by Christine Hearn
Photography by Raeff Miles

Aboriginal communities, school districts, and SFU in partnership

For Mark Fettes, his first doctoral course in education was “like a homecoming.” With two and a half degrees in biochemistry, that sounds like an odd statement. But Fettes had decided not to be a lab scientist, quit his PhD program, gone to work for an NGO in Europe (where his work language was Esperanto and he also learned Dutch), and returned to Canada to work for the Assembly of First Nations researching community-based language problems in aboriginal communities.

“In that first course I immediately began to find answers to questions on learning and language that had been nagging me for years,” says Fettes, now an expert on linguistic ecology in the faculty of education. He studies how language and culture influence the way people imagine and how imagination is implicated in learning, relationship building, and community identification, and he continues to find answers to those nagging questions.

A $1 million five-year grant to Fettes from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s Community-University Research Alliances (CURA) will help. The grant will allow Fettes and his team to work with the Sto:lo, Haida, and Tsimshian communities and with school districts in Chilliwack, the Queen Charlotte Islands, and Prince Rupert to see how the concepts of imaginative learning developed at SFU can help schools engage all children in learning. Only 42 percent of 18-year-old B.C. aboriginal students complete high school compared to 79 percent of other students. Fettes wants to address that problem.

The concepts of imaginative learning are at the heart of work done by education professor Kieran Egan and his Imaginative Education Research Group, of which Fettes is a member. The theory says that students will learn best when teaching strategies and subject matter appeal to imagination rather than to memory. It presents new ways of thinking about children and about how they make sense of the world around them, and develops school curriculum based on that new thinking.

Children from each culture look at the world differently and need to be addressed differently if they are to benefit from school. Conventional learning strategies often don’t work in aboriginal settings because those strategies are based on assumptions about students’ identities within the dominant culture.

“It is difficult to adopt a way of imagining the world in which you are invisible or marginalized, yet this is what the mainstream curriculum typically requires of students,” explains Fettes. “Through imaginative education, we hope to involve learners in re-imagining their communities’ futures and their place in the world.

"Through imaginative education, we hope to inolve learners in re-imagining their communities' futures and their place in the world."

“First Nations kids already have cultural tools for thinking about the world, but those are not the tools that will help them with a school curriculum because the curriculum has been developed for middle-class kids,” says Fettes. “To change that, it is going to be necessary for teachers to take some risks.”

Here is where the CURA project comes in ­ SFU will provide the frameworks and techniques to help teachers take the risks that will lead to innovative and imaginative teaching. In each of the three school districts the SFU team will work with experienced teachers who have a background in First Nations teaching and with community leaders. Each of the experienced teachers will spend 40 percent of their time as project leaders, working to get six to eight teachers per school district to participate. Those involved teach from grades four to seven because that is when aboriginal students often start to have difficulty as they move from an oral to a literate way of understanding.

Participating teachers will be asked to read and think and talk and look at different ways of doing things ­ to find a sense of wonder and adventure. They will be asked to “lay the curriculum bare to see what the underlying human passions are” to “look at the fears, hopes, and struggles that all kids can, in principle, connect with.” And they will be asked to open up a space for imaginative engagement.

“One of the things we are trying to do is build a learning community for teachers with the help of a university setting and outside (First Nations) influences so teachers feel continually inspired to think imaginatively and take risks,” says Fettes. “A lot of what goes on in classrooms now comes from a fear of taking risks. We hope through what we are developing that teachers will feel supported to take those risks. “Kieran Egan’s work offers guidelines and support so that risk-taking works for teachers. There are things you can try that we know will result in the kind of educational engagement we are looking for,” Fettes continues. “There is a great need for this sort of teaching, particularly with First Nations students.”

As the project proceeds, Fettes and his researchers want to look at what engages kids at different ages, at different levels of intellectual development, and from different cultures. At the same time, they will look at the participating teachers and determine what gives them new insights, what engages the kids in their common space, and how to make educational change sustainable. The project has been structured so that after five years there will be a critical mass of teachers using the same approach so the project will be self-fuelling.

Fettes praises the good relationship the university has with various communities. “We really couldn’t do it the way we envision it without a lot of trust already established with the schools districts and the First Nations.” And he’s excited about the opportunity to use his background as a linguist and educator to help First Nations children. “I don’t know of anybody who has used these teaching strategies and concepts in classrooms where more than half the students are aboriginal,” he concludes. aq

Photography by Raeff Miles: www.ngphotorep.com



Capturing their imagination

A teacher faces a grade six class. She holds up a box. “What’s inside?” she asks. Various students reply, “Nothing,” “It’s empty,” “Dust.” “Ah, but it’s not empty,” she says. “It’s full of air.” But to the students air doesn’t seem very interesting until she starts to get them developing ideas about what air is made up of.

“Air is full of invisible particles that have been around forever,
so we are breathing dinosaur breath,” the teacher says. “Air is full of dust, and dust is mainly small flakes from humans, so we are breathing Andrew, and Emma, and Lizzie. And by the way, where do insects go to the bathroom?” Suddenly the students are engaged; suddenly air is something, not nothing.

By the end of the teaching unit on air the kids are acting as particles of air, they are working on art about air, they’re dancing as air. Forever after, when these kids think about air, there will be an emotional spark. And they’ll remember lots about air. aq

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