Case Study | Benaadizig-yaat Gchitwaa Waaseyaa-teg/Gajihsda gwe:ni:ye:geh (People’s Place of the Sacred Light)
Leading Organization
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto
Location
Toronto, Ontario
Overview
In 2015, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission called on the education faculties at universities across the country to “educate teachers on how to integrate Indigenous knowledge and teaching methods into classrooms.” Many, including the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), had already launched initiatives to give students the knowledge and tools they would need to teach future pupils about Indigenous knowledges, albeit within the bounds of a Eurocentric classroom. But now, OISE is poised to take the call to action further with a new digitally immersive learning space that utilizes cutting edge 360 audio and visual technologies. This ground-breaking room holds space for learning and researching the issues of pressing concern to Indigenous peoples and their communities, in particular, decolonial approaches to the ways we teach educators how to bring land-based pedagogical and curricular practices into their own classrooms. Further, it engages Indigenous and settler-peoples in a digital environment that supports a Land-based framework and its potential for enabling Indigenous resurgence through the ethics of relationality. This digitally immersive learning room serves as a key focal point for graduate Indigenous Land-based teaching and learning. The uniqueness of this state-of-the-art innovative technology space is the ways it is grounded in Indigenous philosophies and learning experiences. This could also have great significance in the ways these technologies can be brought into K-12 schools and curricular practices. This would create more inclusive and accessible classrooms for all learners through an Indigenous land-based lens.
“I realized listening to the ceremony and sitting in this room with community has raised the importance and the reality of the potential that this project has.”
— Associate Professor Clare Brett, former Chair of OISE's Department of Curriculum, Teaching & Learning
Engagement and Solutions
It is unlikely that any school in Ontario has no Indigenous students, yet many have no Indigenous teachers. Meanwhile, numerous studies have demonstratedthat Canada’s teaching body does not reflect the student diversity in its K–12 schools—a situation thatexacerbates inequitable outcomes. When students miss out on culturally relevant, trauma-informed and dignity drivenknowledges and practices, they are denied opportunities to connect with their cultures and identify with representative role models. The People’s Place of the Sacred Light is a direct response to such gaps in Canada’s education system. Given the inevitable future of generative AI in education, this combines Indigenous land-based learning with digitally immersive technologies, empowering future educators to pair the connectivity of the virtual world with the culturally grounded learning opportunities that land-based education offers.
Outcomes and Future Vision
Benaadizig-yaat Gchitwaa Waaseyaa-teg/Gajihsdagwe:ni:ye:geh means “People’s Place of the Sacred Light” in Anishinabek and Kanien'kéha languages respectively, and that is precisely what OISE intends to grow through this new space which also serves as a study and research space for Indigenous students to connect and reflect. Altogether, OISE hopes these resources, paired with the land-based and culturally relevant focus, will helps its future educators to bloom.
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