Week 10 [Numeracy]

  • In my experience of mathematics in school I would say that it was definitely oppressive and discriminatory.  Not only would they only teach one way of learning how to solve math equations, but I had teachers to go so far as tell us how we were to write our numbers.  Math class was often embarrassing for me as I have dyslexia and I would read numbers wrong and I had to take my time, especially with mad minutes.  I’m not sure why being fast at math was necessary.  I met a teacher in the summer, and he told me that he hands out mad minute sheets, but its not about time.  What he wants to see is comprehension and the students will repeat the sheets until completed with no errors and then move onto the next one (adding, then subtracting, then multiplication, division, and so on.)  With this, he never shares with the other students where they are at, so they feel no embarrassment with where they are at.  This is a practice I will take forward into my teaching.

  1. Their counting system is completely different, for example 146 in their language translates to ((Twenty five (times) ((Twenty two (times)) and many threes).  They have a strong multiplication factor in how they get their numbers, and its in base 20.  Which is slightly complicated, I learned it in math 100 at FNU.
  2. Using body parts for measuring out the perfect fitting parka or boots, instead of using a numerical system
  3. Using naturally occurring yearly events as a calendar instead of the calculated lunar cycle of 28 days and 13 months or solar cycle which is our 30 some days and 12 months, the latter of which took years and years of math to figure out perfectly.

Week 9 [Biases, Lenses & Single Stories]

  1. My upbringing and schooling was prominently white, and a little below middle class.  Growing up I only had like one friend at a time who wasn’t white, and my best friends -whom I was always with- were all white.   I had one family member who was First Nations but I often didn’t hear great stories about him.  Though my life had very little colour, I was always fascinated with other cultures.  My favourite movie as a child was Pocahontas, though yes, as an adult the real story is awful.  As a child you don’t know that stuff, you see her out in the forest, and her connection with land and animals.  It was a culture I always wanted to be a part of but was never given the opportunity as a growing person, and then peers start to influence your thoughts as you get older and make you feel bad for enjoying when pow wow dancers come to the school.  However, who does that say more about? Them for there ignorance? Or me for not explaining the beauty that I saw?  And even though I was always fascinated, because I never got to know First Nations people well, stereotypes pop into my brain when first meeting customers, students, or people in general when they’re First Nations and I have to work hard to remind myself that that individual person is not that stereotype, and to let them show me who they really are.
  2. Single stories in my schooling were that First Nations were troubled, and we only learned about white people and white histories.  We never learned about what really happened with First Nations peoples, never given the opportunity to know why the Ranch Ehrlo kids, or the “bad” kids were 99% First Nations.  There truth didn’t seem to matter growing up.

Week 8 [Citizenship]

In my K-12 schooling I only really recall doing things that fall under the personally responsible citizen. I was a part of doing activities or volunteering to “develop personally responsible citizens hop[ing] to build character and personal responsibility by emphasizing honesty, integrity, self-discipline, and hard work” (pg 3), such as food or bottle drives, volunteering at shelters, and raising money to build schools.  I was never involved in activities for participatory citizenship or the justice oriented citizenship, and I think that is partially because the large focus was on personally responsible citizenship.  I think this approach to the curriculum in beneficial, but I think students need a better opportunity to understand why these citizenships are important to everyday life and as we get older.  Not just asking them to do something because they were told it was a good thing to do.

Week 7 [Treaty Education]

  1. Teaching Treaty Ed or First Nations, Metis and Inuit content and perspectives in places where there are few or no First Nations, Metis and Inuit peoples is important because those are the people who are not taught naturally by relationships with these peoples about what had happened to them and why learning about their cultures is important.  The people not surrounded by First Nations, Metis and Inuit peoples get to keep an ignorance towards Canada’s history and that perpetuates racism towards these groups of people.  We don’t avoid teaching the holocaust because there aren’t many Jewish people in our schools, that’s a significant point in history that we don’t want to repeat, with many lessons in how to not mistreat people in todays setting.  What happened to First Nations, Metis and Inuit peoples is no different, it to me is worse because it happened for years longer than the holocaust and still has huge impacts today, and children need to learn about it so that they can understand and be a solution to the problem and be an advocate for their fellow people.
  2. “We are all treaty people” to me means that everyone in Canada is under the Treaty and all of us should learn about them as we grow up, because it’s important to respect and honour them.  It’s promises that were made to First Nations, Metis and Inuit peoples and the more we know about them, the more we are able to keep them, because we are all responsible for this land.

Week 6 [Curriculum Policy & Treaty Education]

A) In Ben Levin’s chapter Curriculum Policy and the Politics of What Should Be Learned in School I learned that Policies dictate How our education system is set up including what schooling is provided, how, to whom, in what form, by whom, with what resources, etc. (pg. 8).  Policy is connected to politics and “education policy decision can be seen as being, in some sense, a political decision” (pg. 8), though many educators believe that politics shouldn’t be involved in education, however, even taking the antipolitical stand is a political move.  Political influence is normally highly unequal, and those who have the least status usually have the least influence on political decision making as well (pg. 8), which is cause for concern because an individual in a dominant position could add or take away parts of the curriculum based on their own ideologies.  Without a political vetting process, however, the curriculum would probably never be done, let alone be efficient, because every individual included in the process will have a different view on what is and isn’t important.  What goes into the curriculum is shaped by ideology, personal values, issues in the public domain, and interests (pg. 22), and it concerns me that the students have very little say in what they would like to learn, or what they think is important. 

https://www.corwin.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/16905_Chapter_1.pdf

B) I found that the Treaty Education document contained parallels to the Ben Levin chapter, for example how much control the government has over what is going on in the curriculum, even though you bring diverse people together to create it.  The people with the least status have the least influence.  I found It interesting that it says, “Ministry of Education respects the federal government’s legal, constitutional, and fiscal obligations to First Nations peoples” (Treaty Education, 2013, p. 3), but Treaty Education wasn’t mandatory until 2007.  I am sure that many tensions arose when creating Treaty Education, because it has been almost a taboo topic in Canada.  Not only does part of the population not want to admit to the wrong doings of Canada, or isn’t fully aware of them, but it is a sensitive topic for the Indigenous.  It needs to be handled with care and respect.  Placing high importance on it will have future generations more understanding of their peers and their history, and the more people that are educated on the topic the better Reconciliation will happen.

Week 5 [Learning from Place]

The article we read for week 5 was about place based learning in Indigenous culture.  Some of the ways I saw reinhabitation happening in the article was youth being taught by Indigenous Elders, as well as the middle aged adults.  These teachings were done on traditional lands, while using the Cree language, which has a huge emphasis lately for revitalization.  Teaching outside of the classroom has a massive impact because the students can make a better connection of their learning to their community and the rest of their environment, instead of just learning it in the classroom and not thinking twice about it when they do go outside.  The ways in which colonization was happening was how residential schools tore away First Nations culture from them, especially language, which is why revitalization is so important now.  Another thing would be the laws that came into place to stop something such as hunting which should be a way of doing things that doesn’t have laws, much like gardening, it’s a way of life for people that live off the natural environment, but colonizers placed laws and fees on it.  Land is something we will always have, place is something we will always have and I think using it more in your teachings will not only help students connect and learn better, but respect it more.  Having professionals come a talk about their work in different places would give better insight to what it is like, it’s the same when learning about the place you are in.  I think teaching outside and making connections of the natural world to curriculum subjects will be very important in my classroom.

Week 4 [The “Good” Student]

Being a “good student” is being on time for class, being clean, organized and having a preferred attitude every day at school for the teacher.  A “good” student doesn’t challenge the teacher in anyway and pays attention in class so that they can memorize the given knowledge and regurgitate it back on tests.  The students that are privileged by this commonsense are students who have a home life that allows them to focus on school, be fed, bathed, and clothed properly.  Students who do not have any type of learning disability or behavioural issues.  This keeps the students who memorize and test well at the top of their class, not the students who are actually big thinkers.  These ideals for students creates this never ending cycle of students who think they aren’t smart enough to do things, when in reality they haven’t been able to showcase what they’re really made of, they haven’t been given the opportunity to learn to their full potential.  Keeping the commonsense holds students back from being creative and thinking outside the box because it might make their teacher uncomfortable because a student might be able to grasp a concept that they themselves cannot.  The “good” student stunts the intellectual growth of some students and leaves the others behind.

Week 2 [Curriculum Theory & Practice]

Learning about the Tyler rationale demonstrated how the education system is set up.  As an educator, it makes sense as to why that has been our teaching style, the “objectives are set, a plan drawn up, then applied, and the outcomes (products) measured” (3).  Organized, and seemingly simple enough, however, I recall in my schooling experience having missing information or learning opportunities.  You would either not understand the topic given to you or you wouldn’t catch on to the actual outcome of the assignment given (such as how to write an essay).  I think a big part of learning is to fully learn and comprehend how to do the assignment, such as an essay, as well as the topic that it is supposed to be on, which was never the case for myself and other classmates.  Another thing was the lack of expansion on topics if it wasn’t specifically in what they were teaching, it was very “they are told what they must learn and how they will do it” (4), which diminishes the want to expand our knowledge for ourselves.  We aren’t really taught to think or wonder things unless we are told or asked to in school, like in the text it says “The focus on pre-specified goals may lead both educators and learners to overlook learning that is occurring as a result of their interactions” (5).  Curriculum as a guideline is a wonderful thing, but “programmes inevitably exist prior to and outside the learning experiences” (4), which to me means that you should take the curriculum or programme to guide your classes but allow the free thought and conversation, be a learner with your students, not a dictator of learning.

Work Cited

 Smith – Curriculum Theory and Practice 

Week 1 [Commonsense]

My understanding for the reading on commonsense is that individual societies do schooling in certain ways and our comfortability with those ways make us believe that it is the right and the only way, and straying from the normal path would be detrimental to our education.  We have gotten so comfortable in our ways of teaching, as the reading says “I, for one, did not question whether an outsider looking at my own taken-for-granted perspectives on what it means to teach would find them strange or unreasonable, or for that matter oppressive”(xxxiii), we don’t even stop to think about what we are doing or why, we just do it because that is what we have known to be right.  A part of that is because we feel social pressure to conform to what we “should” be doing because alternative routes are dismissed and can be uncomfortable, doing things a different way hasn’t been mapped out for us.  The more that we pay attention to the commonsense the easier it will be to question why we think it’s right and we can then start to make a difference in education to benefit all learning types that people have and move away from oppressive education.

Work Cited

 Introduction. The problem of common sense (Kumashiro. (2009). Against Common Sense: Teaching and Learning Toward Social Justice, pp. XXIX – XLI).Â