At The Edge Of Canada: Indigenous Research
October 9, 2017
Today our guest is settler scholar Dr. Michele Tanaka, Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations and Teacher Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Victoria. We discuss her newest book published via UBC Press: — Learning and Teaching Together: Weaving indigenous Ways of Knowing into Education –. As was reported last month, the province of Manitoba is facing a critical shortage of certified teachers in Northern communities, specifically FNMI comunities. Facing already large fiscal and resource gaps in education, FNMI communities are now struggling to find properly trained teachers to deliver the basic level of instruction, nevermind culturally literatre teachers for Indigenous learners. Michele’s work provides an essential contribution to the conversation around Indigenous pedagogies and teacher certification. — Learning and Teaching Together — takes as its case study a group of pre-service teachers who enroll in an immersive Indigenous methods course titled “Earth Fibres” at UVic. It becomes apparent quite quickly that indigenous models do not fit so neatly into the Euro-Canadian education tradition: classes bleed out of the rooms into the halls and on to the land, learning is reflective and relational rather than individualistic, evaluation is developmental rather than hierarchical, and time moves in its own way. We cover politics, curriculum, evaluation, and learning, but we really dig into time.