Indigenous Education is so important to bring into each class. This week one of our tasks was to read “The Five R’s for Indigenizing Online Learning: A Case Study of the First Nations School’s Principals Course.” The five R’s were respect, relevance, reciprocity, responsibility, and relationships. Indigenous knowledge is not readily incorporated in an online courses due to the fact that this type of knowledge uses narratives over devices and is typically situated in a specific environment or context, which is the opposite of what online learning does. The advantage of any online course is it’s accessibility, creating FNSPC, an online course for First Nations Schools principles, allowed for principles to work the job while taking the course and gave opportunity for new modes of representing Indigenous knowledge and understandings of Indigenous learning.
The R’s focus on education being accommodated and adapted for Indigenous knowledge, students, and learning and not the other way around. I enjoyed reading this article and found myself constantly agreeing with the points being made. Respect means that Indigenous norms and values are recognized in the school. Reciprocity means that the learner and researcher are being mutually benefitted, Relevance to Indigenous knowledge means incorperating oral communication and community responsability means to uphold Indigenous values, practices and ways of knowing. Building meaningful relationships is necessary to cultivate each of these R’s.
It is hard for a course to be wholly decolonized due to the rigid structures set in places such as dates, enrolment and grades. Incorporating respect, reciprocity, relevance, and relationships into this course allowed for Indigenous knowledge to be shared virtually and will better schools and the communities involved. These 5 R’s were critical in the making of this course and are necessary components to include in any classroom, especially for Indigenous education.
For this week we went on to the hour of code website and had 20 minutes to play around and find a game that would be relevant and engaging for our desired grade level. I chose grade 4/5 because I am in a grade 4/5 class for my Link2Practice class, and I am really enjoying teaching and learning from this age range. I chose to use the game “Minecraft Hour of Code Tutorials”. I chose this game because everyone in my Link2Practice class loves Minecraft and constantly wants to incorporate it into the class, whether it is in the books that they are reading or creating songs about it in music class. By coding something that students are interested in, they will become more engaged in the activity and might even choose to play it outside of class time and really get into coding. The game involves the student coding movement for their characters to reach a goal. It starts simple, like moving forward and turning right, then adds more coding buttons such as “repeat until goal”. I chose to do the “Minecraft Voyage Aquatic”, but there are many other games in this activity such as “Minecraft’s Hero’s Journey” and “Minecraft Designer”. I think that this game would be relevant to grade 5s as It will challenge their previous coding skills, while still being a good introductionary tool to the skill, as it was labeled as a game for grade’s 2+.
November 21, 2022 at 12:18 pm
Thanks for the detailed post, Lexi!