Author: brodlanj

Here is a link to the summary of learning video I posted for this class.

This week’s blog post talked about Kumashiro’s work with literacy, and the difficulties that arise with reading through our own paradigm. To reflect on this reading, we were asked five questions. First we were asked, how schooling shaped our lens of how the world works? Then, what biases and lenses are present in our lives when we’re in the classroom? How can we unlearn these biases? The following question also asked us to address what “single stories” were present during my elementary education, and whose perspective was the most valued?

A) In my experience my upbringing in school shaped many facets of my how I view the world. First being my language, having learned french at a young age and through school is something that I now, truly consider to be a benefit. When I was young teachers would always pester the students (myself included) to speak french in class and on the playground. Since the majority of us were born and raised in Regina, the community that surrounded us was full of English speakers. Maybe it was because I was self-conscious or simple childish rebellion, but I did my absolute best to practice as little french as possible. Despite this, I still to this day speak it fluently and I understand why my parents and teachers were so adamant we learn it. Our school was very focused on creating individuals who would gain the advantage of speaking french in a monolingual community and fight to keep the francophone community in Saskatchewan alive. With dwindling numbers of french speakers in the province during the 2000s our school was using every tactic they could to make sure we grasped the language at a high level. This of course, worked out to many of our benefits but in doing so also missed an essential part of our education.

We were taught from a young age that the world is a cruel place and that we wouldn’t stand out from the rest of the crowd if we didn’t invest our time into the french language. Many of our classes revolved around the history and culture around Quebec and important historical figures such as Louis Riel. No doubt, important topics but our school did little to teach us about current injustices found within our current society. Reminiscing about my first year of university, I can clearly remember not being familiar with many minorities, and it was the first time that a large crowd in the halls made me feel uncomfortable. When it came to learning about; First Nations, Muslim, Sikh among others, I knew very little. My elementary school never introduced us to cultural backgrounds that differed from our own. So when I was faced by a community center like the university, it became evident to me that I would need to learn. I brought lot’s of racist lenses to the classroom. I can distinctly remember in one of my first semester being hesitant about being paired up with a First Nations classmate, because I was taught from a young age by some of my older family members that First Nations people were lazy. Another racist assumption I made was that I’d have a hard time working with someone who was wearing a hijab because their accent would be too thick and I wouldn’t be able to communicate with them properly.

I’ve learned that the best way to unlearn these kinds of biases is to learn more about the communities that you’ve unfamiliar with. This can be done in many ways, you can read about it, or attend an event orchestrated by said community or what I found to be most effective; get to know a person who belongs to that community. Learning from someone who is a part of the culture is the best source of information because their behavior, knowledge and social group will challenge your understandings of how other cultures operate.

B) In my the most evident single story was the traditional Western-European style of Education. History is written by the victor, and as such when learning about Canada’s history we learning little about the oppression that First Nations people went through. The genocide they were subject to was glossed over and made to be more of a side note, as opposed to learning about how the British turned us into the successful country we are today. The comfortable truth was what mattered, the truth that was easily palatable and didn’t make anyone question the morality of the decisions that had been made. I think that many of our teachers were hesitant to teacher something that was uncomfortable because they either knew little about the subject or were uncomfortable with the topic themselves. This kind of information is crucial for students to learn because it allows them to think critically about the justice aspect of society. It allows someone to look at the past and recognize why racism and biases can limit opportunities for minority citizens. To combat this, I think when curriculum is formed it’s important to engage people from many ethnic backgrounds so that students have to opportunity to grow with more than one perspective that guides them.

At first glance, one might not realize the systems of oppression that are abundant in our society. They work tirelessly and everywhere; our homes, places of work, our favorite hangout spots and our schools. There are things that are out of our control as teachers, but built into the curriculum itself there is planned learning that is oppressive. Let’s take for example mathematics, our challenge for today’s blog post is to identify; first I want to think back to how my mathematics class may have been oppressive to myself or my classmates, and second I want to address three ways that Inuit mathematics challenge the commonsense of Eurocentric mathematics.

When thinking of answers to the first query the first thing that came to mind was the lack of First Nations education within my school not just in math class. In honesty, I can’t say I remember ever having a First Nations’ student in our school, so perhaps the faculty didn’t consider it a priority to teach us indigenous learning. If this is the case, they were sorely mistaken, in fact this could be considered an oppressive act. Denying students who were predominantly white knowledge of the importance of the First Nations people within our history and society only brew more fear of the people we don’t understand or indifference towards their social issues. As we have previously discussed though people who are indifferent may not have ill will towards marginalized groups, they inaction allows injustice to continue.

A second aspect I found interesting that Little Bear describes is the positive reinforcement that is met with student’s success. This is something I found to be lacking within my math class. Our teacher was not a huge positive reinforcement kind of person. The students that were doing well, went generally unbothered by the teacher, but the students who were doing poorly were under constant surveillance and often got the “do better” talk (I know from personal experience). Now despite having a horrid time with the subject itself, the teacher was one of my favorites which is why it really felt awful to let him down.

The final circumstance I can think of was earlier on when our class was learning multiplication, one of my classmates was showing off the method her parents had shown her for multiplications. For a long time I didn’t understand how she was doing it, but I’ve come to realize this was the lattice method of multiplying. Our teacher was unimpressed to say the least. Our teacher told her “You can multiply like that if it helps you at home, but on homework or a test I want you to show me your work in the way I teach you in class.”. Reflecting on this now, that statement was very oppressive, she learned that method from her culture and though it wasn’t the same method it still granted the desired result, so what difference should it make? The teacher was in this instance repressing her cultural learning and normalizing the Eurocentric mathematical method.

To answer the second question, I think the most obvious difference in the way the Inuit have learned mathematics versus the normalized western methods is that from and early age, they learn it in their native tongue. Now to many this may not seem like an issue, I refute that by saying I learned all of my mathematics going through a french school system, a system mind you that used the same Eurocentric base for their mathematical system as the English. Yet, when I reached university level maths, I struggled 1. because math is not my strong suit and 2. because I needed to relearn many of the terminologies as they weren’t familiar to me. The Inuit children then face an even bigger challenge because they are learning math up to grade 3 in Inuktitut which uses a base-20 for of counting versus the french or English methods that they take on in grade for which rely on base-10. This would be an incredible challenge as they students in essence need to tear down what they know and begin anew with a different system that they aren’t familiar with.

A second mathematical difference that is discussed is the method of measuring, whereas the Europeans developed a standard unit of measurements, the Inuit preferred using tools that were readily available to them at all times, their bodies. The Europeans always needed to be exact with their measurements to be certain that the result of their equations or creations fit perfectly. The Inuit’s system however sings the praises of their intuition, they could use their bodies to give approximate measurements and use their spacial awareness to create something that was of use. I dare anyone reading this to go knit or sew something using only their body as a measuring tool, see how well that goes. Spacial awareness is a skill that many students in our school system lack and have trouble comprehending. Perhaps re communing with nature and creating new ways to interact with mathematics in the outdoors should be a part of curriculum?

My favorite of the mathematical differences, and the final one I will write about, is the difference in the calendar. Europeans have a tendency to want to put numbers on everything. Hours of a day? Slap a number on it. Currency system that relies on thin pieces of paper or plastic? The bigger the number, the better. A way to designate a new model of your favorite long-distance walkie-talkie/Candy Crush playing device? You guessed it, NUMBERS! The fact the Inuit use significant natural events to designate the end and start of a month is brilliant. It straight up disregards the Eurocentric method by not implicating numbers at all. To me this method makes more sense than the European method, because the Earth isn’t 100% predictable, despite how much humans want it to be. The seasons change every year, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. Being aware enough to notice the changes in nature around you, especially in the animals like the Inuit do, shows a true connection to the environment around them. Additionally, this is another strength the Inuit show that lacks within European teaching. The recognition of changes in animal behavior and environment shows a distinct understanding of the patterns that are present in nature. Many city students would likely be hard-pressed to demonstrate that kind of learning.

Upon a little reflection, I initially thought that there wasn’t a presence of any of the three concepts discussed by Westheimer. I thought this because our school didn’t organize or promote much in terms of citizenship. Sure, they wanted us to come out with enough knowledge to pursue further education or find a job, but we never really aimed towards democratic goals such as the promotion of democratic voting. We never really addressed issues of injustice or racism that I could recall. Even matters of gender we left untouched by the faculty. Our school was made up of predominantly white students with some minorities of immigrants a majority of which came from Africa.

The realization that I was in fact wrong making my initial reflection was that I didn’t even stop to think of the context that surrounds my school. To any who know me, most people be able to say two things that are essential to my identity. The first being that I am tall, which I hear almost everyday from strangers on the street. The other is that I’m a “Frenchie”. The school I attended from K-12 was a francophone school, the only one in the city in fact. The reason that this is important is because upon further reflection I realized my school, was busy being tangled up in the red tape the government was wrapping them in to try and get funding, alongside trying to raise kids who were surrounded by English in day to day interactions to become competent and confident french speakers. French for the most part is undervalued in Saskatchewan, on five percent of our population is able to speak it fluently. Despite the big push of immersion schools within the bigger cities, English remains Saskatchewan’s only official language. This reminded me of some of the activities we did participate in, our school at one point was in desperate need of a new school. We were too many students packed into a small school space and our faculty was desperately struggling with the School board to get the funding they needed to create another location. Without even taking note of it, I was a part of a participatory citizenship type of learning. On more than one occasion, we were asked as students to come out and attend the court hearings that the school was participating in to try and get funding for the school. The school asked us to pass word onto everyone we knew to generate interest within the community. We were a minority and were doing what we could to help ourselves.

After the better part of four years, we were finally able to get some funding. Though it still wasn’t what we had asked for, we were given the old run-down Robert Usher school which needed a ton of renovations. Now I’m uncertain as to whether the reluctance to fund our needs were due to constraints, or general disinterest for our culture. It makes me think however, that if this is the resistance that we got as white people trying to obtain help, how difficult it must be for minorities like the First Nations people. Like mentioned in class, we need to strive towards equity, equality doesn’t cut it. Some people need more help than others, and to truly make an impact within our society we need to identify critical problems within our societal systems and combat them in whatever ways we can.

This week’s blog post is aimed towards treaty education and it’s importance within our curriculum. There are many schools within our societies that are made up of primarily white students, minorities such as First Nations students are less represented. Some schools interpret this as a legitimate reason to not incorporate treaty education into their classrooms. This is a mistake and with the question’s provided in this weeks post, my aim is to clarify why this is the case.

1. What is the purpose of teaching Treaty Ed (specifically) or First Nations, Metis, and Inuit (FNMI) Content and Perspectives (generally) where there are few or no First Nations, Metis, Inuit peoples?

The particular benefit of making sure all students regardless of race or culture learn Treaty Ed and FNMI content is that it can help mend a conflict that has lasted generations. During the colonization of North America, the issue that Indigenous people faced was that the newly arrived Settlers decided their way of life was better. The “uncivilized” lifestyles couldn’t be accepted by the Settlers because it was different to them. A few trades, wars, genocides, and treaties go by and the Settlers have weaseled their way into power. Now by this time all that remained of the First Nations people where those who hadn’t been killed by sickness, war or starvation, certainly a tough bunch. It was decided that treaties and agreements would be the best way to sweep them under the rug and complete our white takeover of the country, and so we did. The kicker really is that we had no intention of keeping our word when it came honoring our treaties. In reality the Settlers had a real superiority complex. Whenever someone was in the way of our expansion treaty land or not, we pushed them away. Where ever we wanted to build whether it was under treaty permission or not, we took it. It almost seems as though the treaties were a publicity stunt to portray the white settlers as gracious negotiators.

So the initial problem that started this violent take over of land and culture was fear of the misunderstood, or in other words prejudice and racism. If we continue to this day to not teach treaty education to the settlers descendants, they will develop their own opinions (which might not be too positive) of other races and cultures. So if teachers are against treaty education in schools that are predominantly white or are neutral to the idea and will only follow-through if asked, they are allowing future generations to develop negative biases towards a culture they know nothing about. It is instead a necessity to teach Treaty ED and FNMI content so that students from all cultures can gain an understanding of this countries history and can learn to appreciate the First Nations culture.

2. What does it mean for your understanding of curriculum that “We are all treaty people”?

Well this statement expresses that there were two parties that signed the treaties. The First Nations people and the White Settlers, two parties in agreement. Despite the fact that White people didn’t hold up their end of the bargain and still don’t today. But this does not deny the fact that; First Nations people have been treated in ways that are racist and demeaning and by the letter of our Canadian laws are victims of crime. Their land was stolen from them, we still live on the treaty lands that belongs to them. Acknowledging that as white settlers we have done wrong but that we can do better, is a first step to reestablishing a relationship with the First Nations people. The biggest impact we can make is with the future generation, making sure that they learn about treaties and Indigenous culture. Being a role model for them in indigenous learning by always incorporating Indigenous learning when possible. Making them aware of social issues that plague Canadian minorities, so that they can be a voice against injustice.

For seminar this week we were asked to identify ways that reinhabitation and docolonization occur withint the educationa narrative and how we want to adapt the ideas of reinhabitation and decolonization to considering our place as teachers within the classroom.

To respond to the first question, reinhabitation can happen through reintroducing people to nature. This is not only an important aspect within indigenous culture but can be beneficial to the mental health of all students. No matter how you look at it, our essence as beings on this planet comes from nature, we started out there and we’ve learned to mold it to our benefit. Buildings, technology, medicine, these are things were are no doubt better having than not having. What we seem to have forgotten is that what we had before, Nature, social interaction and natural remedies weren’t bad things to have in our lives. Our advancements though have brought us far in some areas, have also taken us backwards in others. Stepping back out into nature, learning to connect with and respect the environment around us I believe to be critical to our personal development, social development and our own survival.

To talk about decolonization is obviously a stressful subject, because along with it comes an admittance of wrong doing. White people have historically taken over other cultures and imposed their will, beliefs and values on others. This creates not only a separation of superiority and inferiority but it can create generational fractures like what happened during the residential schooling period. Many people to this day are still feeling the effects of residential schooling, either through personal experience or familial experience. These people were forced to conform to a society and a mindset that was not their own, and the treatment of students in these school were simply unacceptable. The consequences of these actions gave us people who were broken, addicted, resentful, depressed, unsure of their own culture and identity. That’s why decolonization is so important, because it is a step towards mending the damage done, and school is the perfect place to do this. Curriculum can allow teachers to approach colonization in a way that can make students uncomfortable, though not an easy thing to do, this is effective in teaching kids what is right and wrong, and that a person’s culture is something that is to be respected.

Physical education being my domain of choice in education is a perfect subject to tackle these ideas through cross-curricular content, sports, games, and teaching for personal and social responsibility (TPSR). TPSR being Don Hellison’s idea is one of my favorite educational methods because at it’s core it changes physical education (or any subject for that matter), into a process that demands that students learn to respect themselves, in terms of their beliefs and points of view while also realizing that they can have a social impact on the people around them through both their words and actions. This means that students need to be aware and act in ways that are respectful not only to themselves but also do no infringe on the beliefs of others. The biggest component of this is building trust and relationships. If we can learn to trust one another and build a relationship with someone, we then become more open to their own point of view and to come to better terms with it, even if it doesn’t match our own. One exceptional way to build relationship and trust is through physical activity and sports. Nothing like some teamwork to make us all fit better together. In terms of cross-curricular activity I think it’s also important to remember that the games and sports played in physical education don’t need to just been your standard sport or game. Things such as history and social studies in terms of colonial relations can be made into a game. Ideas from science and how animal ecosystems function can also be made into a game. Language an literacy can be turned into scavenger hunts or a time rally. Why not then integrate things important to indigenous culture into games like these to make for a more impactful lesson.

In summary, decolonization and reinhabitation are crucial learnings for students, regardless of background. Sometimes the learning that need to strive for isn’t what we are well versed in or what what feels the most comfortable to teach. Learning is a process that develops people’s identity and it should be a foremost objective for teachers to give students and understanding of cultural differences, respect of other cultures, relationship building, and ownership of misdoing. It is then important for myself as teacher to also realize that I have my own biases as well. So just like Michael, I’ll out myself. I have had racist thoughts before, despite my desire to be a welcoming person. I have biases, many of which I’m aware of and others I have not even realized. I hope to be able to tackle these issues in a positive way so that I can become a better role model for the students who I will one day teach.

Who decides what subject matter can be in curriculum? Before I dive into the reading presented by Ben Levin, here is my guess as to how it’s decided. I would assume that each provincial government must delegate it’s own officials to work within the ministry of education. The Ministry would then Identify what subject areas are deemed to be the most critical for young learners to interact with. From there onward the ministry will form a team of people who they consider to be knowledgeable, diverse, and experienced enough within the realms of that subject area and teaching that they can work together on developing their best version of the curriculum. Many revisions later, an approval allows the curriculum to go out to the schools where principals, teachers and students alike make changes to their content to best fit what the curriculum asks.

After doing the reading, I learned many new things about how curriculum is developed. In fact other than the fact that each province can run it’s own curriculum, I knew very little about how the whole process works. It seems as though how “mold-able” each education curriculum is, is really up to the province. Since they can choose what credentials each person who takes the mantle of educational power, these credentials could be diverse from school committee to government worker or they could keep it strictly within their own workers to keep more control over it. For example within the article it states a person who is assigned within cabinet, may elect to add or remove something from the curriculum should they not see it fit to be there. This in essence to me is really total control, since this person could just then be passing on the beliefs of a political party onto the education system without a means of combating against it.

In such a case it would be then impossible to say the education is not political, because when you look all the way to the top of the pyramid to see who holds the power of decision making, you truly realize that the power is being monopolized. What really concerns me the most is what you do about this. If the Federal government seizes more control over curriculum I fear it may begin to lean more to one side politically than the other. Which is great for some people but won’t be for many others. Whereas if you spread the power out and try to involved people with relevant knowledge and diverse political and cultural backgrounds, you wouldn’t ever get anything done. If we moved the power of education to a separate body entirely who worked independently from the government I feel that it would still be run by people with varying political views that would sway they system. My final verdict is that no matter what we do politics will always come into play in educational policy development as long as people are involved.

Reading through the assigned readings this week really shows the contrast between methods or curriculum from the late 1800s to today. Obviously, many of the things I read in Painter’s content was appalling but I cannot honestly say that I was truly surprised. I would argue that many biases towards students from minorities are still very prevalent in schools today. It makes me feel as though not as much progress as we take claim for has actually happened.

“What does it mean to be a “good” student according to the commonsense?”

I think this is fairly straight forward, as many people of my generation would agree. There was in fact an idea student, certain qualities were always present in the preferred students. Qualities such as; listening, being attentive, participating, sitting down, keeping quiet, not questioning the teacher’s methods, not questioning school rules, what the teacher teaches is right. If you displayed these qualities or at least a majority of them, you were likely to pass with flying colours.

” Which students are privileged by this definition of the good student?”.

Well, the students who don’t challenge the commonsense stand to gain the most. It almost seems as if, if you’re willing to just coast along in school and not cause any commotion you’re likely to do well. I can’t say that I put in a lot of effort at school but I was also very good at reaching a bare minimum of acceptance. Since my school was very product based during my attendance, I got good a picking up the essential of each class, committing it to memory and regurgitating it on a test. It would be unlikely that I pass the same test today. I find that this is still a problem in society today, even in university. You would think that a institution of higher learning such as a university, would take into account the knowledge advancements in educational theory. Considering education is their business, it may be of interest to them to make it a good one. There are still classes to this day that I will show up to the exam, circle the word on the page that looks the most familiar to me and move on to the next question. It’s not to say that what we learn in elementary school and university isn’t important, but if we’ve found transmit learning to students, it should be put into action at all levels of education.

” What is made impossible to see/understand/believe because of these commonsense ideas?”.

I would say that what’s impossible to see is the true potential of each student, Kumashiro says it himself in the assigned reading. A student of his did not take to learning the way that he thought was the most effective. The way that he perceived all students to need to be. That doesn’t mean that the student was incapable of learning, each student takes to learning their in their own way. Further, teacher’s will often never really know what the student’s background is like. Home life may not be the best, or maybe they have traumas in their past they are trying to work out. School needs to be a safe space for students, where they can truly be themselves, free from judgement that they may have in their social lives. That’s why I’m a big subscriber to Don Hellison’s Idea of Teaching for Personal and Social Responsibility (TPSR). The essential concept from this teaching method is that relationships need to be built between students and their teachers as well as their peers. If we can build an understanding and respect for our own and other’s religions, cultures, race, gender, sexual orientations we can begin to develop a more critical understanding of how the world around us works and how we can make it better.

It’s up to teachers to nurture learning using several different means, this could be experiential learning, lecturing, writing, expression through art or writing. Not every project needs to approached the same way, if students are given the means to choose how they want to express what they’ve learned, they’ll want to be more involved in their development. TPSR also accounts for this dilemma by bringing forward experiential learning. If a relationship built on trust between the teacher and student is present then we as teachers, should have the believe in our students ability to make responsible decisions about what they need and want to learn and be able to display that in a coherent manner. Anyways I feel I’ve rambled on long enough, see you all in seminar!

” If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow. ” – John Dewey

John Dewey was a very influential individual during the beginnings of progressive education. His basis in experiential learning made the educational experience the most important thing within the curriculum. Each student learned the best from experiencing learning in their own way. Students also needed to have their own sense of direction while learning and got to learn things they wanted to learn as well as many of the concepts he deemed important, such as problem solving capacity, critical thinking and recognition of failure as part of process of learning.

This quote tells me that John Dewey cared about the experiences that his students had in and out of the classroom. He wanted his students to be curious about the world around them and be willing to engage with the unknown to better their understanding. This progressive model towards education aligns very much with myself because this is how I learned best growing up. I always struggled with math and sciences, things like the Pythagorean theorem, angles, charts and such were difficult for me to get a grasp on. However, one day I was given the option to sign up for a carpentry class and this changed everything. We were using many of the same concepts learning in class material and applying it to a real world situation. Having all the pieces of wood there and calculating the angles needed for each cut, drawing drafts of plans up to make sure that all the pieces would fit together beforehand helped me internalize the same learnings I struggled with for years. This quote shows me that John really thought about different capabilities of learners and recognized that students needed to be presented educational materials in a variety of ways to really internalize the subject.

In terms of curriculum this quote is again very progressive in my opinion because it makes takes into account the fact that there is a process in education. Failure can be just as important as success in learning, because our successes depend on our willingness to fail. For example, think of all the things we wouldn’t have today if their original inventors had given up when they first failed. Let’s take the Wright brothers for example, it took them several years of developing different prototypes of planes, as well as researching the failures of aviators before them. When they finally succeeded in getting a plane into the air to about 10 feet off the ground, which in today’s standards is nothing but it was none the less an important stepping stone. Which brings me back to Dewey’s quote if we stick to the way our predecessors learned than there isn’t much space for improvement. If we want our students to experience and learn in a positive manner, I feel curriculum needs to reflect the same. Just like how students can learn through process, curriculum should be under constant monitoring and should be routinely improved upon so that teachers and students don’t stagnate.

Our first task for this weeks reading is to address ways that I experienced the Tyler rationale in my schooling experience. The first thing that comes to mind for when about Tyler’s rationale is that it focuses on what should be considered worthwhile educational content, how to go about attaining those objectives, how to make it efficient to teach and how to assess whether the content is internalized. My school growing up focused largely on language, since I went to a francophone school. The aim was to develop exceptional french speakers and as such everything was taught in french and we were expected to speak only in french while at school.  One way the school aimed to have us attain this outcome was to have teachers always roaming around, in case someone needed scolding for speaking English. Thinking back on this now, it kind of reminds me of the abstinence model that was used to teach us sex ed. Teachers were trying to make us fear speaking English and would threaten punishment if we did so, kind of like how they tried to convince us to fear sex to make us abstain. Neither turned out to be very effective for a many of the students.

The next thing we were asked to ponder was what Tyler’s rationale prevents us from doing as teachers. I think the biggest set back of Tyler’s rationale is that it does not take into account the individual needs of each student. Having overall goals for the student body is certainly a positive thing to have as there are benchmarks we should all strive to obtain, but this model prevents students from being inquisitive and strive to improve their own learning and interests. When student’s aren’t allowed to have some control over their own learning, I feel as though it makes the learning environment more bland and less interactive than it should be.

The final question we’ve been asked is to contemplate the usefulness of Tyler’s rationale. This model is great for developing standards of accomplishment for students as I eluded to earlier. There are certainly some subjects that students should always have a baseline understanding of; math, literacy, writing, sciences, history, etc. Tyler’s rationale helps outline important details for each of the subjects which helps teacher’s focus on the details that are important to each topic.