Keeping aboriginal teachers working in the NWT
Educator's symposium focuses on retention and residential school curriculum
Evan Kiyoshi French
Northern News Services
Thursday, July 2, 2015
SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Ministers of Education from across the country filled the seats at the Northern Arts and Cultural Centre this week to discuss how to meet goals laid out by Jackson Lafferty.
Margaret Thom served as the guiding elder during the 104th meeting of the Council for Ministers of Education Canada(CMEC) and Aboriginal Educator's Symposium - held in the city this week - attended by indigenous scholars and education big-wigs to discuss ways of keeping aboriginal teachers working in the NWT and how to teach residential school history in classrooms across the country. - Evan Kiyoshi French/NNSL photo
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The NWT's education minister told reporters gathered for a press conference last week that his hope for the 104th meeting of the Council for Ministers of Education Canada (CMEC) and Aboriginal Educators' Symposium was that attendees would focus on two main issues: how to get a residential school curriculum taught across the country and how to encourage young aboriginals to take up teaching.
The territory employs 682 teachers, and 108 of those identify themselves as being aboriginal, according to Department of Education, Culture and Employment spokesperson Jacqueline McKinnon. In an e-mail, she said there were four areas of focus for the symposium: Supporting the development of aboriginal students interested in teaching, promoting the teaching of residential school history across Canada, developing curricula and teaching resources on residential schools for use in post-secondary institutions nation-wide and sharing promising practices in aboriginal education.
In Yellowknife it's a question of incentive, said Yellowknife Catholic Schools (YCS) assistant-superintendent Johnnie Bowden. City school boards compete for trained professionals - aboriginals or otherwise - against high paying competitors like the GNWT. It's difficult to keep teachers who become lured away by more lucrative and less-stressful careers, he said.
"We get lots of teachers but we have a problem retaining them," he said, adding that the YCS board currently has six aboriginal teachers.
The elder guiding the symposium, Margaret Thom, said the symposium discourse - which featured discussion with 10 indigenous scholars from across Canada and included speeches from keynote speakers including the executive director for the Saskatchewan School Boards Association and the associate dean for Indigenous Education at the University of British Columbia - centred around a need for awareness about the lasting impact of residential schools on young, would-be teachers.
"As painful as it was, we need the world to know so that the world can begin to understand," she said. "I have grandchildren . when they talk about it (residential schools) they get very upset and very angry. Now what do you do with that anger?"
She said she believes young people are interested in teaching in the territory, but that the shadow of residential schools makes them second guess education as a career.
"If they're affected (by residential schools) they're not going to be able to be full-fledged confident teachers."
One indigenous teacher attending the symposium said the real test is to get boys funneled toward the teaching profession. Lois Philipp, principal at De Gah Elementary and Secondary School in Fort Providence, said half of the 14 teachers at her school are aboriginal but there is a lack of male teachers.
She said aboriginal boys are having a particularly difficult time moving through the education system. They learn kinesthetically, she said, by actively doing things they're being taught as opposed to studying quietly from books. She said, schools need to figure out how to serve them better.
"We need you (boys) in our classroom so how do we treat the conditions that support them through that journey. Schools don't offer enough of that," she said. "We don't have the resources."
Philipp studied at York University in Toronto before returning to take up a job in her home community, she said, but young people don't necessarily have to leave the territory in order to become teachers. They can get trained at Aurora College, she said, which plays a key role keeping young people interested in teaching careers from finding work elsewhere.
