For University of Windsor Education professor Lara Doan, developing an innovative, collaborative Aboriginal cultural training and education program for teacher candidates was about “fulfilling the responsibility of relationship.” The program, entitled Beginning Time Teachings, is in place, for a second year, as an option for BEd primary/junior candidates who are interested of the Original Peoples (“Anishnaabe”)* of North America, while challenging mainstream conceptions of what it means to be an Aboriginal person in Canada today.
As Doan sees it, the responsibility of educators in Canada to our relationship with Original Peoples is ongoing and evolving. To her, it is essential that as caring care-full – educators, we are equipped to “go into the schools and work with students, who may or may not be Aboriginal, with respect and dignity, and with a broader sense of the knowledge of the history that they/we may not have received in their/our previous schooling.
Royal Commission panels, concerned community activists and educational policy makers have spent the last decade repeating themselves over and over: the Canadian educational system is failing FirstNations, Métis and Inuit communities, and this failure must be confronted and redressed. Curricula, programs and strategies musto be developed to create a more responsive system – one thatfosters genuine, sustainable learning opportunities for Aboriginal students, supports these students and their families socially and culturally, and one that also provides, through a culturally sensitive, integrated curriculum,learning about contemporary and traditional Aboriginal communities, cultures, histories and perspectives forall students. In short, concerned educators have been asking for a two-pronged approach to Canada’s greatest educational failure: reach out to First Nation Métis and Inuit communities and, in so doing, better educate all Canadians.
For Dr. Doan, it was through her human rights work that she became profoundly aware of the discrepancies in educational opportunities and the types of misunderstandings about the Original People that are common within the curriculum, and that are common in teaching. And while a lot of suffering and dislocation has been dealt to Aboriginal students through education, she nevertheless sees education as the mode through which redressing these discrepancies and misunderstandings is possible, It just seems to me that part of reconciliation, part of healing, is the role of education. We’re all part, and teacher candidates deserve to have a broader sense of the relations between the Original People of this land, and non-Aboriginal Canadians.
So she did what she always does when confronted with injustice: she responded, immediately and thoughtfully. She applied for a grant and received one from the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities in order to fund the development and implementation of a pilot “urban Anishnaabe” teacher education support program for primary/junior consecutive BEd students. Beginning Time Teachings is the result. The program runs for eight two-hour evening sessions, facilitated by local Anishnaabe teachers, social workers and Ceremony Makers, as well as a two and a half day traditional camp, where students experience traditional teachings taught “on the land,” outside of a formal academicsetting.
Beginning Time Teachings, Doan is quick to point out, refers to the time of the traditional teachings, not to the fact that I work with primary/junior teacher candidates. It is not an accident that she chose to run the program first with primary/junior candidates, however, as at that level that the kids see a lot of stereotypes about who is and who isn't Aboriginal, and that's when teacher intervention is so meaningful – anything from the stories teachers choose to read, to how they choose to represent during playtime, makes a huge difference” to our youngest students.
One of the aspects of the course that Doan has found most impresses teacher candidates is its format delivered as oral teachings. For the BEd students, onditioned by years in “conventional classrooms, this approach was initially off-putting. It was “all just listening.” This discomfort served as an extremely illustrative tool, however, highlighting the difference in Euro-Canadian and Aboriginal approaches to knowledge, sharing and meaning making, and the possibilities that can be lost when students are forced to stifle their own ways of knowing to adhere to convention. In this class, teacher candidates are asked to “just listen and participate, not take notes, not document in an archival sort of way but rather just to listen and learn and come to understand a different approach to learning – one that [eventually] became comforting and enjoyable for them.
Beyond the format, however, the content of the ourse also at heart – strives to raise awareness of contemporary issues in the local Aboriginal communities as well as raising “awareness around the history of [Aboriginal and Canadian] relationships, from before contact (beginning time), to contact, to post-contact following the circle of resilience and strength of the Original People.” The course is consciously designed not to offer all answers – since the point is not to offer simple answers to complex relations – but instead to enable students to feel a sense of comfort that they don't have to know everything.” As teachers, says Doan, recognizing that we don’t know everything, but rather we that we have an interest in learning is key. What that does then is open up a space to allow students, in turn, to share their knowledge and their ways of knowing with us,” breaking the pattern of Us and Them, and opening up the possibility of reconciliation.
As one of last year’s participants, Cara Patterson, summed up: Beginning Time Teachings taught me how to teach with respect and dignity for all children. I gained insight into the Anishnaabe culture that is invaluable to me as a teacher. I strongly recommend this course to any person who wants to be a teacher in Canada.” With Doan and her team’s support, the University of Windsor's Faculty of Education is working to turn this recommendation into reality.