Author: learningwithkino

ARC BC, or the Accessible Resource Centre, is a great resource that takes a little bit of work to access. ARC is a support specifically for students with perceptual disabilities. Perceptual disabilities include visual and hearing impairments as one might expect, but it also includes specific learning disabilities and physical impairments that can inhibit reading and hearing comprehension. ARC’s big job is converting books into Alternatively Formatted Digital Books. In essence the key is digitization to create texts that are easier to use, adapt, and manipulate. The process involves taking physical texts apart and scanning them. After they’re scanned a lot of work goes into making them usable adaptive tools. Well accessibility and differentiation are a big part of meaningful education, but it also happens to be codified. Within districts there are designations, but beyond those, there is the Accessible British Columbia Act. This means something different depending on the organization. For educators, the main point is that an accessibility plan exists and teachers need to do what they can to support this plan and accessibility for learners. The idea aligns with UDL, removing and preventing barriers to accessibility.  The new challenge in technological support is accessible documents, especially now that digital documents are such a central part of communication for a ton of industries and classrooms. This solution does come with a couple of problems. To access this resource teachers have to have a student with a designation that includes a perceptual disability. THis means it’s unfortunately part of the support that can only be accessed because of the funding that comes with a designation even though supports are often an improvement in outcomes for many learners. The only other challenge that comes with a bunch of new accessible materials is teachers needing to continue their roles as a curator of information.

I want to be a bird when I grow up. I’m mostly kidding, but I did walk like a duck today. In windy snowy weather I saw a duck fall on ice, and I got another chance to practice lesson planning and mindfulness. I felt the snow under my feet. I like the way you can find grip, depending on the snow you can feel the snow shift, the difference between ice, packed snow, and soft flakes sticking to your boots. I brought my grandfather’s film camera and as I watched a big group of ducks walking on a frozen river I watched the way they moved, walked, interacted. Trying to get close enough for a 50mm lens, I watched the ways they interacted and the way they recognized humans as something familiar, but worth giving a little distance. This is very different from the smaller chickadees that would swoop into any hand that couple possibly hold a seed. 

When the chickadees, ducks, squirrels and dog walkers change their day around you, it means that you’re the activity. For the creatures of the forest who have adapted their behaviors around human interaction, the group of 39 chilly teacher candidates is the core activity for the morning, and the chickadees at least, seemed fairly engaged. 

We felt tree bark and saw faces and animation everywhere we could, we looked for movement and saw snow blowing off a roof, stopping another group in their tracks. Thinking about change and interaction is how I came up with an activity I’m pretty proud of. With support from my classmates, I was able to connect to the BC curriculum connecting Science and Language arts. The idea was fun and encouraged creativity. Taking advantage of changing seasons students can see how plants and animals adapt to their environment in real time in a concrete and connectable way. This could follow a unit where students learn about adaptations in local wildlife. The understanding of adaptations can follow a secondary activity where students get to create their own imaginary creatures. Students can see adaptation in the wild, feel the cold, see the river, and consider a creature that would survive or thrive, understanding the needs and adaptations of creatures both real and imagined.

Binary Beads

One of the big concerns when teaching Indigenous culture and experiences is historicizing it. To lock indigeneity in history is to forget that Indigenous cultures and people exist, with the capacity of change and connection that any person or community has. Binary Beading with Noel Pippin connects Indigenous art and pedagogy to technology, math, ADST, and language. Oh the things a bead can do! 

One of the big continuous goals for an educator is engagement. SD57 now uses the language engagement instead of management, the idea being that behaviorual problems largely stem from a lack of engagement. Pippin told stories of incredible engagement and despite my frustration I was hooked. We were melting strings, creating tools out of random objects, it became more than just interactive learning, it was inventive learning.

 

The other cool part of project centered lessons, they scale really successfully. The lesson is scalable for ability, age, available materials, and even time constraints. Pippin runs this lesson with everyone from kindergarten to adults and educators. You can modify beading technique, word length, or even degree of binary coding to adjust a lesson to students, really extending universal design for learning. Also, there’s no need for class access to the often limited resource that is computers. 

 

My three big takeaways are that it’s great to practice FPPL in modern contexts, creating is fun and also easy to tie to curriculum and competencies, and you can teach technology in ways that don’t necessarily rely on consistent access.

Two Rivers Art Gallery

I visited Two Rivers Art Gallery on the first Monday after Barry McKinnon died. If you read poetry, or study English in Prince George, you will likely learn who Barry McKinnon is. I’ve read Barry McKinnon. I have a copy of The Circle which I read for a class, but the real reason I’m connecting McKinnon and Two Rivers despite the fact that I’ve had limited interaction, is that I’d like to believe art is alive here. So I’ll try prose, bare with me, it’s been a minute.

Cynicism

Art is dead, art is dying.

Not really, not anymore than the rest of us.

We are dying, the world is dying

Well yes but no more or less than our art, our selves.

Young people today don’t believe in the future

Do we, do we really?

Young people have climate anxiety.

Amidst ecological collapse? I’d be more worried if they didn’t.

This town sucks!

In a bunch of ways absolutely, what now?

There are no artists here, no scene!

There is, but if you don’t like them you can always become one, or import.

Art has changed, it’s worsened. 

Did you know film photography has been the same process since humans figured out chlorophyll, and it still works essentially the same today? Here’s a stunning example:

The last time I did art “professionally” I went to Nelson, Art hippy capital of BC, or so they claim, despite their lack of housing, hostile architecture, and multiple police forces. But hey, they have Shambala. The week before my birthday, a couple days before I was completely out of money and had to return north, a few months before the first lockdown, I went to a poetry Jam, and I won. The kid from the north had the best poetry in a room of a dozen people and they gave me $20 to read for them again. An old poet woman in a funny hat told me it was modern, original, and striking, and she gave me a hug; I haven’t read since. 

Two River’s current exhibit, like everything living and aware of its situation, is a stunning look at waste, loss, and our ongoing ecological collapse. None of the pieces really suggested the damage was stopped, or ending in time. No piece, at least for me, suggested that we’ll stop climate change at the last second. But how do we make pedagogy at the end of the world? Looking at Jude Griebel’s work I think it might be whimsy. When we become enveloped in wildfire smoke and dirty air, can we giggle under our gas masks? When buildings crumble can we smile at the greenery growing through the streets? When the rising oceans swallow our cities, can we visit the fish who make submerged luxury apartments home? When lights go out, will we be able to see the stars? I think that’s what this lil’ green fruit was telling me.

Lesson planning is a skill I can’t wait to get good at. After years of snowboard instructing and a stint as a TTUC it’s the one thing I’m more or less a complete beginner at. Slowed down by bad crutches and a sprained ankle I got to hobble my way into the Library with a couple big takeaways. The first big reminder is that I love libraries. An entire institution devoted solely to best serving as much of their community as possible and giving people a real chance with everything from free printing to bicycle repair kits, to places to charge your phone. While schools and libraries are different in many ways, they overlap in the deep seated focus of serving a community through opportunities to learn and find information. I believe this is a big part of why they work so well when they collaborate. Libraries are a great resource for beginner lesson planners like myself and educators in general.

Being a momentarily crutch based beginner lesson plan gave me the chance to experience PG Public Library Resources, and the art of lesson planning, in a unique way that I’m grateful for. Without the ability to comfortably browse shelves I took a chance to think about the Library as a space. It’s a space with windows, levels, variation, unique architecture, books, computers, and plants. It has plenty of chances to be part of lessons simply because of its space. The kind of lesson that uses a new space to incorporate curriculum of something like mathematics is cool and exciting to think about, but also something I need to be willing to work towards. Being honest about where I’m at is part of moving beyond. Luckily the online browsing of resources and the online resources available through the PGPL are wonderful and a great place to start centring lessons as I hone my lesson planning skills.

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.