Indigenous Learning in the CALP Model
Transcript
00:05A lot of people say they don't have
00:06any Indigenous people in their communities.
00:08I find that very hard to believe.
00:10I find that impossible to believe.
00:12Yeah.
00:13But the reality is, many of them don't enter the spaces,
00:16so they think because they aren't front and center in their experience
00:19that they're not there.
00:20And the reality is, is that the vast majority
00:23of communities in Alberta have Indigenous learners.
00:27If you don't have Indigenous people in your classrooms,
00:30then there's a gap that you need to really look at closely.
00:35We have about 15% of our population is Indigenous in Manning.
00:39And I would say we might have a handful
00:42that would come into my programs on a yearly basis.
00:48And so I knew there was a problem.
00:49I knew that there was a disconnect,
00:52and I had no idea
00:54how to address it.
00:56I approached Georgina at that point of it.
00:58She was kind of sitting back and going,
01:00"I don't know if I quite trust this whole situation."
01:05I thought Kelly would have this project
01:07and then we would be just offending our elders,
01:12that we would be doing things
01:14that are not the proper protocol,
01:16not the proper way of doing things in the community.
01:19It took me a long time.
01:20I had to really, really think about this.
01:22I'm not a person just to jump on something.
01:24I have to really think about it,
01:26and if it sits well in my heart, then I will do it,
01:31but it took me a while.
01:32I started thinking about it.
01:33Yeah, this is a good opportunity
01:35for us to clarify what's the barriers here.
01:41With a number of members of other CALP communities
01:44in Peace River and High Level and those areas,
01:47we compiled a huge list, three pages, of questions.
01:52And I went to Dave Matilpi, who is an elder in Peace River,
01:56and I asked him, I emailed the list of questions.
02:01And I said, "I want to do a training for my staff
02:05"on cross-cultural Indigenous awareness
02:10so that we can get people into our centre and retain them.
02:14And he kind of looked at me and I said,
02:16"Did you look at the questions the first time we met?"
02:18And he went, "No."
02:21So I went back, and he invited me back to meet with him,
02:24and we talked again.
02:26He introduced me to some of his students and their families
02:29and some of the people in the outreach centre where he worked,
02:33which is a high school outreach campus.
02:37And I watched him play grandpa and papa
02:41to all of these students and people in the community,
02:45and I watched it.
02:46I said, "Did you look at the questions?"
02:49"No."
02:50And he sent me home,
02:52I emailed him again.
02:54I said, "Are you going to look at these questions?"
02:57I didn't get an answer.
02:58I went the third time,
02:59and now I was getting frustrated
03:02because I'd asked a direct question and I had no answer.
03:05Anyway, so he said, "Kelly," he said, "those questions,
03:10"they are written by an educated white educator."
03:14He said, "I don't want to use those words.
03:17"I don't even want to even try to use those words.
03:20"You have to rewrite those questions so they're simple, in plain language.
03:25So I did.
03:27For him, he was raised in a residential school.
03:30He has very negative attitudes towards early learning,
03:33so a lot of the words that we use,
03:36I would say educators and practitioners
03:39and Indigenous learners,
03:43and all of those words that fit the European model,
03:46and he didn't recognize them and had no interest in learning them.
03:50He once told me, he said,
03:52"The nuns tried to make me speak English.
03:55"And then, when I went back as an adult learner,
03:57"they said, you need to build your word power.
03:59"I finally told them that my language is my own.
04:02"The words I choose are my voice."
04:05And he had no intention of changing those words.
04:09When he finally did this training,
04:12we invited people, we had our staff,
04:15and then we invited people from the region.
04:19And, at the end of the day, everybody was
04:24blown away.
04:26His story was so powerful.
04:28We started to explore the Indigenous learning principles.
04:32One of which is learning involves patience and time,
04:36which I had to learn.
04:38And everybody kind of said, "We need this."
04:43These stories are stories that are not history.
04:47The residential schools weren't closed in Alberta until 1993.
04:52They are very much part of people's lived experiences today
04:58and certainly their children
05:00are also experiencing that kind of fear.
05:06When they come into these centres,
05:07they don't necessarily know that they trust
05:12a European-trained educator
05:16in a box of a building.
05:18They don't necessarily trust that person,
05:22Indigenous people don't get that opportunity
05:24to be a voice at that table
05:26or to have an opportunity to say,
05:30"This is the way that I'd like to do my programming."
05:33There's always the European saying,
05:36"This is how you do things.
05:38"And that's the only way that you're going to do things."
05:40And, "This is my way or no way."
05:44I realized how the history of
05:48residential schools and colonization
05:53really does impact, even now,
05:57the way learners feel about formal learning spaces.
06:05If we don't acknowledge that,
06:07we're never going to have people feel comfortable
06:09in the places that we make.
06:12We knew that there were some teachings
06:14that we could introduce,
06:15that you could use in your programs,
06:18but we also really tried to embed the ideas
06:22of the principles of learning of Indigenous learners.
06:26And those are really different.
06:29It helps us understand
06:31that if we understand some of those principles,
06:35then we can create our own strategies.
06:38If you understand that learning takes time,
06:43then you're not going to be in a rush to outcome.
06:46If you realize that another principle
06:49is the importance of intergenerational roles,
06:52if you understand that,
06:54not only are you to bring elders into your programs
06:57but you're also to encourage the young people,
07:01your students, their families to be involved in your programming,
07:04because learning is a collective experience
07:07in the Indigenous culture.
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