Trudeau scholarship awarded

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D. Memee Lavell Cooper received a boost to her high educational aspirations recently, when she learned she was one of the recipients of the inaugural Trudeau Scholarship.

On June 26, the Trudeau Foundation announced its first 12 scholarships for doctoral candidates from around the world studying social sciences and humanities. Each receives $35,000 a year for up to four years, and an additional $15,000 to cover research-related travel. This year, 10 of the 12 recipients are from Canada and five are studying Aboriginal issues.

"I was quite shocked by the whole thing," said Lavell Cooper, 29.

The Trudeau Foundation was established in 2002 to honour former prime minister, the late Pierre Elliott Trudeau. It supports academic work in four categories: Human Rights and Social Justice; Responsible Citizenship; Canada and the World; and Humans and their Natural Environment. Scholars must be nominated by a university, provide an application supported by references and transcripts, and attend an interview to defend their research.

Lavell Cooper was nominated by the University of Western Ontario where she studies and teaches.

Nominees are assessed on the basis of world-class academic achievement; they must demonstrate an outstanding ability to engage in lively exchange with other researchers and scholars; and finally they must show they intend to contribute to public dialogue in one or more of the four areas mandated by the foundation.

Lavell Cooper, who was born on Wikwemikong First Nation and now lives in Woodstock, previously studied low academic achievement and high drop-out rates among First Nations students.

At the master's level, "My focus was on Aboriginal student retention, the problem of student dropouts and failure before reaching the end of high school... I found a lot of the students were resistant to the education system, whether it was the content or the way the school was structured, which was what I found mostly."

Her doctoral thesis will focus on Aboriginal students who have remained in school and become a success, although she admits that she has not defined success yet for the purpose of her research.

"I'm still looking at the problem of Aboriginal student retention, but I'm looking at the successful students, to find out just what it is about them, what factors in their lives, what support systems, what kind of things have contributed to their being able to succeed in an area where so many have dropped out."

She says she knows all the reasons students drop out of school, "but there is really no connection from the problem and the reasons why they drop out to ways of keeping them in. And that's what I think we need to really start looking at. Stop focusing on the problem so much and start looking for a solution."

Lavell Cooper obtained a master of education degree and a B.A. in film studies from Queen's University. When she began researching First Nations education, Lavell Cooper believed the solution to keeping their youth in school was Native-designed, culturally relevant curricula. She no longer believes that.

Although Lavell Cooper stressed that her current research is only preliminary, so far she thinks the solution relates to "the classroom and the school environment.

"Because it's based on an educational environment and a structure that is not our own-it's based on the British school model that was brought over-and there's still a lot of little things in the classroom, the way the environment is structured, the way the student-teacher relationship is expected to go, that the students find to be very alienating, very isolating... I think that has a lot to do with the possibility for changing it, to make the classroom more supportive, by looking at our traditional ways of teaching young people and finding ways of incorporating that into a classroom that is more respectful of the individual as a person, and not looking at the student as some kind of second-class citizen, which happens so ften."