One of the things that we were thinking about when planning and designing this
course is that a lot of teachers would be drawn to the content.
certainly since it is a course that offered out of OISE, the Ontario
Institute for Studies and Education and that it is called Aboriginal World Views
and Education. I thought a lot we'd get a lot of
teachers coming to understand ways that they can bring this material into their
classrooms and assist them in teaching and learning about these topics and
subjects. Now I work with a lot of teachers in
training and new teachers, and a question often comes up about how do I take this
material on in a sensitive way and in a responsible way.
And so this area of week four is dedicated to assessing resources that
we're using when we're educating ourselves or others in a classroom
environment or even beyond the classroom. So it's a way of, as we go forward and
we're looking at resources that we encounter ourselves at the library, or
online, or in media. How do we assess those resources to
determine are they, are they good sources?
And I don't like to use the word accurate.
I don't think it's always about accuracy, so much as it is about complexity, and do
these sources speak to the complexities of the issues.
What are they, addressing? What are they leaving out?
And sometimes, what we have to look at is, is what's left out in a, in a
resource, and its discussion of the issues.
So there's a few resources here about how to, analyze bias and stereotypes that are
found in resources. They're, they're certainly, designed for
teachers or budding teachers, but I think they're useful for everyone.
And also a site that looks at identifying appropriate resources, and the excellent,
excellent blog by Debbie Reese called American Indians in Children's
Literature, and it started out as kind of looking at, you know, kids' literature.
And what should be in libraries. What should we be directing people's
attention to for reading? That's, that's a good source of material
on indigenous issues. And what sort of books have been written
that are, are problematic in that way? So they, they perhaps reproduced
stereotypes or or continue to entrench the various colonial and stereotypical
thinking about aboriginal peoples. So her work actually goes beyond kids
literature too, to larger discussions of representation, so that's a good one to
look at. And I'm also including here a site that's
very close to my work, and also of Angela Nardosi, one of the teacher, teaching
assistants for the course. And that is the Deepening Knowledge site
at OISE. Deepening Knowledge is a project that has
been under way for a few years, to bring Aboriginal perspectives to the teacher
education program in a more sustained way across the various components of teacher
education, initial teacher education. And so we've developed this this site
that's full of resources that are, they are organized by the different classroom
levels curriculum tie-ins where it matters provincially.
So I apologize for the the, the kind of provincial focus of this site.
But even people beyond Ontario and even Canada have, have commented on how useful
the site is for them. There's also it's, it's continuously
under development and we're organizing it also via First Nation, so if you're
looking for particular resources by First Nation, you can search that way as well.
It continues to grow and get improved and and we certainly want more and more
people to be aware of it and use it, so please check that out as well.
All of these resources, of course, are to the side of this video lecture.
So go through them and happy hunting for good stereotypical analysis, and ways of
discovering bias in resources.
Jean-Paul RestouleAssociate Professor
