Creating Culturally Appropriate Curriculum

Hello Saul,
In response to you here are a couple points or so, some of which you and I have discussed before and others which are generally accepted pedagogy and strategy.
 
A Bold Step – Shared Leadership
If we can agree that Leadership is one of the keys to effective implementation, then we must take a bold step forward and commit ourselves to encourage and support our student’s voices and our student’s choices in the review, development and implementation of our school curriculum, units, lessons and activities.

To culturally enrich our lands-based and community/school-based classroom experiences we must seriously respect and encourage our students to invest in the work, the challenge of learning both traditional and innovative skill-sets.

Results
If we can agree that Leadership is one of the keys to effective implementation, then we must take a bold step forward and commit ourselves to encourage and support student decisions informing and directing the implementation process.

If we are to expect positive results we must find ways of engaging the local community as our primary learning resource, whether it be in the outside (lands/community-based) or the inside classrooms.

If we are to maintain our focus and momentum we should share our achievements and our accomplishments with a broader audience from within the local community and beyond.

The Teaching Community - A Community of Teachers
Each educator, whether a teacher, a family member or a community should be willing to recall, remember and rethink his, her or their own traditional teaching methods and be willing to adapt their particular knowledge and skill sets toward common goals shared by themselves, their community and the students.

By doing this we should be able to re-define and re-design our own teaching philosophy toward creating real and lasting partnerships with our students and our community.

The Team Approach – First Steps
Students, community members and teachers should seek to work as a team to encourage the student voice, student choice, student design, student review and student revision of culturally relevant curriculum, units, lessons and activities.

Students, community members and teachers should seek to work as a team to create and maintain a clear vision of the goals and objectives of their culturally enriched curriculum, units, lessons and activities.

Students, community members and teachers should seek to work as a team to create goals, objectives and activities which have activity-based hands-on learning activities as their starting point.

Students, community members and teachers should seek to work as a team to create and support outside and inside classroom activities that are peer, small group and team based. The classroom concept need not be confined to age groups, rather, the lands-based activities should be made of numerous age groupings to more closely remind the students of a family or community of learners.

Students, community members and teachers will be able seek to strengthen and gain acceptance of new activities as a direct result of the student's understanding of the skill-sets and lessons already learned through repetition and practice.

On a regular basis the students must be allocated time to reflect, discuss and share their experience(s) of the activities as a critical part of the curriculum, unit, lesson and activity review, development and implementation cycle.

The strength of the partnership between the students, the community and the teachers will come to light, over time, through our combined efforts to encourage and reward imagination and creativity in the development and implementation of the curriculum, the units, the lessons and the activities.

As well I wouldn't feel complete in this unless I share with you a VERY bold step I've spoken about to a number of our colleagues, including yourself. I'm referring to the idea of putting more emphasis on Arts and Athletics and tying these to the Ontario and Kwayaciiwin curricula. I'm advocating a shift in perspective which focuses more on these areas as a launch-pad for teaching all the subject areas from Math and the other sciences to language and literature.

And maybe the most important piece of this “Bold Step” is . . . .

HAVE FUN ! ! ! !