U of S plans new approaches to Aboriginal learning

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A number of changes are planned at the University of Saskatchewan over the next five years, aimed at improving the school's relationships with the Aboriginal community.

Cecilia Reynolds is dean of education at the U of S. She said the university plans to expand its Aboriginal education programs in the areas of research and distance education, and to create new science programs for recent high school grads. Also included in the plans is creation of an Aboriginal research centre.

The research centre will take a new approach to academic research, which has historically been criticized for not involving Aboriginal people in research being done within their communities, Reynolds explained. Instead of merely conducting research on Aboriginal communities, the research centre will involve Aboriginal people in ways in which they will benefit.

"A lot of the criticism is that the research gets done and the researchers get their publications and their money and everything but the community gets nothing and then even the results don't make anything better in the community. So this research centre is designed to turn all that around and to start with the community, involve the community and feed back into the community," Reynolds said.

"It's a very different research approach which really means we often would take a group of people from the research centre and they would visit with a community, say a grand council such as the Prince Albert Grand Council. And they would then work with us to formulate a series of research questions."

People in the communities will receive training in how to create a questionnaire and conduct an interview, how to collect oral histories, and how to read a treaty and analyze historical documents.

The college of education has also set its sights on developing doctoral and masters programs that will link up with universities in Hawaii and Australia. Reynolds said the program would allow people in one country to learn about Aboriginal issues within the other participating countries. Student exchanges between the three countries are another possibility.

"We would learn from another (about) what we are doing in each other's countries in regards to land claims, acquisitions issues. So I know in Hawaii, they have immersion schools in Hawaiian languages. I know that the teaching of Cree, Dene and Soto are big issues here and how are we going to preserve our languages," said Reynolds.

Delivery of graduate education programs to Aboriginal people in remote communities is in the works as well.

"What we are wanting to do is start up some distance delivery master's of education programs aimed at Aboriginal people and we call it distributed learning," Reynolds said. "They might have to come to a central location in a northern remote area but they could pick their course up then through computer technology and simulcast television.

"A variety of distance education or distributed learning techniques could be applied to the delivery of programs at the graduate level. A lot of people are having a lot of trouble, and some of it isn't just the distance, it's their family situation. They can't leave their children very easily and come and get this graduate education," Reynolds said.

In addition to the programs aimed at graduate students, the college has plans to create a bachelor of science (B.Sc.) as well as bachelor of education (B.Ed.) program that grant entry to students right out of high school. It is hoped this will encourage more Aboriginal students to go into the sciences and, more specifically, to teach that subject in elementary and secondary schools.

"They shy away from the sciences and the math because they tend to be taught in very colonial kinds of ways. So some of what we're doing is introducing Indigenous knowledge approaches to math and sciences. The B.Sc. and B.Ed. program would also be striving to teach math and science differently and increase success rates in he high schools and elementary schools through teaching it differently, teaching it better in some ways," said Reynolds.

"I think you can see that (the programs) affect one another. So having the centre helps us have the B.Sc. program, helps us have the enhancement to the TEP (Teacher Education Program) (and) helps us have the secondary program. So the centre, the research program, is in some ways the driver of all of that because you have to have research to make all those things work well."