A Sense of Place
Story appeared in the 2018 issue of QMS Connections Magazine.
BY LEANNE SCHULTZ, OPERATIONS & HR MANAGER
“Learning is holistic, reflexive, reflective, experiential, and relational (focused on connectedness, on reciprocal relationships, and a sense of place).”
One legacy outcome of the Senior School’s work with Ms. Hart and the Cowichan Elders has been the creation of a native garden at Queen Margaret’s School. Spearheaded by Miss Lorusso, with help from our Maintenance Staff, a pathway has been formed behind the Senior School that showcases native plants of the region. Students regularly help by weeding out introduced species, so that the native specimens can thrive. This “Ethnobotany Walk” has provided valuable hands-on learning opportunities for all students at QMS.
A Grade 3 class takes a walk around the QMS grounds with Ken Elliott, a Cowichan Tribes member and expert in native plant horticulture.
In the summer of 2017, a QMS grand-parent approached the School with a unique proposal. Sally Hart, whose roots come from Pun’eluxutth’ (Penalakut Tribe), is an Aboriginal Education teacher for Cowichan Valley School District #79 and a PhD student at Simon Fraser University. Her doctoral thesis explores the challenge of indigenizing education for non-indigenous learners, and as a practical application of her research, she wanted to work with QMS to bring the First Nations Principles of Learning into the classroom by helping the school build reciprocal relationships between QMS and local elders.
For Vice Principal of Curriculum & Instruction Alison O’Marra-Armstrong, the offer could not have come at a better time. “When the Ministry of Education launched BC’s new curriculum, there was a clear focus on integrating Aboriginal world views and knowledge. Our faculty was excited by the prospect of teaching students about Indigenous culture, but at the same time, they had some trepidation about inadvertently misinforming students.” O’Mara-Armstrong had tried to provide QMS staff with as much professional development and learning as possible, but resources were limited. What the QMS faculty needed was a “go-to” person in the community who could teach their knowledge first-hand. Enter Sally Hart and her proposal.
Grade 10 students worked with Cowichan Salish Elder Della Rice Sylvester to harvest medicinal plants such as sword fern, mint, burdock and comfrey from our Campus. They weighed and processed them into salves under Della’s guidance. These QMS salves were offered to visiting elders at the BC Elders Gathering 2018 in July.
Using her deep connections to local Elders, Hart collaborated with members of the School’s Senior School Educational Leadership Team to augment the curriculum and strengthen the integration of Aboriginal world views for QMS Students. Using a cross-curricular approach, she and STEM Department Head Nicole Lorusso and Humanities teacher Kim Phillips began their work with the Grade 10 cohort starting in September 2017. Their approach will follow the students through to their graduation year in 2021.
Working with community partner Social Planning Cowichan, the trio welcomed local elders to the School to deliver a Cultural Connections Workshop for Grade 10 students. Students listened intently as the elders guided them through 500 years of pre-and post-colonial Canadian history through the lens of their people. Then, they were divided into family and village units to role-play the daily life and routines they had just learned about. Abruptly, they were split apart and taken into another room, cut off from their family units.
This experience, reflective of just one small fraction of the Residential school trauma that many Elders have lived through, was transformative for both the students and their teachers. For one local day student, it completely changed her understanding of her neighbours and fellow citizens of the Cowichan Valley. One international student felt that this added facet of Canadian History helped enrich her understanding of Canada.
Grade 3 Teacher Mrs. Alice Lavigne reflects on a walk her class took around the QMS grounds with Ken Elliott. A Cowichan Tribes member and expert in native plant horticulture, Elliott, had worked with the Grade 10s earlier in the year to do a species inventory and show students how to remove introduced species. “Our social studies curriculum focuses on the relationship between people and their environment, innovations and tools of indigenous peoples, traditions and spirituality. In science, we look at biodiversity, which encompasses both plants and animals, and how we interact with them. Having access to an elder from the Cowichan First Nations who could talk about the plants we see on campus every day with knowledge passed down to him through his family was a perfect way to blend our social studies and science.”
In February of this year, Elders from the Cowichan Tribes attended a workshop with QMS teachers and staff from other BC schools to talk about their collaboration to date and offer practical approaches to strengthen the integration of Aboriginal world views in the classroom. The innovative work done by Sally Hart, QMS teachers, and the Cowichan Tribes is helping guide the implementation of BC’s new curriculum. More importantly, however, it is providing an important sense of place for our students.
Sources: BC’s Redesigned Curriculum
https://thetyee.ca/News/2017/09/05/Bumpy-Start-for-BC-First-Peoples-Curriculum/
QMS Founder, Miss Geoghegan kept an ethnobotany journal in her years at QMS as she discovered the various plants around campus.