Across Canada, new curriculum initiatives require teachers to introduce students to Aboriginal content. In response, many teachers unfamiliar with Aboriginal approaches to learning and teaching are seeking ways to respectfully weave this material into their lessons.
Learning and Teaching Together introduces teachers of all levels to an indigenist approach to education. Tanaka recounts how pre-service teachers enrolled in a crosscultural course in British Columbia immersed themselves in indigenous ways of knowing as they worked alongside indigenous wisdom keepers. Transforming cedar bark, buckskin, and wool into a mural that tells stories about the land upon which the course took place, they discovered new ways of learning that support not only intellectual but also tactile, emotional, and spiritual forms of knowledge.
By sharing how one group of non-indigenous teachers learned to privilege indigenous ways of knowing in the classroom, Tanaka opens a path for teachers to nurture indigenist crosscultural understanding in their own classrooms.
Table of Contents:
Foreword / Greg Cajete
SENĆOŦEN Pronunciation and Glossary
Introduction: A Welcoming
The Moons of XAXE SIÁM SILA
1 Orienting to Place and Pedagogical Purpose
2 Opening Oneself to Indigenous Ways of Being-Knowing-Doing
3 Rethinking Learner-Teacher Relationships
4 Invoking Good Intention and Conscious Action
5 Focusing on How and Why We Teach
6 Trusting Learners and Remembering Wholeness
7 Coming Together in Safe Enough Spaces
8 Continuing Reflection towards Sustainability
9 Preparing Self and Community for Dispositional Change
10 Indigenizing Practice amid Classroom Challenges
11 Re-envisioning (Teacher) Education
12 Touchstones for Future Teaching
References; Index
