Inuit/Nunavut Perspectives

Resources I have found helpful...

Other Perspectives

Resources I have found helpful...

Elsie Paul et al., 2019

In trying to find or develop a way to capture what lived inside me and share my knowledge in a way that felt authentic and right as I moved through my graduate coursework, I felt repeatedly frustrated that I couldn't figure out how to communicate all that I knew in writing. This was nothing new to me... I have always struggled greatly to express myself in writing, despite being told I am a gifted writer by many people throughout my life.

Thinking that the physical writing process itself (coupled with my neurodevelopmental disability & the motor coordination challenges it brings) might be the problem, I started experimenting with voice recording software to try and get my words out. That helped a little, but only a little.

I next wondered if maybe relying on the written word exclusively to communicate (coupled with my Autism & Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and the tendency towards rigid thinking or "perfectionism" the combo can bring) might also contribute to my challenges in communication. So I experimented with recording video essays and responses in "real-time", as I have also been told I am a gifted verbal communicator. This helped a little, but again... only a little. Verbally, my ideas came out much faster, which helped me cut back my workload by ~1 hour each day, but I was still struggling. My videos felt too long & rambly & I always forgot to say something I had carefully researched, despite my best efforts at planning. Worse yet, the same work still took me almost twice as long as most of my classmates told me it took them.

I felt defeated. I had professors and a university that was supportive of my needs, both as a student with processing speed delays and poor working memory due to my disability, and also just as a student who wanted to figure out a way to "do" this program in a way that made sense to me as a Nunavummiut teacher with a neurodivergent brain. I was given license to try different things to meet my needs, but as someone who had never tried to do "academic" work with any accommodations before in my life, I had no idea what to even try after my first 2 attempts missed the mark.

Then I found As I Remember It: Teachings (Ɂəms tɑɁɑw) from the Life of a Sliammon Elder, and something clicked into place. Collaboration... between people with strong relational ties. Conversations shared between people who trust one another. Storytelling... in many forms. Expressions of wisdom through teachings from the same source, sharing from the same body of knowledge, but in so many different ways, through different lenses. Every component is personal and so different but is connected to the whole in a way that creates something far greater than the sum of its parts.

This is digital communication, learning and teaching in a way that feels more "right" to me than anything I could have ever imagined or dreamt up on my own. Thanks to Elsie, Davis, Paige & Harmony, I could finally see a way to move forward with not just my coursework, but my work as an educator in a healthier, more sustainable way. To me, this feels like pilimmaksarniq.

Lake & Atkins, 2021

I am a massive fan of this work by Joanna Lake & Hayley Atkins published in 2021 for their Master of Education work (in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction) at the University of Victoria.

I think this work is an amazing example of both digital citizenship & allyship from settler educators as both teachers and as graduate students. I admire this work for so many reasons, not least of which is the fact that in addition to it being a fantastic teaching resource from a universal design & accessibility perspective, it was done collaboratively. May we all be lucky enough to find a Lake to our Atkins on our educational journeys. <3