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Educators involved in a Simon Fraser University pilot project in Prince Rupert credit the project with boosting aboriginal children’s learning, as well as their chances of graduating from high school.

Mark Fettes predicts LUCID (Learning for Understanding through Culturally Inclusive Imaginative Development) will significantly help increase the aboriginal high school graduation rate in the northern B.C. community.

The high school graduation rate of B.C.’s aboriginal students is 47 per cent, while the rate for the entire public school population is 79 per cent.

Fettes, an SFU education professor and director of LUCID, cites the results of a year-long study of four intermediate classrooms as evidence of the project’s effectiveness.

“Teachers using the LUCID approach in Grades 4 to 7 saw a 10 to 33 per cent improvement in students’ attendance, and improved academic performance,” says Fettes. “They also saw significantly better classroom energy and engagement compared to the same students’ performance in conventional classrooms.”

Prince Rupert is one of three B.C. school districts that are adapting SFU education professor Kieran Egan’s imaginative education-based teaching strategies for classrooms with a high aboriginal population.

Going beyond textbooks, worksheets and tests, LUCID uses culturally relevant stories, games and images to spark children’s imaginative thinking about concepts and facts in the K-12 curriculum. Fettes says LUCID helps to bridge the gap between aboriginal and non-aboriginal cultures in schools, and strengthens children’s language and collaborative learning skills.

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council put $1 million over five years (2004 to 2008) into developing the adaptation, which best took hold in Prince Rupert.

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Backgrounder on LUCID in Prince Rupert

Five years into the project, an estimated 10 to 15 per cent of Prince Rupert teachers have some knowledge of LUCID techniques, but implementation still falls well short of covering the targeted 70 per cent of the provincial curriculum.

“We see LUCID as a way of making classroom teaching more culturally inclusive for all students,” says Fettes. However, he acknowledges, “It takes time to get comfortable with teaching in a LUCID style.

Fettes hopes that SFU’s four-year-old Faculty of Education master’s program in LUCID teaching—which is currently accepting new applicants—will attract more high school teachers to turn more public school classrooms onto LUCID everywhere.

“I know of 25 prospective students from the Prince Rupert school district and about another half-dozen from neighbouring districts who want to be part of the program’s second cohort of students,” he says.

In 2007, the master’s program produced its first cohort of 14 graduates, several of whom now form the backbone of Prince Rupert’s LUCID program.

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