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!