Bonnechere Valley (Eganville) — Eganville Public School (EDPS) was awarded a 2016-17 Premier’s Award for Accepting Schools.
EDPS’s submission was titled, “Learning together about Indigenous peoples and culture”.
The Premier’s Awards for Accepting Schools recognizes schools across the province that have done exceptional and innovative work in creating a safe, inclusive and accepting school environment.
“We are so pleased to receive this recognition from the Premier,” said EDPS teacher Anne George. “This award honours and acknowledges the hard work of our students, parents, community members, and staff in creating culturally responsive learning spaces. We look forward to many more years of growing and nurturing a shared vision with our community for our students.”
Data collected from student focus groups at EDPS — where the student population is about 20 percent Indigenous — indicated that students were experiencing subtle and overt bias. In response to this, school staff took on the challenging task of exploring their own biases, engaging with the local Algonquin Community to learn more about Indigenous culture and its worldview, and providing culturally responsive instruction.
The project focused on three themes; Professional Learning, Cultural Responsive Places of Learning and Mathematics.
The Professional Learning component had staff participate in a school-wide investigation into culturally responsive teaching methods. They were encouraged to reflect on what it meant to be educators of Indigenous students. As a result, staff now collaborate with community members to infuse Indigenous culture into the school and has allowed for all students in Kindergarten to Grade 3 to learn about Indigenous language and culture, focusing on the Seven Grandfather Teachings in the Character Education Program.
To create a culturally responsive place of learning, the school ensured that in addition to murals and artifacts reflecting Indigenous culture, student concerns about racism were acknowledged and addressed through assemblies and classroom discussion.
Finally, mathematics was reimagined through a four-year project involving the Algonquin’s of Pikwàkanagàn First Nation, a Lakehead University researcher and the Ministry of Education. The project explores how to incorporate Indigenous perspectives into the Ontario math curriculum, using traditional Algonquin activities such as traditional beading activities. The work helped students develop numeric, spatial and proportional reasoning and more fully understand patterning, algebra, fractions, and geometry.
