New learning centre to support sharing of knowledge

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About 100 people were on hand at the recent launch of the Aboriginal Learning Knowledge Centre that took place at the Wanuskewin Heritage Park located just outside the city.

The Aboriginal Learning Knowledge Centre is a non-profit group whose purpose is to collect and classify data from various Aboriginal educational institutions in an effort to find teaching methods that will benefit the wider community.

"We work with all jurisdictions to share with as many who can benefit," said Dr. Marie Battiste, academic director of the Aboriginal Education Research Centre at the University of Saskatchewan, who, along with Dr. Vivian Ayoungman, executive director of the Calgary-based First Nations Adult and Higher Education Consortium, is co-director of the newly minted organization. "It's across-the-board information sharing."

Seeds for the idea were originally planted in the minds of University of Saskatchewan staff. Several years ago, staff at the university's College of Education noticed they were getting a lot of requests from outside groups asking for information on different Aboriginal issues. At the same time, studies were being carried out on these very issues but the results were not being used to help others.

"There was a lot of ad hoc stuff being done," noted Battiste.

The Aboriginal Education Research Centre, already in place, devised a plan to coordinate these efforts. They submitted a proposal to the university and received funding for a three-year program with the understanding that they would be on their own after that.

"We saw the need to focus a centre on research," Battiste said.

The next step was to approach the Canadian Council on Learning (CCL) a national organization that promotes learning across the country. Funding for the Aboriginal Learning Knowledge Centre was granted as part of an overall plan by the council to encourage growth in education through learning centres.

Five learning centres across the country have been established with the help of the CCL. The Aboriginal learning centre is the last one to be opened. Each centre has its own focus and is expected to share information about that theme with the rest of Canada. In addition to the Aboriginal Learning Knowledge Centre, there is a centre in Atlantic Canada focused on adult learning, an early childhood learning centre in Quebec, a health and learning centre covering British Columbia and the Yukon and a work and learning centre in Ontario.

The theme of Aboriginal learning extends across the Prairie provinces and into the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. Battiste notes that, although the Prairies have done a lot of work in the area of Aboriginal schooling, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut have done less. A co-ordinator to bring the northern areas together with the south will be put in place soon, she added.

Although many different schools have been working to address Aboriginal learning issues, most of the work has been done in isolation with little contact between the groups. The new learning centre would be an outside group to help remedy that, Battiste said. Data that is collected by the centre will be shared through workshops, symposiums and conferences, and three-way sharing between the province, the Aboriginal community and schools could be beneficial. The first conference will be in Edmonton in March 2007.

Although the centre's focus right now will be to bring together different schools, the wider community also needs to be included.

"We don't know about Elders and their learning," said Battiste. "What could we contribute to their learning?"Up until now, many improvements in Aboriginal learning have dealt with elementary and high school studies. What this new centre hopes to do is help coordinate efforts made in the pre-school and post-secondary arenas. One of the goals of this expanded focus would be finding ways to make the transition between high school and post-secondary studies easier.

All of this is signifiant in light of the fact that twice as many Aboriginal as non-Aboriginal adults are working and living without their high-school diplomas. And this can seriously affect earning potential.

"This alone is a dramatic illustration that Canada's education systems have been failing Aboriginal peoples for decades," a statement from the CCL proclaims.