Sustaining Aboriginal Identity Through Distance Education
Channel: calienteking1
Date: 2018-04-29

In my assignment, I use a method known as arts-based educational research, this takes shape as a digital story, which will include images, voice recording, music, and texts. My video will communicate the hypothesis which I will be researching along with why my hypothesis is important. The active destruction of Aboriginal languages in schools, continues in many ways, through the government-imposed curriculum. Aboriginal schools must follow the English or French curriculum and universities only offer to teach degrees in English or French. The imposing of these dominating languages on Aboriginal people is cultural genocide which is the systematic destruction of Aboriginal traditions, Aboriginal values, Aboriginal languages, Aboriginal culture, and Aboriginal identity. Systematically, these imposed English or French curriculums have much disproportionate academic achievement and engagement gap, therefore, Aboriginal students are pushed out of schools and condemned to a life of poverty, addiction, incarceration, and suicide. Therefore, Aboriginal people must direct their children's education, by developing a suitable philosophy of education based on Aboriginal values adapted to modern living. These include discussions about new means of organizing teaching, and learning, and challenges to and effects on multiple practices in education, including pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment. In this hypothesis, Aboriginal people integrate distance education into Aboriginal schools with its focus on Aboriginal/tribal/First Nations languages and efforts to forge partnership within the community. Therefore, Aboriginals who identify as Micmac can learn to speak the Micmac language, Micmac history, Micmac treaties, Micmac solidarity even though they are not at the school offering these lessons or near Micmac reservation. These are strategies that destabilize colonial power and hopefully, decolonize.