View here. Unit Plan Overview Grade: Five Length: 5 Days (60 min/day) Subject: Arts Education, English Language Arts, Social Studies, Science and Treaty Education Content: This cross-curricular unit explores the essential question “The Circle of Life is traditionally thought to be a First Nation way of living and seeing the world. How can we connect to the Circle of Life and bring it into our daily classroom and education?” using a variety of instructional strategies.
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In Chapter 3 of Kevin Kumashiro’s (2006), Against Common Sense Teaching and Learning Toward Social Justice, Kumashiro discusses that teachers teach in a state of uncertainty. What does teaching in uncertainty mean? According to Kumashiro, teaching in uncertainty means that teachers do not know the hidden lessons they are teaching their students, and therefore do not know what their students are really learning from their lessons. In the chapter, Kumashiro discusses an example involving two different teachers. He then recounts…
How My Upbringing Taught Me To ‘Read The World‘ My upbringing and schooling heavily reflected a colonized western society. When I was a child, we lived in North Central Regina. Considering the high crime rate of that area and my parents’ own biases, my parents did not allow me to play outside alone or with other children in the neighborhood (especially Indigenous children). They also sent me to a babysitter that lived in a much nicer area (primarily white families…
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The concept of reinhabitation and decolonization is rooted in the fact that Indigenous people share a deep connection with the land and their culture. “Learning from Place: A Return to Traditional Mushkegowuk Ways of Knowing” is a research project completed by Jean-Paul Restoule, Sheila Gruner, and Edmund Metatawabin. In the project, they worked to discover the ins and outs of reinhabitation and decolonization. They did so by creating an audio documentary about taking a trip down the Albany River which…
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An important question to consider as an educator is ‘What do we teach and why?’. This is an important question because it allows a teacher to critically analyze the implications of what they teach and how they teach it. For this same reason, it is also important to consider how school curriculum is decided. How is school curricula decided? Curriculum is a complicated concept that involves multiple factors. These factors also play a role in how curriculum is both decided…