Class Year

15

Current Hometown:

Fort Providence, Northwest Territories, Canada

Job and Employer

Outdoor Education Teacher, Deh Gáh Elementary and Secondary School

Work:

I help coordinate experiential, culture-based education for kindergarten to grade 12 in this Indigenous community. This often means doing the background work to get kids out to camps down the river where they learn from Elders, hunters, trappers and other cultural educators from the community. I teach sessions in science, wildlife management and outdoor survival skills while at the camps with the students. I have also been taking high school students on canoe trips that focus on leadership skills and freshwater studies.

Community work & family

I’m finishing my second year of a Diploma in Indigenous Language Revitalization. It is run through the university of Victoria, but our courses happen in the Dehcho region of the Northwest Territories where I am working. It has been a truly humbling and amazing experience to be learning the local Dene Zhatié language alongside such an awesome group of women from the communities. As well as the language itself, we have been learning methods for teaching language. While I still have a long way to go before coming anywhere close to fluent in the language, I am beginning to be able to support the integration of more language-learning into the outdoor programs. It has also been extremely fun!

Senior project:

Learning From the Land: Harmonizing academic and cultural learning through on-the-land school programs in Northern Canada. (I was working with the school where I am now employed.)

Internship:

Student Teaching at Juniper Hill School in Alna, Maine

Human ecology in action:

Human ecology is the best foundation for my work that I could ask for. Studying human ecology reinforced for me that knowledge and skills must not be taught in isolation. I am guided by the philosophy that the best way for students to develop into life-long learners is for them to be given authentic, hands-on opportunities to explore, express themselves and tackle real problems in their local and global communities. Human ecology encourages me to search for context, for contradictions and interconnections and to support my students developing their own understandings of this complex world.

Considerations for prospective students:

I found the Ed. Studies program at COA extremely valuable for many reasons: All of the courses had opportunities to observe and work in classrooms; the small class sizes allowed for lots of discussion with other students and the excellent professors; some of the courses were co-taught by current school teachers; the program models a kind of teaching that is based on caring and supporting diverse needs and passions of all students… the list could go on. In all, it is a great program!