Since 1975 McGill’s Office of First Nations and Inuit Education (OFNIE) has partnered with First Nations and Inuit education authorities throughout Quebec to deliver community-based teacher education programs and professional development.
Now, thanks to a major gift of almost $2 million from the Rideau Hall Foundation (RHF), OFNIE has a unique opportunity to improve its programs and grow its pool of expert First Nations and Inuit instructors.
OFNIE is one of seven Indigenous-led teacher-education programs across Canada to receive funding from the RHF through its Indigenous Teacher Education Initiative, which is investing more than $13 million in community-driven and Indigenous-led programs. Made possible by the Mastercard Foundation, the initiative aims to enrich the education system with 10,000 new First Nations, Inuit, and Métis teachers.
Located within the Faculty of Education, OFNIE offers certificate programs in Indigenous Language and Literacy Education; Education, First Nations and Inuit Studies; and Inclusive Education; two Bachelor of Education tracks, one for Kindergarten/Elementary, First Nations and Inuit Studies and another for certified teachers (a unique program designed specifically for certified teachers currently teaching in elementary schools); as well as a Master of Arts in Education and Society.
Everything at OFNIE – from program design, recruitment, and development, all the way to graduation and instructor preparation – is done in collaboration with its six partner schoolboards: Kativik Ilisarniliriniq, the Cree School Board, the Naskapi Education Committee, the Listuguj Education Directorate, the Kahnawà:ke Education Centre, and the Mohawk Language Custodian Association of Kanehsatà:ke. And the partnerships are growing. This fall, OFNIE will be launching new program deliveries with Mamu Tshishkutamashutau Innu Education (MTIE) in Labrador and Gesgapegiag Education Services.
The RHF grant will allow OFNIE to take a step back and look at its programs from a wider perspective – to hear from its instructors and partners holistically about what it needs to do to improve instruction and curriculum in classes.
McGill graduates at convocation in 2022.
Bethany Douglas is a Post-Secondary Distance Counselor with the Kahnawà:ke Education Centre. Part of her role is to coordinate the in-community Bachelor of Education program offered through OFNIE.
The first Kahnawà:ke cohort of the program graduated in fall 2022, and she’s working on building the program for the next cohort. “There are so many opportunities within the programs offered by OFNIE. There’s a lot to build on, and the work is exciting,” she says.
Coordinators like Douglas gather once a year to review programs. She says a similar gathering for program instructors could be greatly beneficial.
“I would like to see a symposium of all the partners, all the instructors, to create a dialogue on best practices. Even though each partner is unique, we do face a lot of similar barriers to success.”
Charlene Erless, who is Coordinator of Professional Development with the Cree School Board, also sees the value in gathering instructors from the different partners.
“We call them Knowledge Keepers, the people who take care of our culture and our language,” she explains. “The role of the Knowledge Keepers is to pass on their knowledge to other people. We use them as instructors, so they can pass on their knowledge to the student teachers and the student teachers pass it on to the students they’ll be teaching in the future.”
It’s been a long-term goal of OFNIE’s to do curriculum mapping and look at ways of better supporting its instructors, says Stephen Peters, OFNIE’s director. “This is an opportunity for us to work with the partners and our instructors who teach in the program to improve the quality of teaching and learning.”
OFNIE will use the grant to create resource packages for its different courses and to make sure that its current instructors are supported to the greatest degree possible.
In addition to investing in its existing instructors, OFNIE will work to increase its number of instructors by engaging McGill’s growing Indigenous faculty community to help further connect to a broader Indigenous education community, helping to identify potential instructors who could travel to communities to teach one of the OFNIE courses.
Working within and across partnerships
About two-thirds of OFNIE’s instructors are based in the communities where they teach.
The grant gives OFNIE the opportunity to work with its instructors across communities to identify ways to improve courses and curriculum, map out the programs, improve resources for instructors – and ultimately generate new ideas about the best ways of doing in-community teacher education.
Erless notes that the Cree School Board did curriculum mapping for its four Cree language courses and it was very successful. She sees that it could be helpful for other courses and programs.
“Get everyone together to do curriculum mapping and course planning. I think that would be beneficial for everyone: For the students, the program, the instructors. They can share ideas. If we put all the instructors together, everybody has their different opinions and everybody’s different,” she says.
“This grant will allow us to learn from our instructors about how we can better deliver our courses and serve the needs of our students and community,” says Peters.
The first step is outreach and engagement with instructors, students, and alumni to understand what directions and needs they see. Then OFNIE can work with its instructors to consider how to best meet those needs and ideas.
Retreats will bring together instructors to learn from one another and to do collaborative professional development.
Instructors will have opportunities to direct how courses are taught and how they could be improved. “OFNIE has already been doing this sort of thing, but the grant will allow it to happen on a bigger scale,” says Peters.
Every course delivered through OFNIE is different depending on the partnership, but with this grant OFNIE really wants to work across partnerships.
“We can learn a lot from each other, partner to partner,” says Douglas. “And I think OFNIE can learn a lot from us as well.”