Life’s Chapters – Past and Present

It has been a busy summer for me to say the least. It’s hard to believe I return to a full-time teaching position tomorrow. I wrapped up my latest contract as a Learning Support Teacher with Prairie Valley School Division‘s Remote Learning School at the end of June. I then launched into an M.Ed. program through Vancouver Island University in early July that kept me busy and largely preoccupied with course readings, research and assignments all of July as well as the first week of August. I have created blog posts for a few of the assignments that were completed as part of my two courses this summers, which you’re welcome to read as well, if so interested.

On August 10th, I quietly deactivated my Facebook account as it was beginning to feel like kryptonite for me whenever I went on it. I felt like I didn’t have the mental capacity to be able to keep up with it all and I became a very passive consumer and felt like I was unable to show up to support and engage with friends on it the way I’d like to. All too often, I resorted to passive scrolling, sending out some likes and loves here and there, but also was left feeling apathetic and distracted from what I’m in the process of working towards at this time.

Since then, I have redesigned Creative Classroom Connections by changing my former Services page into a Research page to reflect the types of research and design that I am passionately interested in pursuing, both as a full-time educator and as an M.Ed student. I have created a Connect page to invite anyone who is interested in these topics as well, to consider becoming a subscriber, collaborator, or even a contributor to the Featured Blog page. My hope is that I will be able to develop a readership for this blog organically and even separately from social media. I may not always share every post that I write on social media, so the best way to connect with this page is to subscribe to the RSS feed or fill out the new and improved contacts form through the Connect page.

One of my first tasks as an M. Ed. student was to write an introduction of ourselves and share it with the rest of the cohort who will be taking this program with me over the next two years. Here is what I wrote, and have been intending to share through this blog ever since:

I come from a historic gathering place, now called the town of Fort Qu’Appelle, situated in the Qu’Appelle Valley northeast of Regina, SK. I come from the heart Treaty 4 Territory, where a treaty was signed in 1874 between representatives of the British Queen Monarch, the 7-year old Dominion of Canada, and various bands of the nêhiyawak (Plains Cree), Anishinaabeg (Saulteaux), and Nakota (Assiniboine) First Nations, whose existence and nationhood evolved on these lands long before the nation of Canada ever came to be.

Growing up with several First Nations surrounding my hometown, I have come to develop an empathetic understanding of the negative impacts of colonial government policies, including the creation of the Indian Act and the horrific residential schools that were forcefully enacted, shortly after treaties were signed and existed for over a century. I have come to know and understand the extent of intergenerational traumas resulting from colonial policies and practices of cultural genocide and assimilation. I have also come to recognize the extent of the systemic privileges I’ve been receiving because of my perceived identities as a white cis-gendered, heterosexual male. It was at a fairly young age that I came to realize that I would either be part of the problem of continuing the poisoning of our relationships with the Earth, ourselves, and one another, or I could grow and evolve to become part of the solution and work towards the healing of these fragmented relationships.

I completed my B.Ed. degree in 2008 after having dropped out of university after my second year of Education in 2003 to make sure that I was pursuing a path that aligned with a sense of passion and a purpose and which has been carrying me forward ever since. I spent a year travelling (domestically and abroad); another year working as a youth care worker with the Ranch Ehrlo Society; and another school year as an Educational Assistant in an at-risk youth satellite school program with Regina Public Schools before I decided I was ready to go back and complete the remaining two years of my B.Ed. degree.

I completed my teaching internship in my hometown of Fort Qu’Appelle in 2007, in the same high school I graduated from nearly ten years prior. As an emerging Social Studies major, I was tasked with “teaching” the Native Studies 10 and 20 courses to classes made up almost entirely of Indigenous students. Through these early teaching experiences, I learned the importance of taking a learning facilitator (guide on the side) approach to teaching rather than the top-down sage on the stage approach like so many teachers have traditionally taken on. You can catch the highlights of my professional experience since graduating with my B.Ed at the bottom of my About page. What I love most about my approach as a facilitator of learning, is that I don’t feel like I have to know everything. The most important thing I can bring is a passion and commitment to developing supportive learning environments and processes that can spark natural curiosities to learn and grow with one another.

After trying my hand at self-employed consulting contracts last fall, I picked up a contract as a Learning Support Teacher with Prairie Valley School Division’s Remote Learning School from February until the end of June. PVSD Remote Learning school was created on the fly to meet the needs of students and their families through this pandemic year. Although this position didn’t become available until February, I am so glad it did, as I was able to learn a lot about individual student supports that can be offered within a remote learning environment.

This coming school year, I have accepted a follow-up position to work as a Transitions Teacher for Prairie Valley SD this coming school year, where my upcoming job description reads as follows:

The Transitions Teacher provides a significant connecting and integrated role. This teacher will provide both virtual and in-person support to students, families, and staff. The priority for this teacher will be to engage with students and families that did not attend a school or had low attendance in 2020-2021. The Transitions Teacher will work with a team to provide supports.

As for the M. Ed program through Vancouver Island University, I had initially applied for and was accepted into the program in the spring of 2020, but after the pandemic hit and with too much uncertainty in the air, I withdrew shortly before classes began and so had to re-apply again this year. I feel the timing is better for me now and am looking forward to researching, synthesizing and designing practical applications of Universal Design for Learning, Personalized Inquiry Learning, and Social & Emotion Learning, as outlined through my research page.

The plan is to seek, explore, and inspire best practices for developing education programming supports that can re-engage our most disengaged students.

My Top 5 Audiobooks that I listened to this summer and would highly recommend include:

• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly. Including and celebrating flow activities and how to inspire students into that state of mind.

• The Practice: Shipping Creative Work. by Seth Godin. This book leaves me thinking about the creative practices, purposes and responsibilities involved in this work as an innovative educator.

• Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens. By Barabara Oakley. There is also a free online course through Coursera that covers this material too.

• Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, by Daniel Pink. How to inspire intrinsic motivation by offering opportunities for students to practice autonomy, mastery, and purpose in their educational programming.

And lastly, I wanted to share a link to another great audiobook and author who I was introduced to by one of my classmates in my M. Ed. program who works with this fellow teacher/educator in Victoria, BC:

• Dive into Inquiry. By Trevor McKenzie. This book provides some great practical tips and tricks to implementing inquiry over the course of the year, and great examples of how to co-design learning with your students.

If you’ve read this far, I thank you for your interest! If you’d like to subscribe/support, collaborate, contribute to the evolution of Creative Classroom Connections, you can do so by filling out the form Connect page here.

Until next time, take care out there.