A)

I feel as though my upbringing was very generic and relatable to most people who live in a middle class white family. I was read the basic stories when I was young like Dr. Suess and The Giving Tree, books and stories that taught what it meant to be a better person. Once I got into school I feel those same principles were being taught with similar books. The bias I saw tended to be focussed on the race and professions of the people, a lot were farmers working with their animals and the kids in the stories were all very cheerful, and on top of that most of the characters were white. What these biases taught me is that there is a very specific type of person or people that are represented in these stories, that along with the fact that I did not see a person of colour in my classrooms until about grade3 my view on the world was very limited. It becomes very important for people to realize that there are multiple ways to be viewing the world, in my opinion the best way to challenge these biases is to be getting more younger people so to speak exposed to other views besides their own.

B)

The stories I saw as I said earlier represented a mainly white character base. It seems the only truth that seemed to be represented was the western European views on what people should be doing.

When I think back to my education I often think of late elementary school up in to high school. And in this context I think they are the most relevant years of developing the kind of citizen I am. I do not really recall doing a lot of community activities in school. What I did do recall though was sports, I loved to play sports and be apart of a team. it was on these teams that I learned a lot of very important life lessons about how to be just an all around better person. Respect was valued above everything else in sports, especially respect towards the coaches and other players. There were a few times where I learned how to better respect people the hard way when I misbehaved and would not be allowed to play in the next game and experiences like that broke my heart. Playing organized sport, either through the city leagues or the school leagues helped to create that base on which I built myself as a good citizen.

I do feel though that my limited experiences with other community things kind of slowed down my citizenship development and I do regret not participating more in other school activities and volunteering.

I think that teaching treaty ed in schools is going to important no matter what, even if there are no First Nations students in the school the information that is provided with some treaty ed and First Nations knowledge is beneficial to all students not just the students who are apart of that culture. If it were me in this situation with the teachers being very closed minded about the content that is being taught, I would try and seek help from people outside the staff. Maybe community members or teachers from other districts. And after I had looked for help from others, I would try and use the information I had gotten and implement it into the class in little pieces.

Treaty ed has become more important in recent years and will continue to be important for years to come so it is good to get students used to learning about some of these topics in order for them to properly understand why it is being taught. Learning about the past is the best way to understand the faults of some of our ancestors so we do not repeat them. We are all treaty people and should all be knowledgeable of what took place. In my understanding, being a treaty person is saying that we all live on treaty ground and are a part of the deals that were made a long time ago, and we must still honour those deals.

Part 1:

In this article Levin says that schools just like everything else are affected by public policies and governments, it is these governments and policies that end up deciding what will be included with in the curriculum. Many of the people within power who have the tools to change and revise the existing curriculum are not educators, which ends up making it harder for teachers trying to get across what is actually needed, and in the eyes of many educators these officials and the policies they produce are very unpopular. those same teachers and educators who are unhappy also believe that politics themselves should not be imposed upon schools at all.

Aside from the fact that the changes made are often unpopular, it is good to see that these changes and revisions are being made based on some research and findings. These politicians are probably doing the best they can with what they have. Developing a curriculum and deciding what is important is a very difficult job, and not one that I would want to do, so although I am not making excuses for those in power, I am just sympathizing with their difficulties and challenges they face. It is a little upsetting to see and understands how large a role the government and politics play in the decisions of educating the youth, but I also understand that this is how the system is run.

Part 2:

I believe that the main connection between these two articles is the involvement that the government has on what is to be taught and learned within schools. Levin’s article focusses on the policies and the government within the curriculum, and in the Treaty Education article we are shown that the actual Ministry of Education has given and recognizes the right of the governments role in deciding the curriculum.

A few of the tensions that come to my mind when thinking of this are the willingness to learn about these differing perspectives from the students themselves, asking myself would there be any pushback from the children and their families? and who would be responsible to teach this new addition. Because the mandatory teaching of First Nations heritage came in 2007, I would assume that many of the active teachers did not have a formal education on these new topics so they would probably feel pretty uncomfortable teaching it at first, and there is a good chance that some of these teachers may have had a feeling of guilt surrounding the topic.

This weeks article ‘Learning from Place: A Return to Traditional Mushkegowuk Ways of Knowing’, talks about a research project on the Cree ideas of land, life, and the environment. The ideas discussed in this reading were centered around how the Cree people were making an attempt at decolonization and reinhabitation in order to take back their land. One of the attempts that can be made to decolonize is to get the younger generation participating in tradition ways of knowing as a way of reviving the culture, this action is seen as a sort of resistance to mainstream ideas that were introduced to these people.

As a future teacher I would hope to be able to provide my students with this important knowledge of culture and heritage, hoping that they will become more knowledgeable of what is really important and what Cree and Indigenous people are doing in order to reclaim their culture and tradition. I am hoping to make the class an open environment that students will enjoy and not feel like they are being force fed knowledge that they do not care about. I believe that everyone is a life long learner so there will always be new ways to integrate these concepts into the classroom.

I believe that the idea of a good student is someone who is quiet unless being asked a question, sitting still, doing their work when it is asked of them, and they also achieve good marks. These traits that supposedly make a good student are what most people expect of all students, but it just can’t be the reality for most. Whether they have some behavioural problems or ADHD or ADD they may have troubles in school, and it is these traits that are seen as a hinderance that make someone a “bad” student. The idea of a good and bad student have been ingrained in most peoples minds at this point and it just common sense. It is a very one sided view on a good student, and this view makes it easier on the students who are naturally good and harder on the students who struggle. Once a student falls into the pool of other students who are struggling it is difficult for them to pull themselves out which will consequently add more problems to their lives in the long run.

The topic I chose and found interesting is disability, I have decided to try and focus on disability within the curriculum. One article that I found, Disability Studies in Education: The Need for a Plurality of Perspectives on Disability by Baglieri, Susan; Valle, Jan W; Connor, David J; Gallagher, Deborah J. This article talks about the field of special education throughout the history of schooling. Disability rights have changed greatly and will continue to change. One of the first changes that disability saw was in the meaning of the word disability, into something other than just the medical term.

Another article I am looking at, Infusing Disability in the Curriculum: The Case of Saramago’s Blindness by Liat Ben-Moshe. Disability has often been seen as something negative when it does not have to be. Focussing on the aspect of “blindness” as a metaphor, and how there are some strategies on how it can be used in the classroom. Liat Ben-Moshe is an assistant professor of criminology, and disability studies at the University of Toledo.

My next steps are to do more research and look into some more articles that interest me and try to include relevant, which hopefully will not be too difficult.

Within my schooling experience the Tyler Rationale seems to be a part of the main evaluation systems in place. Everything that was taught felt like it was being taught for the sole purpose of examination, and to find out who could regurgitate the most information from class. Most of my classes only focussed on an outcome-based system. At the time that the Tyler Rationale was established schools were trying to emulate the conditions of a factory line, where you start with one thing and mold and shape it until it comes out the other side a prepared member of society ready to contribute. Now, obviously schools operate differently in the day to day processes, but I believe that the same goal of just giving what needs to be given and sending out a person to contribute to society is still implied by many school systems.

I believe the main disadvantage to the Tyler Rationale is the amount of stress put on the outcome-based approach that focusses on heavy evaluation to determine success. in my opinion this is the largest drawback because it does not take into account that there are some students who ca not handle stress of examinations, or are just bad test takers. There could also be some kind of outside problems going on with the students in their family lives. Many kids that I knew growing up had a lot of issues in their families and it was reflected in the work they did the next day at school.

But, one of the advantages to the Tyler Rationale is the organization. For the sake of the teacher the level of structure and organization would be nice. In my case I did better when things had a set structure within the classroom, and many people I know like myself, tended to thrive in an organized and well structured learning environment. But it all comes down to the type of learner each student is, because not everyone will do well in certain classroom environments. The most important thing in modern schools now is that each student is going to get the best education they possibly can and that their needs are met by the staff. Hopefully schools will continue this upward trend and become better than they have been.

In this reading we see two approaches to schooling, each very different than the other. The writer tells of their experience trying to adjust to new customs and common practices in Nepal. From this comparison between Nepal and the United States I decided on the definition of “common-sense” to be, actions within a community or culture that are so normalized in the day to day life that they are no longer questioned by any of the people in the society. For this reading the common-sense things for Nepal was the schedule of water usage in the one central area, eating habits, and schooling habits, which when compared to the common-sense practices of American people is drastically different.

It is important to notice these differences in what is considered common-sense because not every place in the world has the same ideas of what are considered common-sense practices. If everyone ignored the differences between societies then the whole world becomes ignorant, and that puts people in a position where they are creating more ignorance. The best option is being aware of these differences in common-sense. when we are aware it becomes easier to adapt and live somewhere that may have drastically different common-sense practices.