As part of the reflection on these readings, I have to say that I feel that they were a bit novice for this stage of our learning. However, the introduction of this topic did make me think about my own practice in regards to literature, literacy and the First Nations people, and that is primarily what I'll comment on.
There seems to be some crossover between this section on the stories of First Nations people, and the section on oral storytelling. Although I can see the strong belief of Native advocates and literature specialists to explore specifically native stories with children, perhaps it is also a further recommendation on the salient quality of the modality of oral language in storytelling. It helps us to understand that a specific group of people would benefit from this type of literacy learning, and to be mindful of this in our practice.
Like most things in education, this topic has a political edge to it. It seems to me to be an outcry from the native population to try as much as possible to counteract the injustice that they underwent in the recent past. In the article 'Honoring the Word', the author states, "...learning our own story as it is told in our own voices may well be the most fundamental guarantee of our survival as native people". Although I fully support this idea, and am appalled by this terrible history, I wonder how much this applies to the children who we see today in our classrooms. I wonder how much this political agenda weighs on them personally.
This reminds me of a child who I had in my centre who was Native. The teachers went out of their way to be culturally sensitive to this child and his family and (as much as we were able to, not being native ourselves) try to represent his culture - or what we perceived was his culture - in his classroom. It was later that his mother spoke to us, saying that despite her appreciation of our efforts, the child wasn't really "in touch" with his Native culture, and she didn't want us going out of our way to represent it, since it wasn't really applicable to him.
This experience makes me think, what are the dangers in "representing" a culture when we are not even sure of it's presence in a child's life? How is this different from any other form of "Halloween" style multiculturalism?
What I will take away from this week's readings is similar to the week on oral storytelling. Aside from this, I think that the most important thing that we can do is to keep open dialogue with all families so that we can learn a bit about their practices and beliefs, and to try to avoid acting simple on our perception of what they might be.
(get ready to be slightly offended by this cartoon, but I chose it to spark ideas of perception)
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