Month: October 2023

If our job is to prepare young people for a hard to predict future, then it’s best to prepare them around the few semi-certainties we can connect, extrapolate for, or at least confidently guess. Sinclair highlights one easy to predict part of the future. Indigenous populations are growing, in nearly every community, at a much higher rate than non-indigenous Canadian populations. Sinclair explains that, “everyone children may grow up to know will most likely be, know, or love someone indigenous”. Avoiding inclusivity, not allowing students to see Indigenous perspective, this is robbing them of a future where they can collaborate and connect with those around them. 

The one thing current SD57’s TTUC onboarding taught me is that the future is uncertain. No one’s really sure what jobs are going to look like for the people I’m teaching. They tried to guess when I was a kid and they were so wrong they had to re-align and heavily promote careers in trades by the time I finished high-school. Several years later and a Pandemic changed the way we see office jobs and corporate culture. There’s some great solutions to the oncoming threat of ecological collapse but they’re attempting to tackle a massive global issue that’s already well under way in most of the world. Education has a history of preparing people for employment. While this is valuable in society where employment is often necessary for continued basic survival, it shouldn’t be the only goal and likely isn’t the most valuable one. 

Community is the one thing we know works. It’s the one thing we know allows human beings, in any time, to succeed and make the world a better place. We have to live, thrive, and survive together and if students can learn to do this they have a great chance at conquering everything we can and can’t predict. One challenge is the history of competition that dominates both western thought and much of the educational experience. From the bigger lens that is Nation to Nation relationships Indigenous peoples fought, but their agreements and treaties were about connection and relationship. Indigenous communities are increasingly collaborative for the benefit of all while modern nation states, including Canada, are focused on competition. Sinclair highlighted how much of what we value within capitalism and competition simply isn’t workable with the goals of community and indigenous values. We teach how to be successful by metrics that have caused immeasurable harm. What students need to survive anything, to thrive together, the core skill Sinclair pointed out we don’t measure, is empathy. If students can learn community and empathy, teachings ingrained to First Peoples Principles of Learning, then they’ll have the support and foundation to learn everything they need to thrive in whatever world that comes. 

Digital Literacy

Numeracy and literacy are foundational and frequent focuses within education. In a world where access and ability with digital devices and tools possess both great opportunities and risks, how do we help students understand digital tool use?

Depending on age group many students have a digital device in their pockets much of the time. Sometimes phones can be a distraction but in a school system that often struggles to provide adequate access to cellphones provide an entry into digital literacy. The divide between the two devices should be noted. Most portable devices are largely app based. Beyond searches apps are a major part of how small devices became so valuable to culture and day to day life, especially when the internet pivoted to social media. This capability often struggles to translate fully to personal computers, devices that are still incredibly useful for a lot of tasks and careers. Also, computers are cool. Thinking rocks with multiple moving parts all connected in a specific way with specific tasks running software developed in unique languages to do things that are mind blowing. Smart phones do this too but they often do a much better job of hiding it. They also hide one of the biggest tools people have for making computers useful, especially in Education, organizing files. I’m not going to suggest that clerical work should be a part of the grade 6 curriculum, but rather that part of being confident in using technology is being able to get it to do what you want and this often means clicking a little manilla envelope icon knowing what you’re looking for. Students can struggle with this. Students who are seemingly at home on mobile devices can be hampered by the less intuitive reality of most PC operating systems.

This boils into a surprisingly recurring part of my experience as an educator, some of the things I teach are going to be scary. For my students, and sometimes even me, new information can be frightening, and when it’s as complex and possibly hazardous as computers that fear is pretty reasonable. The idea then is to move past this fear, to give the power to the students. Sure computers can be an often fancy box filled with incredibly neat and complicated parts usually of somewhat high cost, but they’re also an incredibly cool tool to create. 

I was lucky enough to take on the incredible challenge of teaching Music 8. I play a little guitar. I am only mostly confident in which end of a clarinet the sound is supposed to come out of. I taught digital music using the clunky and free software many nerds like me have come to know and love. It was a chance to talk about the historical importance of 808’s and hip hop, it was a chance to explain why file extensions and directories could make things fall apart. It was a chance to show how fixable things are when they’re clunky and you haven’t much choice. It was also a really wonderful chance to create. Students who were largely unexcited about learning rhythm or brief histories of Jazz and Country music were suddenly completely engaged. We learned to take music from the internet, navigate websites of sketchy download links. Confident students helped those who were battling Windows 10 for the first time. By the end everyone had created a song using a variety of tools and suddenly computers weren’t so scary. Ugly software and file conversion wasn’t impossible to live with, it was something that let you sample a Lil Peep beat into a digitally created violin score and cut in google translate saying “chicken nuggets”.

The best skiers, snowboarders, cyclists, and artists I know think of their tools as toys and opportunities to create. Knowing a computer isn’t literacy; I’ve known many computers, some of them were jerks! Literacy comes from a courage to learn and try, the ability to accept and experiment, and most importantly, the dare to create.