My thoughts on implementing Alberta’s Teaching Quality Standards can be understood in part by my thoughts on a local work of art. I’ve revisited and spent some time sitting with a friend, the Inglewood statue Wolfe and the Sparrows, to reflect on my learning in the Bachelor of Education program (Bed) and how my understanding has evolved since I first visited this statue and explored it as a metaphor for evolution of education in Canada.

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As public educators we represent a past that includes the original Wolfe. A past that attempted to eliminate diversity from it’s past, present, and future. Our understanding of our duty to care and legal responsibilities to our students has evolved significantly over the history of our system. We continue to improve because we are better at embracing new ideas that look towards the future of education. As educators we can represent a present and a future that imagines what could be. I believe the ability to imagine the future is a powerful tool for children and youth which should also guide our own growth. Being challenged to expand our pedagogy is key to our growth as well-equipped professionals and our ability to honour the best ways for our students to express their learning and emotional growth. We must include ideas we’re unfamiliar and sometimes uncomfortable with because it challenges us and provides opportunity for professional growth. We build authentic relationships with our students and peers by engaging in life long learning and demonstrating that knowledge as part of our professional practice. A teacher who can represent the best in research based pedagogy will be positioned to provide an inclusive classroom built on productive and positive relationships.

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I hope I can use the learning from my BEd and research to build a classroom that is inclusive, built on creativity, filled with story, and incorporates Indigenous ways of knowing and learning. I will start with my feet in the concept of “seven generations before, and seven generations ahead” (Fricke, 2019, p.119) and explore my students futures with story and agency, “storytelling is a way of indigenizing the curriculum, building the socially constructed context of prior learning and meaning making into their lessons to be culturally responsive to Indigenous students, as well as offering non-Indigenous students an experience that brought new, interactive ways to represent their own experience” (Battiste, 2013, p.184). Wolfe and the Sparrows is an artwork in conversation with its predecessor statue that sits on some lonely street in Mount Royal. I see Wolfe and the Sparrows and can’t help but think about the past while imagining the next chapter for Wolfe and what shape I’ll take next as an educator who can represent change and progress. 

 
 

Battiste, M. (2013). Decolonizing education : Nourishing the learning spirit.

Fricke, S. (2019). Introduction: Indigenous Futurisms in the Hyperpresent Now. World Art, 9(2), 107-121.