Janice Novakowski, a math consultant for the Richmond School District, is a non-Indigenous educator committed to learning about Indigenous worldviews, perspectives, knowledge, and culture.
Janice sat on the Ministry’s mathematics curriculum development team and so has insight into ways to embed Indigenous ways of knowing into mathematics teaching and learning. She explains, “they were very intentional to not include Indigenous culture in the content learning standards . . . because culture is localized.” Therefore, any particular Indigenous cultural content may not be applicable to all Nations, communities, or geographical areas. “Instead, those Indigenous worldviews and perspectives and knowledge are embedded in the curricular competencies.”
“We all have a moral and ethical and human responsibility to do the work ourselves.”
One of the ways Janice and teachers in Richmond district incorporate Indigenous culture and knowledge in their teaching is through land acknowledgement and nurturing connection to the land. They made a concerted effort to dig deep into what land acknowledgement means for mathematics, for example, by exploring measurement, shape, symmetry, and mapping to identify and classify different species and features of the land.
In one particular project, students in grades 3-5 used Google Earth and Google Maps to look at the place where they live and go to school, then went out onto the land and took pictures of their place. Back inside, the students mapped their neighbourhood while focusing on mathematical concepts of spatial reasoning, positional language, proportional reasoning, scale, and measurement.
Students then accessed the Musqueam website to look at the Musqueam place names map. They explored the places around Lulu Island (Richmond) to see how those places were named. The students realized “that those places aren’t named after someone, as is so often done in Eurocentric culture. They learned those places were named after purpose or they were describing the place, like Driftwood Place or Boiling Point.” The students then started naming the places on their maps after how they use those places and not after themselves!
Janice acknowledges teachers’ hesitancy when it comes to including Indigenous knowledge in their teaching, because there have been mistakes made in the past. But she asks us to remember: “We’re doing it with good intentions. We own the mistakes [when we make them.] And then we move forward and we learn from that.”
Janice shares a tidbit of her own journey as her parting advice (and writes thoughtfully in her own blog): “We all have a moral and ethical and human responsibility to do the work ourselves. It’s a fault in our system that we didn’t learn this in schools. Therefore, we have to take that on ourselves. We need to read, listen, watch films, go to speakers and classes that are open to the public. As educators we need to see that as part of our professional responsibilities as well.”