Lecturers, schooling assistants, and assist employees of the Yellowknife Schooling District No. 1 gathered by the Yellowknife River on Thursday to participate in an Indigenous language schooling day.
The objective of the day was to show the roughly 300 new and returning college employees the significance of language and tradition, in order that they will higher interact with the Dene Kede curriculum, in keeping with coordinator Andrea Harding.
“It truly is simply a chance for us to respect and interact within the cultural learnings of the world and have folks come collectively in order that they really feel that we’re supporting their skilled studying in a method that is related for them,” mentioned Jameel Aziz, superintendent for the Yellowknife college district.
Aziz says he hopes educators will be capable of take the talents and sources from this schooling day to interrupt down cultural obstacles of their school rooms and hold Indigenous languages alive.
The day began with a chief welcome and a feeding-the-fire ceremony, adopted by a keynote speech and efficiency from Juno award successful Canadian singer Susan Aglukark, who graduated herself from Yellowknife’s Sir John Franklin highschool.
Workers then spent the afternoon creating expertise in Indigenous cultural practices corresponding to soapstone carving, moose cover tanning, canoeing, beadworking and extra.
There have been additionally many alternatives for attendees to achieve familiarity with the Willideh language.
“As a younger Indigenous girl, I really feel that it is wanted increasingly,” mentioned Crystal Catholique, who’s a brand new schooling assistant at Sir John Franklin. “The lecturers with the ability to expertise what we have now been doing since I have been rising up — that they are capable of take the language with them, with the ability to present the scholars that is what is finished on this space of the Northwest Territories.”
This was additionally the primary time educators had been capable of collect en mass for the reason that begin of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Yellowknife college students return to the classroom on Aug. 29.
