I. General Information
School Name: District Education Centre
School District: SD#36 Surrey
Inquiry Team Members:
Allison Hotti, hotti_a@surreyschools.ca
Cheryl Corrick, corrick_c@surreyschools.ca
Sarah Hern, hern_s@surreyschools.ca
Inquiry Team Contact Email: kyle_j@surreyschools.ca
II. Inquiry Project Information
Type of Inquiry: Numeracy & Literacy Project
Grade Levels Addressed Through Inquiry: Intermediate (4-7)
Curricular Areas Addressed: Language Arts – Literacy, Mathematics / Numeracy
Focus Addressed: Indigenous understandings (for example, Traditional Knowledge, oral history, reconciliation), Land, Nature or Place-based learning
In one sentence, what was your focus for the year? How does combining Indigenous Storywork with Place-based learning effect student participation and belonging?
III. Spirals of Inquiry Details
Scanning: When we asked students the essential questions, there were a very low number that felt connected to adults in the school community. We also discovered that this was partly because the students did not understand the caring behaviours that the adults in the school were displaying, and they attend the largest elementary school in Surrey with almost 1000 students. We wanted to find student-led ways of connecting them to community. The students were also full of curiosity, but they found interacting respectfully to be a challenge. We had previously worked with the place-based mats and Sto:lo Sitel stories with primary students and seen how it inspired connection and respect, as well as encouraged the students to both experience and participate in deep storytelling, as a learning strategy. Since the principles of Indigenous Storywork, like the First People’s Principles of Learning honour holism, we decided to put the math content on the back burner and focus on the “4Rs” of Respect, Reciprocity, Responsibility and Reverence.
Focus: We knew that a sense of belonging and community are a key part of learning. Knowing that the majority of the students were struggling to feel that sense of belonging and struggling to create a sense of community, we thought that focusing on the 4 Rs would improve their learning overall, including in math. We hoped that, by learning about the structure and purpose of Indigenous Storywork, they would be inspired to engage with the stories of others and to begin to tell their own stories. We hoped that they would develop a sense of respect and responsibility towards others and themselves, and that they would come to understand how community and learning are fostered by reciprocity. We wanted them to use their curiosity to explore questions with respect and reverence for the places, people and traditions that they were learning about.
Hunch: With close to 1000 K-7 students, creating and maintaining a sense of community could be challenging. The students saw school as a competitive, hierarchical place where they had to constantly vie for position, attention, status, etc. Learning was seen as a collection of disjointed topics, rather than a process of expanding and deepening connections to the world and other people.
New Professional Learning: We used both the website and the book Indigenous Storywork in combination with the Sto:lo Sitel Stories. We also used a felt mat, which was a map of the Mount Cheam area to pair with the Sto:lo stories to help students connect the stories to place. Sarah, the classroom teacher, told them the stories as she introduced the Storywork principles and also wove the principles throughout classroom activities. Having the Sto:lo Sitel collection was very helpful, as it gave a starting point for both the students and ourselves to understand authentic story structures through the voices of the Indigenous storytellers. This approach allowed us to also explore the question “What math lives here?” in contexts where the students did not initially expect to find math. This process helped us all slow down (learning takes patience and time) and value the holistic nature of Indigenous pedagogies.
Taking Action: We introduced the mat and the story “The Mountain Goat People of Cheam” first and simply allowed the students to ask questions. There was lots of curiosity, especially about the scale of items on the mat (specifically, that nothing was to scale). The students also connected to both familiar and unfamiliar things, such as wondering about the types of trees that were represented. There was also some brashness in some of the questions they asked and some that bordered on racism, so Sarah’s next step was to invite Cheryl, one of our Indigenous Helping Teachers, to come and facilitate a conversation around topics, such as the use of the word “Indian” to refer to First Nations peoples. This was the first step towards a series of lessons throughout the year that drew on the themes of Respect, Reciprocity, Reverence and Responsibility.
Checking: We saw a vast difference in how the students engaged in learning as a community. One key piece of evidence is when Sarah invited an Indigenous Knowledge Keeper to do a cultural activity with the students. Sarah introduced the presenter using only their name and the students immediately chidded her for not giving the guest a proper introduction. The students then spent 20 minutes asking questions about the presenter’s nation, territory and other things that they had learned were important. They insisted that Sarah show them a map of the territory and again chided her for not thinking to show them these things in advance of the guest arriving. This is one way that the students demonstrated transference of the Indigenous Storywork principles and their understanding that relationships underpin learning. In their answers to the 4 questions, students also demonstrated a deeper sense of community and understanding of caring behaviours.
Reflections/Advice: We learned that Indigenous Storywork is a great structure for building community and that students within such a community become more confident and respectful learners. We are also reminded of the FPPL “learning takes patience and time.” Approaching math, or any other subject, with the values of respect, reciprocity, reverence and responsibility improves the learning experience for all students and allows their stories to become an authentic part of the learning. We also were reminded that math lives in all things and that simply asking the question “What math lives here?” allows students to build connections between their world and math, themselves and math and between mathematical concepts. Our advice is for teachers to see math learning as part of the whole in holistic, to value the connections to story and to reinfuse humanity and narrative into the learning. For ourselves, now that we know the power of building this type of community, we would like to next year focus more specifically on the nature of story and community in mathematics specifically.