Nunavut classrooms get home-grown material

SARA MINOGUE

Nunavut’s high school students need northern content in the classroom, and six years after the territory was created, material from the department of education’s curriculum division is starting to reach teachers.

A new Aulaaqtut unit for Grade 12 is the first of four new streams of northern-content curriculum for secondary students. It focuses on health and wellness, safety, survival, citizenship and leadership. Curriculum has already been completed for Grades 10 and 11.

Aulaaqtut teaches students academic skills – reading, writing, literacy – while dealing with topics and issues that young people in Nunavut are facing in their lives.

The goal is to help students “figure out what’s going on, whether it’s in their school or in their family or in the community, and then learn how to make change related to those things that they’re seeing around them,” says Cathy McGregor, Nunavut’s director of curriculum.

The new materials are part of efforts to enhance the Nunavut curriculum based on the goals of the Nunavut government as outlined in their latest mission statement, Pinasuaqtavut: “Our education system will be built within the context of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit.”

Nunavut’s curriculum was inherited from the Northwest Territories. For the first five years of the new territory, the department of education focused on producing materials in Inuktitut for elementary school students studying in their native language until Grade 3 or 4.

Now, the focus is shifting to creating northern content from an Inuit perspective at the higher grades.

“Our curriculum is based on both the southern perspective about what students need to learn… but also, what are the fundamental principals, values and content that should be learned so that they have a good grounding in their own culture,” McGregor says.

Along with Aulaaqtut, three other strands are still to come, focusing on communications and fine arts; math and problem solving; and geography and environmental science.

“There’s a huge effort here to research with elders what should be taught from an Inuit perspective,” McGregor says. “That’s ongoing work and will be ongoing work because it hasn’t been gathered up and translated into curriculum before. Not in the depth that it’s being done now.”

Also new this fall are English-as-a-second-language unites for Grades 7, 8 and 9.

About 96 per cent of elementary students in Nunavut are Inuit, and teachers are encouraged to approach teaching from an ESL perspective, even for kids who appear to speak English conversationally.

“That doesn’t mean teaching them the word ‘apple’,” McGregor says, “but it means being more conscious of vocabulary and new concepts in the way you teach.”

To produce all of these materials, the department of education relies on Inuit educators, elders and southern educators.

Charlotte Borg, a long-term teacher in Iqaluit, wrote the Grade 9 ESL unit focusing on children’s rights. She says that the new material is “really about excellence in our schools.”

The units provide teachers with lesson plans for hands-on activities, and should cut down classroom preparation time, while making the classroom experience more uniform for kids across Nunavut.

Also new this fall is a new Inuktitut language arts unit for Grade 12 and some new Inuktitut language books for elementary students.