Building Qajaqs, Building Relationships

• In Event: Indigenous Stories of Place/Land/Water: Relations in Education

Abstract

In Canada, educators within professional education programs are expected to bring “Indigenous ways of knowing and knowledge systems” to professional teacher training (Association of Canadian Deans of Education, 2010). In turn, teachers are expected to bring Indigenous knowledge and content to their public-school classrooms (e.g. Ontario, 2014; McGregor, 2012) to support learning. Yet, non-Indigenous teachers are challenged to meet these requirements, both pedagogically and relationally (Desmoulins, 2009; Desmoulins & Leslie, 2010; Kanu, 2005; Kovach, 2010), particularly when they teach in Indigenous communities (Berger & Epp, 2005; Lewthwaite, Owen, Doiron, McMillan, & Renaud, 2013). This presentation introduces some challenges for pre-service and in-service teachers (Researcher 1) and responds to these challenges with stories of teaching practice (Researcher 2). Researcher 1 is a teacher educator in a Faculty of Education. She prepares pre-service and graduate students to teach Indigenous education, and seeks stories of practice to extend learners’ theoretical and curricular understandings. Researcher 2 is a high school teacher who brings land and water-based pedagogies to his science program at a high school in Nunavut. They ask: How might stories of practice inform knowledge of Indigenous education for themselves and for pre- and in-service teachers’ understandings of Indigenous education in public school classrooms?
Corntassel (2012) theorizes resurgence as relational. He describes renewal as everyday actions to “reclaim, restore, and regenerate homeland relationships” (p. 89), whereby Elders and educators share “renewed responsibilities of assisting others in their reconnection to land, culture, and community” (p. 98). Further, for educators who adopt land and water pedagogies, resurgence requires, “moving from talk about the land within conventional classroom settings, to studying instances where we engage in conversations with the land and on the land in a physical, social and spiritual sense” (Wildcat, McDonald, Irlbacher-Fox, Coulthard, 2014, p. II), as learning in relation.

This presentation draws from a larger study using research-practice partnership (RPP) methods in education (Coburn & Penuel, 2016) to examine place, land, and water pedagogies through storytelling. Graveline (1998) reminds that storytelling is a form of teaching and teaching is a form of storytelling (p. 68). In this presentation, one researcher presents stories of challenges and one response to challenges, through stories of a qajaq program. Data sources include educators’ stories, and researchers’ conversations of content and contexts that the researchers transcribed, coded and analyzed in NVivo, and then they discussed until they agreed. Researchers report several themes: forging reciprocal relationships (Cajete, 2005) with Indigenous knowledge, local cultural traditions, and community; activating cross-curricular competencies within communal laws; and situating learning within socio-cultural, place-based, and experiential learning contexts. Themes illuminate water-based pedagogy, which has always been central for Inuit of Nunavut to thrive and survive.
The significant promise of educators’ stories of engagements with Indigenous knowledge and science represent an opportunity to heed scholars’ calls for educators to engage in resurgence in relation to Indigenous peoples, their knowledges, and place. Stories of teacher practices inform practitioners’ and researchers’ understandings of pedagogies of place as central to Indigenous education within public schooling.

Authors

• Leisa Anne Desmoulins, Lakehead University

• Glen William Brocklebank, Victor Sammurtok School