Michele Tanaka

Expanding Health Literacy : Indigenous Youth Creating Videos

How can creating videos contribute to expanding health literacy? This article describes a participatory action research project with a group of Canadian Indigenous youth and their teachers. As the youth explored their interests about health and wellness through the artistic creation of videos, they developed a critical consciousness about community, culture, confidence, and control. They became mobilized and obtained information about health and wellness that allowed for the development and expansion of their notion of health literacy that included cultural conceptions of health and wellness.

Resistance through Re-Presenting Culture: Aboriginal Student Filmmakers and a Participatory Action Research Project on Health and Wellness.

This article focuses on a participatory research project designed to promote student use of digital video to explore conceptions of health and wellness. We have viewed aspects of student resistance through the cultural perspectives that guide the Aboriginal education programs involved with the study. In presenting this piece, we have experimented with a number of different styles to represent the different cultural, ethical, and educational dimensions of the research project and to advance a form of resistance to standardized representations of research results. Through video re ‐ presentation of culture, students resisted the privileging of text and dominant cultural constructions of their personal identities. Key words: digital video, First Nations education, multiple literacies, health education, community and university partnerships Cet article porte sur un projet de recherche collectif visant a promouvoir l’utilisation de la video numerique chez les eleves en vue d’explorer diverses conceptions de la sante et du bien ‐ etre. Les auteurs analysent certains aspects de la resistance des eleves a travers les perspectives culturelles qui orientent les programmes d’enseignement a l’intention des autochtones compris dans l’etude. Dans leur recherche, les auteurs ont fait appel a differents styles de representation des diverses dimensions culturelles, ethiques et pedagogiques de l’etude et ont promu une forme de resistance aux representations traditionnelles des resultats de recherche. A travers la re ‐ presentation video de la culture, les eleves ont refuse d’accorder une place privilegiee au texte et aux constructions culturelles dominantes de leurs identites personnelles. Mots cles : video numerique, enseignement dispense aux autochtones, litteraties multiples, education en matiere de sante, partenariat entre la communaute et l’universite.

Transforming pedagogies: pre‐service reflections on learning and teaching in an Indigenous world

Through personal narratives, pre‐service teachers recount their experiences from a course based in Indigenous pedagogy within the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria. These narratives were drawn from the assigned daily reflection journals of pre‐service teachers. They highlight how their personal understandings of teaching and learning were transformed. In the context of a Lekwungen and Liekwelthout pole carving course, they developed a deep understanding of the Indigenous concepts of Celhcelh—the development of a sense of responsibility for personal learning within the context of a learning community; Kat’il’a—the act of becoming still—slowing down, despite an ingrained and urgent need to know and desire for busy‐ness; Cwelelep—the discomfort and value of being in a place of dissonance, uncertainty and anticipation; and Kamucwkalha—the energy current that indicates the emergence of a communal sense of purpose. The writers share their personal reflections of these concepts and how they affected their views of teaching and learning.

Committed to Transformative Inquiry Three Teacher Educators’ Entry Points Into the Mentoring Role

Teacher educators often wonder about how best to prepare teachers for practice within a complex rather than a mechanistic system. As teacher educators, we facilitate a transformative inquiry (TI) course in which students investigate personally meaningful topics reflexively and relationally within larger educational and sociocultural contexts. This braided piece explores our own significant experiences with TI and how these experiences inform what we do as we mentor students through their own experience. By describing our personal entry points, we foreground some of the ways in which we work together to collaboratively and continuously revision the course. By making explicit our entry points into TI, we aim to reaffirm what matters to us as educators to improve our ability to deliberately engage in effective mentoring and to affirm our connections to the passions that sustain us amidst the many challenges and pressures that we face in our practice.

Transformative Inquiry in teacher education: evoking the soul of what matters

Teaching requires the navigation of an intricate terrain of complex and often overlapping issues, many of which extend beyond the classroom setting. Teachers are uniquely placed to influence large numbers of learners beyond the delivery of prescribed curriculum, and therefore need to be particularly careful and aware of their professional ways of being~doing~knowing. Transformative Inquiry (TI) is a specific approach offered to pre-service teachers that responds to complexity by embracing personal, social and environmental change. Through vignettes of her own teaching and learning, the contributor describes how the TI approach developed over her own professional career. These vignettes align with pre-service teachers’ experience of the process and evoke the soul of what matters for educators who strive towards deep transformation in their practice of teaching and schooling. Significant elements discussed include: thinking partners; emotional engagement; learner autonomy; disrupting binaries; generous listening; relational accountability; accessing other ways of knowing; and reflexivity.

Transformative Inquiry While Learning∼Teaching Entry Points Through Mentor∼Mentee Vulnerability

In Transformative Inquiry (TI), pre-service teachers explore issues about which they are personally passionate in order to enter into the delicate work of transformation. We examine how shared vulnerability within three mentor~mentee pairs leads to new pedagogical possibilities. Michele and Vanessa discuss poetry as a way of entering into TI and how Michele became decentered as mentor as she was carried along in Vanessa’s knowing around poetry. Maureen and Jenn describe how, when faced with pervasive class dynamics of apathetic resistance, they opened themselves more fully to vulnerability. Diana describes the tension of showing interest in Liz’s inquiry without providing Liz with a “direction,” and Liz describes how she resisted traditional academic teachings about how to be a “good” student. Themes of safe enough space, emotion as catalyst, shifting power between learner and teacher, humble engagement, and holistic growth are overlaid with similar themes found by other transformative educators.