Extending my Online PLC Engagement and Making a Temporary and Important Pivot ~ PME 810 My e-Journal - Entry #11

In this post I was hoping to report on the extension of my engagement and participation in the Higher Ed Learning Collective. I have been searching through the additional hashtags to see what might be a good fit for my context of practice. Originally I was hoping to engage in #pedagogy and #inclusivelearning but given the recent gruesome discovery in Kamloops, B.C. I have decided to explore the Indigenous Education space within this collective. This is extremely important and applicable to my context of practice as within my portfolio, I supervise and coordinate service delivery of Indigenous Student Success (ISS) teachers across the division. We have four ISS teachers that provide support to classroom teachers with their implementation of Indigenous Education/Treaty Education in three week block residencies. 

Due to the recent discoveries and in the spirit of respect and recognition of this devastating news, the role of our ISS teachers continues to be in support of classroom teachers with appropriate texts, lesson ideas and resources to support shared understandings of residential schools and the recent findings in Kamloops.

We understand that a show of support for our Indigenous communities who may be reliving trauma associated with attendance at residential schools, personal family loss and intergenerational trauma is necessary and appropriate.

 As a result of this, I am called upon to work with my team to plan for respectful and appropriate divisional responses to this situation. In an effort to support our staff/students and community with this we quickly called upon the team to plan.

As a system response, we were directed to fly our flags at half mast for four consecutive days, as well as to hold a moment of silence in respect of the lost lives of so many children. We selected the moment of silence to coincide with 2:15 p.m., for obvious reasons. 

In addition to these actions, I proposed to my team of ISS teachers that we prepare and offer smudge/cleansing opportunities for all division staff and students to engage, if they so wish. The most unique detail of this smudge is that it needs to be done fully through TEAMS, online, as we are all in remote learning context due to the pandemic. 

So, how do we do a smudge in a virtual platform? What does this look like, sound like, feel like? We came up with a plan, and more details coming soon... In my school division, we have our own hashtag #accomplish anything, and this response was evidence that as a system we truly are able to accomplish something that would not have been considered possible.