Looking at this I initially went to a document that came up as a guiding source multiple times early in my career as a teacher. At that time I was riding the beginning of a career temporary contract carousel and bouncing from school to school each year and this document was a guiding piece of work in the Professional Development process in multiple buildings.
The document is What Did You Do In School Today? - Exploring the Concept of Student Engagement and Its Implications for Teaching and Learning In Canada (Dunleavy & Milton, 2009) and it was an initiative by the Canadian Education Association to provide a framework for engaging students in school in a 21st century context. It is closely tied to Calgary and Alberta as the Galileo Educational Network has close ties to this city.
The overarching question I wanted to reflect upon was: “How is Indigeneity reflected in this document that we were using as foundational to student success ten years ago?”
The document is a manageable 20 pages long and so I set about a preliminary search for any terms related to indigenous students or ways of knowing including: first nation, indigenous, aboriginal, and FNMI (which was a very popular term at the time).
Zero instances of any of these terms appear in the document, but to not give up hope I went through it in more detail to see if there is implicit focus on indigenous students and/or practices in the document (which would further strengthen the assertion of erasure of these issues in educational literature).
The new question then is: “does this framework provide a place to recognize indigenous student needs within the framework (even though it isn’t specifically mentioned)?
The data suggests that this was an issue in 2009 when this was published as in 2006 Indigenous Canadians were much more likely to not finish high school than non-indigenous Canadians. , this trend continues into the 2016 census, though the percentage of indigenous students without a certificate, diploma, or degree is shrinking much faster than in the overall Canadian population. (Arriagada, 2021)
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| Table 1 from Arriagada, 2021 |
The work defines engagement at school in terms of how it works with social and academic engagement. I want to focus on Social Engagement first as this is where we will likely find connections to
“Social engagement is commonly defined as a combination of students’ sense of belonging at school, their acceptance of the goals of schooling, feelings of being connected to and accepted by peers, and experiences of relationships with adults who ‘show an interest in them as individuals’ (National Research Council, 2003, p. 42). Research in this area has led to an awareness that large numbers of students feel disaffected or alienated from the life of school, and this is cause for concern because a student’s sense of emotional attachment to school has ‘a strong effect on whether a student persists or drops out’ (National Research Council, 2003, p. 25). “ (Dunleavy & Milton, 2009)
So, we can identify that a student’s emotional attachment to school at least partially dictates success. How does this square with the generational trauma towards school of residential school survivors? I would be curious to see how this report would be re-written a half decade later as Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission brought these events more into the public eye (or even in the past years’ outrage over the discoveries at those schools).
“For teachers’ work together to be effective, they also need reliable and meaningful sources of research and data, combined with regular opportunities to make sense of what the evidence is telling them in relation to their own experiences and beliefs about their practice. Too often we draw a direct line from evidence to decision-making and miss out on the essential idea of inquiry as a learning process that requires not just analysis in an objective sense, but also personal and group reflection about the subjective impact of new ideas or evidence. Engaging with teachers as influential leaders in developing new ways of thinking about school and classroom practices requires us to approach the practice of improvement as an inherently social, emotional and cognitive process that is most powerful when it is connected to teachers’ day-to-day lives in classrooms with students and as members of professional communities of practice.”(Dunleavy & Milton, 2009)
My takeaway from this is that yes, the work we did a decade ago with this What Did You Do At School Today? report were not completely misguided. It provided, at least in spirit, an imperative to be responsive to the students’ needs and to do research into what their needs are to engage with our educational institutions.
References
Arriagada, Paula. The Achievements, Experiences and Labour Market Outcomes of First Nations, Métis and Inuit Women with Bachelor's Degrees or Higher. Statistics Canada, 2021. Insights on Canadian Society.
Dunleavy, J. & Milton, P. (2009). What did you do in school today? Exploring the concept of student engagement and its implications for teaching and learning in Canada. Canadian Education Association (CEA), 1-22.Retrieved from: http://www.cea-ace.ca/sites/cea-ace.ca/fles/cea-2009-wdydistconcept.pdf
National Research Council – Institute of Medicine (2003). Engaging schools: Fostering high school students’ motivation to learn. Washington DC: The National Academies Press. http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10421
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