentation is the SK Rivers Indigenous Perspectives website. This website publishes shared resources that we can use to inform our practice. Although I thought much of this content would only be applicable to those with classrooms, I was wrong! This insightful website shares many helpful resources, such as information about treaty 4, the territory which I live, work, and play on. Information like this helps me better connect to the context of the land which I get to benefit from, and what the treaties mean to our Indigenous peoples and me.

This week may have been the most useful for me yet. It began by informing my practice first by reflecting on what was ineffective/effective during my educational journey, as well as giving actionable ways to improve my relationships, and even more, providing me a library of resources to help me even more into the future!

Hello everyone, my name is Rhett and I am from Regina, born an raised! I am not, nor have I ever been a teacher. It’s fair to say I’ve experienced a good amount of imposter syndrome during my career! I stumbled into the realm of education when I was completing my undergrad in business and was hired for a coop work term and the U of R. Later in life after completing that degree, I saw a position advertised at the university and I applied! Since then, I spent over 5 years working in instructional design, until recently I have pivoted myself and find myself working in corporate training. I’m excited for all the new challenges that come along with it! In this course I am hoping to gain practical strategies that I can implement in my pedagogy to tear down colonial assumptions and help Indigenous learners succeed in the courses/training material I help develop.

While I read chapters 1 and 2 this week, I found myself reflecting on my own experiences or what I’ve been taught. Something that resonated with me was this discussion about power relationships and sense of belonging. This took me back to a workshop I participated in hosted by Darryl Isbister from The U of S Gwenna Moss Center. During this workshop, the first thing he did was tear down the “implied hierarchy” that a standard classroom has. This opened up the opportunity to allow all of us to learn from each other, not just the instructor, and has been something I’ve tried to apply into my practice whenever I can. Seeing it mentioned here in this book further exemplifies the importance of tearing down this implied hierarchy to allow students to succeed. Practices like this show me how Indigenous ways of knowing and practices can easily be applied to curriculum and be beneficial to everybody involved. Simple changes like this do not take much effort from the instructor, but tear down barriers to learning and will help students succeed. I’m always thankful when I learn about practices such as this that I can apply into my lessons right away.

Chapter 2 also contained material which was a great reminder and reinforcement of knowledge. As a descendant of white settlers myself, I need to remind myself to challenge the way teaching and assessment is done. In this chapter I’m reminded how the ways I was taught in school growing up is based on biased and oppressing assumptions that all people learn the same way, which is disadvantageous to Indigenous learners and their ways of knowing. This is especially important considering that teachers teaching styles typically mimic the way they themselves have been taught (I do not have a direct source for this, though have been told this many times in my career and education). Chapter 2 highlights the importance of breaking these norms, having the important discussions about racialization in education, and bringing awareness to as well as adjusting teaching styles for different cultural ways of being. Learning in different ways should never be a set back, and in fact, should provide strength among learners, demonstrating the diversity among each other. This chapter was a good reminder to me to do my best to enable that type of environment.

Overall, through what I learn in this class I hope to be better equipped to structure my courses to be more inclusive for all. I hope to apply what I learn to enable universal design of my lessons so my students learn and succeed in ways that work for them, rather than bend their style to the prescribed “norm”. This will be beneficial for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous learners, enabling the success of everyone. I’m excited for this class and to challenge my own ways of thinking along the way. I’m looking forward to taking this journey with all of you!