Northern Teaching: The Land and the Classroom

Canada's newest territory, Nunavut, faces great challenges as it works to create a government, assign responsibilities to new departments and agencies and begin governing the thousands of people living within its huge boundaries. One of the government's numerous tasks is education.

In 1996, 56 percent of Nunavut's population was younger than 25 years of age, and close to one third of residents age 15 and older had less than a Grade 9 education. A requirement of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, which set up the territory, is that Nunavut's public service will eventually be 85 percent Inuit — reflecting the proportion of the territory's population that is Inuit.

Carmie MacLean's experience at Tusarvik School in Repulse Bay is a good example of the kinds of challenges and changes confronting education in Nunavut.

When Maclean arrived in Repulse Bay after nearly three decades of teaching in southern Canada, she quickly realized that "many of my standard expectations and my familiar teaching strategies had to go straight out the window." This was because of the profound differences between the culture of the northern nomadic people of Nunavut — still within two generations of living off the land — and the technological and urbanized culture of the South, where she had developed those teaching strategies.

MacLean discovered that the children's and community's understanding of what teaching was — how it was done and what it was for — were very different from hers. To be able to teach in Repulse Bay, "I had to find and build some kind of balance between the culture of the North and the encroaching culture of the South, between their learning what they need on the land and what they need in the classroom to function successfully in their rapidly changing world."

She identified and tackled several challenges.

Since school is seen as only one of several ways to learn, what would be called "chronic absenteeism" in the South was one problem, though many of the parents of Repulse Bay didn't see it that way. Learning to live "on the land" and the annual springtime custom of extended visits to distant relatives took children away from school for long periods of time. Staying up late and then sleeping late also kept students away from school. "It's difficult to teach the sequential development of skills and knowledge when the population of the class changes from day to day," remarks MacLean.

Seeing absenteeism as a critical barrier to her students' learning, MacLean began by rewarding perfect attendance with Muffin Saturdays. Children with a month's perfect attendance were invited to her home to bake blueberry muffins and enjoy them with juice, milk and fruit.

A Perfect Attendance Wall in the school foyer was next. Any child in the school with a month of perfect attendance had their picture displayed on the wall. (Interestingly, the Perfect Attendance Wall also provided students with a lesson in ownership and respect for property. Personal photos are rare in the community and initially the pictures disappeared from the wall as soon as they were put up. MacLean recruited parents and fellow teachers in the search and recovered all but one photo. Its place was filled with a simple note about the problems of stealing.)

Another challenge Maclean faced was that English — the language of instruction beginning in Grade 4 — is a second language for all students and often not spoken at home. As a result, the students were very far behind national or international standards for their grade.

Maclean felt that improved English skills were crucial to her students' overall educational success. She set out to improve these skills through a variety of approaches, one being a daily letter to the class written on the blackboard. These letters introduced new topics, commented on moral issues or discipline problems and introduced new vocabulary. They also served as a springboard to further oral and written language development.

The letters also connected family and community events to the classroom, revealing the links between school life and daily life. The students looked forward to each letter and began each day with reading practice that was personal, applicable and relevant. In addition, MacLean encouraged students to practise their writing skills in daily journal entries. Transferring the familiar communication style of oral conversation into writing, and writing practice, she rewarded each journal entry with a personal reply.

As well, the students were constantly exposed to the idea that good academic performance naturally brings its own rewards. Students with the required literacy skills earned the privilege of an email account and use of the school digital camera for classroom displays. In this way, students not only improved their English skills, they learned the use of modern technology in an interesting and practical application. email and the Internet gave these isolated children much needed contact with the outside world.

This connection between school life and daily life, and the related idea of planning, anticipating and working towards what one might be doing 5, 10 or 15 years down the road was another seemingly unfamiliar notion for many of MacLean's students.

As an example, she relates that in her first week at Tusarvik School, she asked her students to write a short paragraph on what they'd like to be when they grew up. "It was difficult for them to understand the assignment, as most had not given this idea very much, if any, thought."

This explained another teaching challenge: homework. The idea of taking books home to do work was a poorly developed habit. MacLean began by sending a note home at lunchtime to parents of children who hadn't completed their homework. (She also sent notes home praising a student's success at school.) The note was to be signed and sent back to school the same day. She found that a follow-up phone call regarding homework was sometimes necessary and parents usually expressed a desire to help in this regard.

This simple initiative (one that's commonly used in the South) was quite successful in changing attitudes about homework. Students weren't used to taking such immediate responsibility for their actions or to assuming responsibility for the completion of a task. Their parents were not accustomed to such immediate feedback about their children's actions. Most importantly, though, this measure presented and reinforced the idea that academic learning can and should be a lifelong habit.

MacLean found much of the standard curriculum was not suited to her northern students; for example, many had never seen a cow or a dandelion. She spent hours doing research, developing lesson plans and resources more relevant for her students and their educational situation and needs.

To coincide with the community fishing derby, for example, her students made paper fish, wrote stories about how they caught their fish, took digital photos of each other holding up their "catch" and later presented the project to parents and others in the community. She encouraged her students to teach her what they knew as she taught them. Field trips to examine geographical and geological features became lessons in snowshoeing or fire building as well.

The newer learning tools — computers, the Internet, and digital and video cameras — are invaluable to northern students, MacLean finds. Though modern technology isn't seen as a frill any more, it's still expensive, especially in the North. But MacLean argues that the expense is worthwhile for her students, because it gives them much needed exposure to the outside world and culture. "Even if a student never leaves Repulse Bay," she says, "email and the Internet will keep them connected to the rest of the world."

In her time teaching in Repulse Bay, MacLean learned that broadening her students' horizons enough to contemplate their future opportunities was equally, if not more, important than the academic material she was teaching. "Helping them see past Repulse Bay to the outside world actually made teaching the academic material easier," she reports. "When they saw that learning to read or to speak English had a purpose beyond school, learning began to make sense to them."

This is the task of all education — showing children their future and then helping them get ready for it. Nunavut is preparing its students for the future, readying them to live, work and succeed in the technological global economy, while at the same time preserving and maintaining their own cultural identity.