I. General Information
School Name: Montecito
School District: SD#41 Burnaby
Inquiry Team Members: Jessica Vaughan: jessica.vaughan@burnabyschools.ca
Fonda Papathanasiou: fonda.papathanasiou@burnabyschools.ca
Steve Smith: steve.smith@burnabyschools.ca
Leslie-Jo Field: leslie-jo.field@burnabyschools.ca
Madeleine Moore: madeleine.moore@burnabyschools.ca
Tanya Nicoll: tanya.nicoll@burnabyschools.ca
Inquiry Team Contact Email: jessica.vaughan@burnabyschools.ca
II. Inquiry Project Information
Type of Inquiry: NOIIE Case Study
Grade Levels Addressed Through Inquiry: Primary (K-3), Intermediate (4-7)
Curricular Areas Addressed: Arts Education
Focus Addressed: Indigenous understandings (for example, Traditional Knowledge, oral history, reconciliation)
In one sentence, what was your focus for the year? Our focus was developing our understanding of Coast Salish Design Elements, how they differ from more well known styles from further north, and through this extending our connection to the land on which our school community resides.
III. Spirals of Inquiry Details
Scanning: Prior to covid, we completed a large project where the entire school worked with Squamish knowledge keepers to learn about and build a class set of drums. We then invited a Metis artist in residence to our school to teach us songs and more protocols around the use of our drums. Covid derailed our plans to move forward and paint our drums at that time. We are very much looking forward to being able to come together as a school again and complete our project this year.
Our students have been having an increased amount of difficulty relating to one another and we felt that by bringing the entire student population together to complete this project, we could build in opportunities to increase our connections to each other and to this place. We hoped to focus on the First People’s Principle of “Learning is holistic, reflexive, reflective, experiential, and relational (focused on connectedness, on reciprocal relationships, and a sense of place).”
Focus: Our students have been having an increased amount of difficulty relating to one another and we felt that by bringing the entire student population together to complete this project, we could build in opportunities to increase our connections to each other and to this place.
Hunch: Over the previous two school years, we had little opportunity to bring students together outside of their regular classes. This has been detrimental to the students’ ability to empathize with each other and their ability (or willingness) to make choices for the good of the school community as a whole.
New Professional Learning: We invited a Squamish Nation artist into the school to work with staff on a Pro-D day. On this day staff learned about Coast Salish design elements (shapes, how they are often combined, and their relationship to carved works) and protocols (permission to use designs) around painting our drums. After that we worked together (relying on the experiences of a few of our staff members) to create lessons to reinforce these ideas with our students.
Taking Action: The students’ first experiences with Coast Salish design elements came from the Squamish artist who came in to work with them. The classes met with the artist in buddy groups and each student completed a directed drawing with the artist while he shared some information about the animal they were drawing and traditional practices for making paints and carving.
Individually in classes the teachers then led the students through a number of activities that included sorting the shapes into categories, practice drawing the shapes with guidelines, looking at artwork and identifying the shapes, searching for the shapes in colouring sheets, participating in one or more Joyful Learning session focused on Coast Salish art, creating designs given an outline, and creating a design of the animal that they had learned about from the Squamish artist who had visited the school.
Each class then chose one design to represent them. It was drawn on to two drums, and then painted. The music teacher worked with two classes to learn three songs from our original project (2019-2020), and we held a celebration of our drums as a whole school.
Checking: Summarize the differences you made. Were they enough? Were you satisfied? What did you use as baseline – and change – evidence? How much richer are your learners’ answers to the four questions?
Our baseline was the number of students who staff reported at the end of the 2022 school year who they were concerned about due to lack of connection to the school and/or lack of connection to peers. In June of 2022, we identified 12 students in this situation. At the end of the school year we again discussed the students who we had been concerned about and found that half of those students had made connections with peers and were demonstrating more care for our school community.
Reflections/Advice: The opportunity to work with a Squamish artist and knowledge keeper was invaluable to this project. He helped us all make connections to the land our community resides on in a way that reached all our learners (students & staff). We could not have connected with our Indigenous student population or helped all students make connections within our school community if we had not worked with a Squamish nation knowledge keeper for the project.