Teachers should know

Page 25

A decade after she graduated from the University of Manitoba with her masters in Education, Myra Laramee has returned to the institution to help it improve the way it prepares teachers to provide Aboriginal education to their students.

Laramee has been employed by the Winnipeg school division for the past 27 years, with the last nine of those years spent as principal of Niji Mahkwa school in Winnipeg.

Laramee has spent the last four months on secondment to the university doing research on how it can help the teachers it trains incorporate the Aboriginal voice into their classrooms.

While her secondment ends April 30, that date certainly doesn't mark the end of the research project, Laramee explained.

"It's been a long time coming, and it's going to be a while coming even yet for some of the concreteness to be put to this. But I think the most important thing to me in doing the project is to get the sound of the voice of people in the community."

To get that voice, Myra Laramee met with 11 different groups, including two groups with a mix of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal members. While a number of the people she spoke with were leaders in Aboriginal education, she also met with youth, both those who are flourishing in the education system, and those who are struggling.

The question she asked the members of these groups was, If you were able to go back to school and have a more positive experience related to Aboriginal people, what would you want your teachers to know about you and your people before they ever hit the classroom?

"In other words, what do teachers need to know going into teaching about Aboriginal education and Aboriginal people? So from there, I had a lot of very powerful and positive responses. One group said that they were thankful, that this is the first time they'd ever been asked this question. In fact, I should say, most of the groups voiced that, the importance of asking that question to them," she said.

"The importance of this work and the acceptance of it is it's going to benefit all people," she said, including Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal educational leaders, facilitators of learning, teachers working in the classroom and all others who are "part of creating places of learning for children" and all Canadian learners, including Aboriginal learners.

"In terms of an overall understanding as to why we need Aboriginal education, I think there's still a phenomenal amount of work left to do, because the average Canadian citizen doesn't understand that they've been robbed of the truth," Laramee said.

"They do not see the significance of the land of the people that they are walking in, and they simply believe that because they were born here, that they belong here.

"I've had Elders tell me that until they realize that they are in someone else's birthplace, things won't change. Because the fact remains that if whatever birthright someone who is not Aboriginal was born into, they still have a land that they can return to, to sit down with people who can tell them the history of that land, the language of that land, the learning of that land. Aboriginal people do not have that privilege. This is the place that they have to do that in, and if the truth is not being told about that to them, and their children, then where do they go? They're certainly not going to go to France to learn how to be Aboriginal, to be Anishnawbe and Inuuk. They don't have a place. This is it. And until Canadian people understand that significance, until that is taught in classrooms by all teachers, then we're not going to get anywhere."