Teachers in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories are...

Teachers in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories are learning how to deliver a new course for their Grade 10 students, the mandatory classes on residential schools. And they are preparing for some fallout from the information that will be delivered, with counsellors ready to respond. “There’s things where we can’t predict where this is going to go,” said the author of the curriculum John Stewart in an interview with the Canadian Press. “But what we do know is that this is at the root of a bunch of things and if we can start to deal with some of those things, then there’s hope.” The program takes 25 classroom hours and every high school graduate, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, is to take the course.

“A majority of our community has been affected in some way by residential schools,” said Anna Leishman, a teacher in Chesterfield Inlet in Nunavut since 2001. “Bringing it up, you wonder what kinds of feelings are going to be brought up with students, whether their parents or grandparents were in there. Trying to get the feelings out on the table, I’m just wondering how the kids will cope.”