One of the many good things that came out of my Bachelor of Education from UNBC (go Timberwolves) was a refinement of my educational philosophy. When I was at the University of Saskatchewan, I wrote an extended gardening analogy as my philosophy of education as a future university professor and was quite pleased with myself (the lectures being like bees pollinating the fertile minds of my students blah, blah, blah) but that wasn't really how I felt about education, it was a result of doing a Ph.D. in English Literature and being focused on the image rather than the actuality of education.
Now, my educational philosophy is more simply put. I believe in teaching students to value themselves and where they are from. And I believe that public education is a field leveller. No matter where kids are starting from, they all deserve a quality education and I will provide the best education I can to every child I teach, whether it's for one day at a teacher on call or for an entire year as a classroom teacher, or for years as part of the staff at a school (because kids learn from all of the people on a staff, not just the teacher in their classroom).
I wrote a couple of philosophy papers during my final semesters at UNBC. A refined version is below, but it's long. The short version is: I want to teach about where I am and help students understand that they are important and that their place in the world is valued.
Continue Reading for Nicole's Educational Philosophy:
I’m going to start by telling you a story, it’s short, but it illustrates a pivotal point in my life. If this were a traditional fairy tale, I would probably start with long ago and far away, and while it does feel long ago, it was not far away, it was here in Prince George, on the banks of the Fraser River where College Heights used to be wild but is now a sub-sub-division of giant houses. When I was a teen, I spent a lot of time wandering through that wooded area with my friends, learning the paths and trials, observing how as the seasons changed the trees and plants changed with them and I got to know the patterns of that place well, but I never had a guide to that place, I did not know it beyond my personal experience there and I wish I had. I wish someone had helped me learn the names of the plants, had shown me how to look for signs of animal life and had talked to me about how the river shaped the land around it. I did not know why people chose to settle here and I never read stories about the people in my community. I knew more about the Mississippi River than I did about the Fraser. But we don’t live on the Mississippi, we live on the Fraser and we should be proud of that and celebrate the river and our community that exists where the rivers meet.
When I moved back to Prince George a couple of years ago, I went looking for the places I knew and I found most of them and when I found them, I found peace again. Living away had taken a toll I did not realize until I came back. Everywhere I lived, I searched for community and I put down roots. I made a mostly sub-conscious decision to get to know the history of those places and I felt like I belonged, but when I returned to Prince George, I realized what belonging to a place really meant. I realized I knew the seasonal patterns of the river and the community here better than anywhere else I ever lived even though I had not formally studied Prince George. I do not know the history of Prince George the way I know the history of other places I have lived like Saskatoon or Wolfville, Nova Scotia, but I know my history in Prince George and that makes a bigger difference in my life. I would like to be the guide I wish I had for my students. I want my students to value what they already know simply by living here, to recognize that they have a foundational knowledge that they can add to through education. I want to help them decide what they want to learn and to base that learning around Prince George and our place here because of the ties my students have to this place and the connections they can make to their own knowledge so that they feel empowered and can claim ownership over their learning.
Since returning to Prince George, I have made a conscious effort to learn all I can about this place. To learn the history, to learn the language of the people that first settled here - because I believe that language can tell me more about this land than just about anything else -and to consciously look at the geography and the plants and animals that live here, to observe the weather patterns and really know this place empirically as well as spiritually.
Miranda Wright’s model based on the seasons speaks to my general philosophy of teaching and education. She explains that “the basic premise was to use the four seasons as a vehicle for discussion. The seasons allow for cyclical change: birth, growth, maturity, and reflection, much like the birth of new plants and animals in spring, the growth associated with summer, the maturity or harvest of fall, and the reflection and celebrations of winter” (139). Education is necessarily a cyclical process where educators and learners work together to create and nurture learning to maturity and then reflect on the process. As a new teacher, I am constantly trying new methods of instruction to see if they best meet my learners’ needs, watching how my students respond and then reflecting on how to refine or adapt the process to make it more effective.
Beyond the land and the influence of Wright’s seasonal, cyclical model, I think community and the role of the individual within a community is a further foundation of my teaching philosophy. I want my students to understand that they belong to a community and that they have a role in that community. I want them to know the history of our community and the impacts our community has on the land, both positive and negative. I also want my students to understand the cultures that make up our community and how those cultures interacted in the past and how they continue to interact now. There may be some difficult lessons related to the complexities of our community, our history of colonization, the systemic racism that still exists and the ways cultures have clashed, but ultimately, I want my students to feel proud of their community and to feel a sense of belonging and I want them to feel valued and to value the other members of our community.
I strongly believe that we should be teaching our students about where they actually live and what they can actually see, touch, and experience before we send them looking outward into the rest of the world. It is not that the rest of the world should be ignored, but simply that where we are has significance and should be celebrated and known. I want my students to be proud of the place they belong and I believe that pride of place will translate into their own lives as they recognize their role as part of the school community, the larger community where we live and as stewards of the land they belong to. If we give our students a sense of place, and belonging that they can carry with them in their hearts and minds, they will be successful even if they leave this place because they will know there is always somewhere to return to where they will be accepted and known.
Wright, M. (2000). The Circle We Call Community: “As a community, you all have to pull together.” In Maenette Kape’ahiokalani Padeken Ah Nee-Benham and Joanne Elizabeth Cooper (Eds.) Indigenous Educational Models for Contemporary Practice: In Our Mother’s Voice. (pp. 135-144). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.
