Indigenous Perspectives

 



Article 1 – Toulouse (2008)



In today’s world of education, I firmly believe that we are slowly becoming better at integrating Aboriginal ways of teaching and knowing. However, when I was in high school (15ish years ago), I personally think that education ignored Aboriginal ways of teaching and knowing. I honestly don’t remember learning about any indigenous perspectives. And when we did learn about this stuff, it felt like teachers were merely just ticking off a box so they could say that they incorporated Aboriginal content. What they taught was not meaningful.

Toulouse (2008) indicates that schools need to provide a learning environment where students understand and honour who they are and where they come from. In addition, schools need to recognize the impact of Aboriginal people’s innovation, inventions, and contributions to society. From what I remember in my Social Studies class, much of the content I learned was negatively geared towards the Indigenous people. However, as we have finally recognized, the Indigenous people have positively impacted the world and society we live in today. By utilizing the Ojibwe Good Life Teaching and Implications for Education (respect, love, bravery, wisdom, humility, honesty, and truth), teachers can create a positive, safe, and fun learning environment for all students to succeed in (Toulouse, 2008). In my opinion, the root of education starts with empowering our students. I personally think that loving, caring, and respecting our students will help create that teacher to student bond. In my opinion, once these bonds are created, learning becomes easier for the student because they feel more inclined to listen to their teachers (amongst other things). The respect factor is there! In addition, teaching becomes easier for the teacher because the teacher will hopefully understand their student profiles (i.e., learning styles, what makes them tick). 

By recognizing and implementing Aboriginal ways of teaching and knowing into education, we are more prone to providing a positive and meaningful learning environment to all students. If we just focus on content and not on the student, learning becomes irrelevant. There will be no progress.  This is definitely something that I need to work on! 

Question for the author: Can you provide meaningful examples of incorporating Aboriginal ways of teaching and knowing?



Article 2 (Louie, 2017)


Louie et al. (2017) dives into a study that is focused on integrating Indigenous perspectives in Canadian Universities that offer education programs. Decolonizing education is definitely the premise of integrating these indigenous perspectives, along with promoting diversity, inclusivity, respect and focusing on the well-being of students. Louie et al. (2017) indicates that indigenous pedagogies (i.e., storytelling) are effective of ways of learning and teaching and need to be utilized more in the classroom. Old and traditional ways of teaching (i.e., lecturing for hours about content, writing tests, memorization) have proved to be ineffective. Hence, teachers need to incorporate alternative methods of teaching which prioritizes discussion, reflection, experience, and interaction. Much of what I am saying right now is exactly what Louie et al. (2017) is emphasizing in the article/study.

Through reading this article, I have come to the realization that I personally need to incorporate more “storytelling” into my teaching. I honestly believe that my rough upbringing and abundance of both positive and negative experience, can impact the students that I teach. Furthermore, by integrating content into this, I can create meaningful interactions, discussion, and experiences for my students. Currently, much of the content I teach is just information that has no meaning behind it. In my opinion, students should have emotion and perspective in the content they learn. They should have the ability to recognize, acknowledge and challenge an idea instead of just knowing what something is. Yeah, this is definitely something I need to work on!

Question for the author: What recommendations do you have for teachers who are planning to implement storytelling? Talking circles, or small group discussions and etc.?

References

Louie, D. W. (2017). Applying Indigenizing Principles of Decolonizing Methodologies in University Classrooms. Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 47(3), 16–33. https://doi.org/10.7202/1043236ar

Toulouse, P. R. (2008). Integrating Aboriginal teaching and values into the classroom. What Works? Research Into Practice, 11, 1–4

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