Education 3508 B Fall 2019

Integrating Indigenous Education Workshop #1 with Dawn Burleigh

How has your participation in this workshop challenged and expanded your philosophy of teaching and
learning?
Georgia Merk, 001203260

This past Monday I attended the Indigenous Education workshop where we participated in the
Turtle Island exercise and listened to a residential school survivor tell her heart wrenching story of her
life. This entire experience was very eye-opening as it gave me a new insight into the actual history of the
First Nations people in Canada. I learned about so many different aspects of tragedies, forsaken rights and
dicrimination that occurred over the course of Canadian history and I found my peers and I were equally
shocked. I wished we had been given this exercise earlier on in my education or that we would have been
more educated on this history in our social studies classes.
I found myself feeling very emotional listening to the elder describe her life in and out of the
residential school she attended. I can’t believe that an event such as this occurred in Canada with the
amount of oblivion that existed. The amount of damage that all of the events that happened to the First
nations people have created so many generational problems and this is hard to accept.
Listening to my classmates offer reconciliation and remorse to the elder was so powerful. There
are a couple of students in my class who come from First Nation families and listening to their stories and
perspectives was such a valuable moment. They were able to offer insight and emotion that you would
never understand or fathom from a textbook or a teacher who wasn’t from this culture.
From an education perspective, I would like to be even more aware of these issues and history
moving forward. I think this experience showed me that you really have no idea what someone else is
going through as you are unaware of their history, life and experiences. This can be applied to students
both First Nation and other students from any background. I also this it’s important to try to implement
this perspective into the students I teach with an emphasis on the rights and history of the First Nation
people around us. Maybe a good solution would be for this exercise of Turtle Island to be brought into
schools to educate students from a younger age of the history in Canada.