Aboriginal Education Reflection

Amrit Gill
Reflection #6

This week we have spent some time considering Aboriginal Education. How has your thinking about your role in reconciliation as a teacher developed since you entered PDP? What PDP goals do Aboriginal Principles of Learning and Aboriginal content address? What excites you about this challenge? What struggles are you having? What are your next steps? After the visit to the Aboriginal center I feel empowered and like I would be able to "authentically, transparently, and honestly" ( Goal 4) teach my students about what took place in the past and continues to take place in the lives of Aboriginal peoples. Because prior to this fieldtrip I felt like I would have to bring an Aboriginal speaker into my classroom in
I think it is my job as an educator that my students see ideas and history from different perspectives and not just from the Euro-centric views, because I must be "sensitive to the position of privilege, power, and trust which is placed in a teacher" ( Goal 3). As an educator I think it is important that I do my best to show my students how-to look at history or an issue from all views before having an opinion on something. The Aboriginal Principles of Learning address many of the PDP goals. One of the principles of the Aboriginal Principles of Learning is that "Learning is holistic, reflexive, reflective, experiential, and relational" this connects with the idea of "lifelong and life-wide learning that is rooted in the development of reflective capacities (Goal 2).Overall, the Aboriginal Principles of Learning helped me to see how "Indigenous epistemologies and pedagogies create opportunities to meet the needs of all learners" (Goal 6). Another principle is that "Learning involves recognizing the consequences of one's actions. I connect this idea with the PDP goal which states "place students at the center of
I love to share things about my own culture and always grew up with the mentality that others cultures were free to learn from and enjoy without restriction, but this really helped me to see that not all things of a personas cultures are free to anyone. I was to Thomas about it and told him that I think students in my class would love to question why they could not know about certain things, and I think we both came to a good conclusion after our conversation. I think we both decided that we could teach the students in our classroom to respect others personal and cultural boundaries and be appreciative of what is being shared with us. Thomas made a good point of how we could also tell our students that because the Aboriginals had suffered so much in the past that possibly they are weary of completely exposing themselves and their cultures to the whole world. Overall I am feeling pretty happy with what we are learning in terms of Aboriginal Education. I think for me personally my goal is to learn more about Aboriginal History so I become more comfortable about sharing Aboriginal History to non-Aboriginal