In praise of a good start
Ellen Hamilton credits team for national honour celebrating ECE programs
Casey Lessard
Northern News Services
Monday, June 29, 2015
IQALUIT
Ellen Hamilton is playing the long game, her sights set on helping Nunavummiut graduate high school, get good jobs and stay out of prison.
Nunavut Arctic College early childhood education co-ordinator Ellen Hamilton was recently given the Canadian Child Care Federation 2015 Award of Excellence for her work developing new training programs. - photo courtesy of Brian Manning/Nunavut Arctic College |
For her work setting the stage, as the co-ordinator of Nunavut Arctic College's early childhood education programs, the Iqaluit woman received the Canadian Child Care Federation (CCCF) 2015 Award of Excellence.
"I was pretty shocked," Hamilton said.
"But really also very proud of the program I represent and what we're doing here in Nunavut. The biggest investment you can make in society is in young children in what it will save you just in the cost of putting people in prison to people successfully finishing high school to people getting work that pays well to having a society we all want to live in."
Hamilton said she doesn't deserve to be singled out for an effort that required a great number of people, with the end result being a pair of programs to train Nunavummiut how to educate young children.
The first, a two-year diploma, was the result of intensive consultations by her colleagues with a range of stakeholders to determine the tools educators needed most to do the job right and in a culturally-appropriate manner.
Fourteen beneficiaries started the program in September. Meanwhile, 67 beneficiaries in seven Nunavut communities are working on an applied certificate while they work.
Myna Ishulutak spoke with child care workers across the territory to determine whether these child care workers had the tools they needed, asking questions to tailor a program that worked for the majority.
"We didn't think it was fair or even ethical for us to run a full-time program for people just entering the field or people who had the time to take two years off to study," without giving those working a way to receive the same training, Hamilton said.
"Our child care centres in Nunavut are very vulnerable and the parents need those programs to keep running every day. Workers are really busy and can't take the week off or any time off for training. We had to figure out a way we could train them without interrupting the day care schedule. So we did that and it's a neat model, a blended model where we combined training in the day care itself with evening and weekend courses, following up with some new technology," she said.
In a release, CCCF praised Hamilton for raising millions of dollars to create an ECE Strategy and pilot it for three years.
As coordinator, she supervises 10 instructors and 10 Inuit elder-instructors delivering programming to 80 adult students, all beneficiaries.
"We knew right from the beginning that Inuit culture and language was going to be the absolute foundation of the program, it was going to be the first outcome of anything we did, any course we taught," she said.
The award will be presented at a ceremony, Hamilton said, but a date and time has not been set.
She is the first person from a Northern territory to win the prize, and hopes it will be presented in Nunavut to raise awareness of the work being done here.
"As a society, we have to address the quality of care of young children," she said.
"Anything that happens in those years has lifelong implications, and we learn all of our language, most of our social skills, our ability to solve problems, to be creative, to work well with others, we do that all before the age of five. We do that by being surrounded by an environment that gives us lots of positive support. If we neglect any area, physical, social, cognitive, emotional in those years, that child will pay the price for the rest of his or her entire life. So will society."
