Professional Growth
Professional Growth 2023
Iyinisiwin Story Institute Incorporated - Gail
Indigenous Motherhood Class
The Goal of the Language Course is to awaken the Indigenous spirit of storytelling. It is imperative to allow our child caregivers as well as myself to learn of the teachings utilized in the ancestral child rearing. This program immersed all learners in intergenerational learning and cultural revitalization. In this course we learned about story usage to move knowledge from generation to generation.
As a learner I get to:
Experience the stories, reflect on and retell the stories that teach us about our land, ceremonies, survival skills and language.
Learn the stories that can revitalize our systems of parenthood, education, governance, etc.
Learn to speak and understand nehiyawewin.
Learn the original laws of the land.
Why is this valuable to me?
Identity is built from the stories we are told as children. If you work with or raise nehiyaw children and youth in their own stories, they will grow into their identity as nehiyawak.
Becoming an Anti-Racist Educator - Darrel
December 8-9, 2022
We began the journey of becoming anti-racist educators by examining “The Change Curve," on the emotional journey.
We explored the six layers of racism:
Sociohistorical Racism, the way we're socialized to make meaning of race.
Ideological Racism, the result of socio-historical racism is ideological racism, informing world views and belief systems.
Individual Racism, the result of ideological racism informing interpersonal interactions.
Institutional Racism, the implications of ideological racism operating in an institution, like a school, division, board, or university.
Cultural Racism, messaging about white superiority through sources that control the means of perception.
Structural Racism, the network of unjust distribution of access and opportunity built into all systems and structures in society. From here we then examined the three zones that we travel through on the journey to becoming anti-racist. The Fear zone where we deny and avoid there may be a problem. The learning zone where we recognize racism as a present and current problem and the growth zone where we identify how we may unknowingly benefit from racism to speaking out when we see racism in action.
We looked at Deficit and Grit Ideologies and how they are used to inform the lenses through which we view students and families. Deficit Ideologies take a deficit perspective that focuses on people's weaknesses rather than their strengths. Grit Ideologies, meanwhile attributes disparities to shortages of resilience and grit within Indigenous communities and communities of colour, so solutions focus on strengthening their grit or resilience.