Entry #11

Hello everyone! It’s Alanna and I’m back to share another blog post with you. Today I want to share an experience I had in my second practicum trying to integrate Indigenous material into my lessons. In no way is this piece meant to be a bragging session about me and my culturally relevant lesson plans. I am in no way an expert in implementing Indigenous Knowledge nor will I ever be, but I tried it once and it seemed to work okay. I will also mention that the music video included in this post might trigger some individuals who have gone through similar experiences described in the song, it is very emotional, please watch what you are only comfortable viewing. 

First let me give you some context. I was teaching a grade 12 Academic English class in a rural Nova Scotia high school. I was teaching a poetry unit (which is often the most hated unit in every ELA class) but I wanted it to be different, I wanted to show my students how poetry is relevant and can be a way to make change in the world. In this particular lesson, my students and I were analyzing Marilyn Dumont’s poem “Helen Betty Osborne” which is a very powerful piece filled with emotion. Dumont is a Métis author and in the poem she writes about Indigenous icons and events that faced adversity.

Photo Credit: Alanna Saunders

My students were not confident in their analysis skills, so I knew we would have to tackle the poem line by line. This was not a bad thing as I knew there would be many references my students would need to look up as well as allusions, images and symbols they could highlight. Before we began to analyze the poem I showed students a music video as a way to prime them for the content they were to analyze. The song “Powerless” is by Nova Scotian rapper Classified and showcases the struggles young girls and women face, particularly Indigenous women. The video introduced the content in a familiar and engaging way. The video was directed by fellow Canadian and Grammy-nominated Andrew Hines. Hines shot the video on the Millbrook First Nations Reserve which is a Mi'kmaq community near Truro, N.S (Classified, 2018). 

After watching the video we discussed The Red Dress Campaign and how it raises awareness of Murdered and Missing Indigenous women and how that connects to the poem. We then began to analyze the text which started with the students annotating the poem with questions or highlighting lines they felt drawn to. From there we researched references to people we didn’t know and gained context to the poem. We then went one step further and looked at word choice within the text and discussed what the words meant to the poem and the author. This wasn’t a perfect analysis but with each read through we were able to go from surface reading to picking the poem apart to gain further meaning. By showing my students this process they were able to understand what type of things to look for when reading a poem, and to be comfortable asking questions and making connections even if no one else has the same idea. 

I should also mention that I purposefully tried to create an open and casual environment so my students would feel comfortable asking questions or hazarding guesses about the content of the poem and about analysis. I went about achieving this environment by trying to create a “coffee house” vibe with low lighting, snacks, a crackling fire video from YouTube and desks pulled together in a group. I told them I wanted it to feel like we were just hanging out in university at a local coffee shop discussing poetry (because isn’t that what all cool university students do?). I don’t know if they believed the university coffee shop thing but they did become more confident in analysis and they learned about the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women crisis in Canada. All in all, I think the lesson was successful and I plan to use a similar strategy again in the future. 

I know this was only one example of one lesson, and it doesn’t shed light on how to seamlessly weave Indigenous content into curriculum. But I hope it shows that it can be possible and small steps like one poem, one video or one story are better than taking no steps at all.   

References: 

Classified. (classifiedmusic). (2018, April 6). Classified- Powerless [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9W69e9jDRq0

Dumont, M. (1996). Helen Betty Osborne. In A Really Good Brown Girl (pg. 20). London,ON: Brick Books. 

Greenslade, B. (2015, October 4). Red dress campaign looks to raise awareness about missing, murdered indigenous women. Global News. Retrieved from: https://globalnews.ca/news/2257745/red-dress-campaign-looks-to-raise-awareness-about-missing-murdered-indigenous-women/

Entry #10

Good morning world!

I'm back again and more fired up than ever. All of my time spent doing research has been eye-opening, but this last week has been especially valuable. I finally finished my annotated bibliography (for those of you who are new to reading the blog, I've spent the last 2 months searching for research literature about poverty and its relationship with academic achievement), and, though I'm relieved and proud of what I've accomplished, there's a lot still to be done. I found exactly 100 articles that make suggestions relating to disadvantaged youth in the education system, so now my job is to sort through the articles and pull out key themes and similarities. I've been doing this for about a week now, and it's been really interesting to see so much overlap in the researchers' ideas, but the more themes and agreement I find, the more annoyed I am that they hasn't been applied to rural contexts.

I know, here I go again. But, honestly, I was really mad when I wrote my last post about rural representation in research literature, so I think it's reasonable that it's still on my mind. I do wish I could just focus on the work without having the thought constantly nagging at me, but at least I'm  thinking about the literature critically.

Two articles in particular have been holding my attention while I work. The first one was written by
Corbett (2005), and it talks about how students in rural areas associate formal education with out-migration, which isn't necessarily what they want:

"...additional factors such as rising tuition costs, the centralization of educational and other services in rural areas, the high cost of leaving, and the expansion of low-wage, low-skilled work in the expanding rural service economy may help to explain continuing high dropout rates and low post-secondary participation rates in rural communities... My data supports common local perceptions about how education functions as preparation for out-migration.... Families in coastal communities understand that their children need education, but the source of this need is ironically nested in the very forces that are conspiring to destabilize the life they know...In other words, young people’s need for formal education has been created by the same global change forces that are seen to be jeopardizing the traditional way of life in coastal and rural villages. Thus, education, along with other forms of state intervention, has come to be viewed with skepticism and ambivalence (p.14-16)"

Image retrieved from https://therodcast.ca/2013/06/06/comparing-education-in-canada-the-usa-and-australia/

I realize that that's a lot of academic reading I just subjected you to, but everything Corbett says makes perfect sense. The goal of education has historically been to create workers, plain and simple, but over time it has increasingly become more about creating potential university students. Azano  (2015) absolutely hit the nail on the head when they said that "teachers face the challenge of giving students meaningful (and plausible) responses to questions like, "Why are we reading Shakespeare?" (p. 268). It's a challenge because, if we're all honest with ourselves, there are some abstract literacy tools and skills that just don't matter to students who want to join the work force as soon as they leave high school. Corbett is effectively saying that there's a mismatch between rural students and modern education, because, while education as an institution likes to push conceptual thinking and academia, those things are not a priority for students who value local traditions and local work.

My goal here is not to condemn academia, if anything, I think that my exposure to abstract literature and critical thinking has made me a more well-rounded person and a more empathetic teacher. That being said, I still think it's important to remember that if students aren't given a reason to care about literature and academia, to see their value in the real world, they're not going to be motivated to engage with them. So, that's it, I guess I solved the puzzle: If students have a reason to care about Shakespeare, they'll love it and want to read it!

Well, no, it's not quite that simple.

It's not enough to tell students that something is "important" or that "they should know the material."
Sure, those are technically reasons, but if someone handed me a book, and told me that I should read it because it's "important," my first question would be "why?" Why is it important, and why should I bother? What am I going to learn from it, and will that learning matter in the grand scheme of things?

Image retrieved from https://darylcagle.com/2007/04/12/high-school-prepares-for-jobs/

Azano (2011) observed the classroom practices of a teacher in a rural community and how they used the local context to bridge gaps in their students’ knowledge. The teacher made explicit connections between their life experiences in the area with the novels they studied in class. The students in this class were actually very successful academically, because the teacher created a common ground that enabled a sense of community, and made the abstract ideas they discussed in class accessible by situating them in a place-based frame of mind (p.8). I feel like I'm jumping all over the place with my ideas in this post, but what I'm really trying to get at is the fact that, while rural students are different in their motivations and values, they really just need a --- reason to care about what they're doing in school. Azano's work shows how valuable real-life implication and student-teacher relationships are in helping students be successful, and they are practices that any teacher can integrate into their routines.

Though a lot of strategies for working with disadvantaged youth are thematically similar, I think that they all depend on a school's context and culture. If there was more research available focusing on education in rural areas, I think that the entire field of study would look different. Multiple perspectives are important when approaching a subject as complicated and difficult as disadvantaged students, and as of now, there aren't enough voices from rural communities in the conversation. All in all, I think it's just important that teachers do their best to make the subjects they teach relevant to the lives of their students. It's not always easy, but it's important have a good reason - one with instrumental value - to care about and be motivated to engage with school. That, paired with more rural representation in research literature, will help our motivate our students and foster their strengths.

Have a great week!

Savannah MacDonald

...

Azano, A. (2011). The possibility of place: one teacher's use of place-based instruction for English students in a rural high school. Journal of Research in Rural Education, 26.

Azano, A. (2015). Addressing the Rural Context in Literacies Research. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 59(3), 267-269.

Corbett, M. (2005). Rural education and out-migration: The case of a coastal community. Canadian Journal of Education, 52-72.

Entry #9

Hey everyone! It's Alanna again and I’m back to talk about the research I’ve been doing in relation to Indigenous students in public schools. With my first blog I talked about how Indigenous Knowledge might be understood (Batiste, 2002) and how we as teachers should want to learn and grow in order to make change happen. Today I want to do something a little different. I want to focus on a friend of mine who I met at Mount Allison University during my undergrad degree. Emma Hassencahl-Perley is a multidisciplinary artist who completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Mount Allison. After graduating, Emma went on to work in Student Life as the Indigenous Affairs Coordinator and became an active leader in the Indigenous Support Group on campus. All of the insight and information in this blog has been provided by Emma as we've been collaborating back and forth all week.  

The reason why I am profiling Emma is because her identity as a Wolastoqiyik woman (commonly known as Maliseet) influences her art. She is currently exploring how legislative identity such as the Indian Act shapes the identity of Indigenous people. She has completed two projects called “White Flag” and “Ahtolimiye” which means “She Keeps Praying” that personify the impact of the Indian Act on Indigenous identities. Both projects have fragments of the Indian Act which were shredded and placed on a Canadian flag and a Jingle Dress.

Photo credit to Logan Perley, Jingle Dress "Ahtolimiye"

I asked Emma about some of the challenges she has faced as a Wolastoqiyik student going into university and how the education system could change to make Indigenous students feel more welcome in classrooms. Emma described how she went through culture-shock as she realized that her peers knew little about Indigenous history and who her people were despite New Brunswick being unceded territory. For those who may not know "unceded territory or land" refers to Aboriginal land titles that have not been surrendered or acquired by the Crown (Indigenous Corporate Training, 2014). Emma felt like she didn’t have a sense of community, she felt “othered” when at school and dealt with racism, ignorance and misconceptions from classmates. Emma is not the only person to experience this, as many Indigenous students form elementary to post-secondary experience racism and feel like they are not understood by educators (Canadian Council on Learning, 2007, pg. 10). Obviously there isn’t a band aid solution, as Emma explained to me, but she believes that curriculum needs to change in order to support Indigenous students. It starts by telling the truth about history, for example acknowledging that colonialism still happens today, evident by the Water Crisis’s on many reservations. Emma believes the education system needs to listen to Indigenous students so their needs can be heard. Each generation of Indigenous students are going to need different things from their respective institution and as educators the least we can do is listen to what they have to say. 

While Emma was working as the Indigenous Affairs Coordinator at Mount Allison the Indigenous Support Group wanted to integrate Mi’kmaq language classes, to fly the Mi’kmaq flag on campus, add signage and host a Powwow. Students and allies began advocating for a Mi’kmaq flag in 2013, and the flag was flown for three days the following year. However, the Indigenous Support Group and allies wanted the flag to be flown for longer but resistance from administration made the flag hard to attain. This spurred the group to fundraise the money for a Mi’kmaq flag and flagpole on their own in order to make change happen. In the past year Mount Allison has begun to comply with the Calls to Action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and has since worked with the Indigenous Support Group to purchase the Mi’kmaq flag and flagpole using funds the group had raised and funds from the administration (Mount Allison University, 2018).

Photo credit to Mount Allison University, raising Mi'kmaq flag

The permanent installation of the Mi’kmaq flag was the opening event to the first Powwow ever held at Mount Allison. The raising of the Mi’kmaq flag and the Powwow was a defining moment for Emma as she felt like Indigenous students would finally see themselves represented on campus. She describes how the flag celebrates the identities and histories of Indigenous students, but also acknowledges the people that occupied and took care of the land before us. For Emma, the permanent installation of the flag should represent a commitment to concrete change at the University and within the community. She was encouraged to see so many community members, faculty and non-Indigenous students come out to the Powwow to learn, love and celebrate together.

Photo credit to Mount Allison University, circle at the Powwow 

If you only take one thing away from this post, I hope it is that as educators we need to listen to Indigenous students, teachers, researchers and communities as they know exactly what their children need to thrive in the education system. When we hear students or parents raise concerns, we need to actively listen and do everything in our power to make the changes happen. As educators we hold a lot of influence and we need to seek out Indigenous voices and knowledge to make the right impact. 

P.S. I acknowledge the effort of Mount Allison to comply with the Calls to Action but in no way are they perfect. Mount Allison and many other universities have a long way to go if they are to overcome their colonial nature. 

Reference: 

Battiste, M. (2002). Indigenous Knowledge and Pedagogy in First Nations Education: Literature Review with Recommendations (pp. 1-69). Ottawa, Canada: National Working Group on Education.

Canadian Council on Learning (2007). Redefining How Success is Measured in First Nations, Inuit and Metis Learning. Report on Learning in Canada, (pp.1-44) Ottawa, ON: Canadian Council of Learning. 

Indigenous Corporate Training (2015, August 10). Why you should avoid using “Crown Lands” in First Nation consultation. Retrieved from: https://www.ictinc.ca/blog/why-you-should-avoid-using-crown-lands-in-first-nation-consultation 

Mount Allison University (2018, March 19th). Mount Allison University to host first Powwow, March 22. Retrieved from: https://www.mta.ca/Community/News/2018/March_2018/ Mount_Allison_University_to_host_first_Powwow,_March_22/

Entry #8

Hi there!

Let me just say, before we dive in, how exciting and motivating it is that this blog hit 5000 views! Yay! Of course, when Dr. Mitton-Kükner and I discussed the potential of a blog at the beginning of the summer, we had hoped that it would be of interest to our friends in the B. Ed program and the general public. Still, as much as we hoped it would catch on, I don't think we expected that it would be this well received. So again, thank you - you've made our hearts soar!

Having so many views is exciting in itself, but what really excites me about them is knowing that most of them come from readers who: A) are currently or have been enrolled in StFX's Bachelor of Education program, B) are faculty members or staff at StFX, C) are friends or family of mine or Alanna, or D) went to high school with me or Alanna and are interested in what we're up to. Any of these kinds of readers are likely from, or have attended school in a rural part of Nova Scotia. I think that's really cool, and particularly relevant to what I've been thinking about lately.

See, when I'm looking for research articles, I search for key words and phrases that will get me the results I need: poverty, socioeconomic, struggling, readers, literacy, etc. Compiling these articles and looking at them side by side is interesting, because even though they cover a range of subjects in education, I can see patterns in the ideas that are presented in their work. That being said, it's actually even more interesting to find information that isn't common across articles, whether it's a teaching strategy that's far outside the box, or an aspect of literacy that no one's really talking about in academic circles yet. That stuff is really interesting, because it's new, and new stuff is... Well, interesting. You know what I mean.

Here's my problem: some of the information I've read shouldn't be new or uncommon. 

I'm particularly frustrated by the lack of research that there is on rural schools. If I were to go through the articles I've collected and summarized, I think that less than 1/4 would be about rural schools and literacy. Honestly, even if I looked at school-related subjects other than literacy, I don't think it would be much better. It seems like there's a push in research to focus on urban schools and "city kids," but why? Am I missing something?

I bring all of this up because, though poverty and literacy are pretty broad subjects for study, I'm ideally supposed to be finding articles that discuss them through a Canadian lens. After all, having a bibliography comprised entirely of work conducted in the US doesn't do much to complement research done in Nova Scotia. And, as much as finding studies about rural schools is a work thing, it's also of personal interest. My hometown, New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, is a rural town about an hour and a half away from Halifax. Plus, my university, where I've spent the last 5 years, is in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Pretty much my whole life has been spent in rural Nova Scotia towns, so, yeah, I guess I'd like to know more about the schools that I grew up in and how to make them better, especially since I'll likely be teaching in one someday.

Image retrieved from https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/21-006-x/2008008/maps-cartes/maps-cartes3-eng.htm

Again, knowing most of our readers are from some rural part of Nova Scotia is part of why this is blows me away. The way I see it, if there wasn't any interest in educational reform and helping students who experience poverty in rural Nova Scotia, none of you would be here reading. Yet, here you are, and here I am writing about it. So why such a lack of research? 

I was really happy to come across an article last week that expressed similar frustrations with this gap in research. Even better, the researcher, Azano (2015) gives a couple of examples of what makes rural schools different from urban ones, and how those differences are relevant to my work this summer: "Rural schools have more challenges than just limited resources... Apathy and lack of student engagement have also been cited as behaviors associated with rural students... If a student aspires to stay local and learn a trade, as perhaps familial generations have before, then teachers face the challenge of giving students meaningful (and plausible) responses to questions like, "Why are we reading Shakespeare?" (p. 268). Anyone who's been to a rural Nova Scotian high school, I think, can identify with most or all of this passage. Limited resources? Check. Students aspiring to stay local? Yup. Students having a hard time finding school meaningful? Definitely. Students not understanding the relevance and straight-up genius of Shakespeare? Yes, yes, and yes!

See, I think those are all really interesting points about education in general, like, student engagement and increasing motivation isn't an issue only encountered by rural schools. But since we know for sure that rural schools do struggle with those issues, why isn't there more research about it? Why don't we have more specific information about what students care about in rural contexts, especially when it can also be applied to urban ones? Poverty is a problem everywhere, that's a given, but we know that it's especially problematic in rural areas like Nova Scotia, so, again, why aren't places like it the focus of academic research concerning poverty, literacy, and education?

Image retrieved from https://www.novascotia.ca/finance/statistics/archive_news.asp?id=9828&ym=3

Azano says that, actually, "lots of folks [are] doing important work in rural places, but there is a limited amount of that work getting published in the journals of major academic associations" (p 268). Why aren't these brilliant people getting published? I mean, does it make sense to produce a bunch of research about equity and privilege while simultaneously prioritizing articles concerned with urban education over rural? I think not!

Schools across the board are complicated. They contain teachers and students whose personalities and lives are vastly different, meaning the systems that organize them are also necessarily different depending on the area they're in. I think in order to understand the big questions about poverty and literacy, we need to understand those different areas and how schools operate in them. Azano (my new favourite person) says that "there is so much that is powerful about rural contexts. Rural communities are resilient. They have grit and character... [But] rose-colored glasses only give permission to further ignore challenges or falsely claim that rural communities are harmonious and that folks there are living "the good life" (p. 269). Researchers and research journals need to take off the rose-coloured glasses! We need more information about students who are close to home, and we need it now!

I'm annoyed that I've spent 2 months collected articles and so few of them are about schools like the one I went to. I'm annoyed that there aren't more studies out there about how to help rural students see more value in English classes than basic reading and writing. I'm annoyed that the word "apathetic" is associated with rural students, and there's virtually nothing published to explain why. I know I'm not alone in feeling annoyed, because along with a lack of research on rural students comes  a greater lack in research about Indigenous students in rural communities and students who are economically disadvantaged. If we care about student success and equity, I think we need data from different school environments and types, and that's not going to happen if we have a weird caveat on rural spaces.

I do appreciate what I've read about urban schools and students from urban areas, I just want a more holistic idea of the big questions, and I don't think I can get that without knowing about rural areas too. I'll keep looking, of course, and here's hoping I find a bunch of work about rural high schools and literacy in the near future that will make all of this complaining irrelevant. Regardless, I appreciate your comments, and am grateful for you readers out there!

Chat soon!

Savannah MacDonald

...

Azano, A. P. (2015). Addressing the Rural Context in Literacies Research. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 59(3), 267-269.