TRUE NORTH
Port Hawkesbury woman teaching school in remote Ontario community
Port Hawkesbury native teaching in remote northern community.
Renee Connors’ first teaching job is bound to be a real learning experience.
This week, the Port Hawkesbury native headed to Fort Severn First Nation, the northern-most community in Ontario, to teach Grade 7 and 8. It’s the beginning of a two-year commitment through Teach for Canada, a non-profit that helps remote communities in Ontario and Manitoba recruit teachers.
And for Connors, 25, it will be something of a homecoming.
She was born in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, and grew up in Hay River, about 480 kilometres away, before her family moved to Cape Breton when she eight.
“I have a lot of blurry memories of living in the Arctic, but I remember really loving it up there,” she told the Post from Thunder Bay, Ont., where the Fort Severn education board was holding professional development sessions before the school year began.
“I’m very excited to see the Northern Lights. I hear they’re fantastic up there because the land is so flat — I mean it’s right on the (Hudson) Bay, so it’s full open sky. I am excited and nervous at the prospect of seeing a polar bear because I don’t get to choose when I see a polar bear, if you know what I mean, so that’s a little rush. But I’m excited for all of it. Ice-fishing is something I did that I haven’t done since I was eight years old, so it will be kind of cool to refamiliarize myself with those kinds of things, too.”
It will definitely be a change of pace for Connors. She spent the last several years living in Toronto where the Mount Allison grad earned her master’s degree in education at University of Toronto at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Now she will go from Canada’s most populated city to a remote fly-in community with a population of just under 500 people.
“I’ve been fortunate to be in Toronto for the last two years,” she said. “My family is quite spread out and my friend group is also, so being in Toronto — people fly through Toronto all the time, so I’ve gotten to see more people in the last years that I’m close with than I have in the past while. So obviously I’m pulling myself out of that space where I’ve been able to connect with people and see people who I love a lot. So that to me will probably be the most challenging part, just being away from friends and family, but technology these days is awesome. The school is totally hooked up and there’s Internet in my house, too, which is nice.”
Connors said Fort Severn’s isolation is the main reason she’s going there. While at the University of Toronto, she studied Indigenous education and learned how the turnover rates of teachers affects students in Northern Canada.
“So, the reason Teach for Canada looks for a two-year commitment is because it’s important to keep teachers in the north for more than one year — or one year at least — because a lot of people leave quickly when they get up there. I mean it’s a new environment, it can be harsh, like geographically and isolating because it’s small communities, so people maybe aren’t prepared, or it’s not what they expected, so they end up leaving early.”
Kyle Hill, Teach for Canada’s executive director, said the non-profit takes extra steps to help its teachers make that adjustment. In addition to a rigorous recruitment process, Teach for Canada holds an intensive three-week summer program that focuses on First Nations histories, cultures and languages. And they offer professional and personal support for its recruits while they are teaching and living in the North.
Hill said the idea is that if they can get their teachers through the first year, it’s better for them and the students.
“A lot of the kids in the north, they’ve seen teachers come and go, so they’re inherently suspicious of teachers when they come. For example, in the first month in September, the kids they really test that teacher, they give that teacher a hard time because they think that teacher might be like a lot of other teachers who have come and gone — maybe for kids’ reasons, but they’ve come and gone. By November or December, once the kids are starting to think, ‘OK, this is a teacher I can trust,’ then they start getting nervous about the fact that the teacher might not be coming back,” he said. “When you’re a kid and you start to open up and build trust in your teacher and then if they leave and don’t come back, it’s incredibly damaging both academically in terms of academic performance, but also in terms of trust and attachment. Having stability and the teacher in the school is absolutely correlated with student success and trust in education.”
So far it seems to be working.
Since Teach for Canada started four years ago, Hill said they’ve sent 155 teachers to 19 remote northern communities in Ontario and Manitoba, and of those,
40 per cent have stayed for third year.
And he said Bluenosers like Connors seem to thrive.
“One thing that has come up, I can’t tell you how many times, is Northern Indigenous communities in Ontario and Manitoba have told us ‘Wow, we love hiring Nova Scotians. They are down to earth, they are friendly, they work hard, they don’t complain, and they fit in with our communities,” Hill, who is from Yarmouth, said, adding that he expects Connors to thrive in her new job.
“She’s awesome, she’s amazing, and she’s going to make a big difference up in Fort Severn.”
Connors said she’s looking forward to helping her students.
“I’m really excited to be there for two years and to be a supportive, consistent adult to these kids because they deserve that.”