‘WE EXPECT YOU TO DO WELL’
AN INNOVATIVE APPROACH TO MATH HELPS EDUCATORS PUSH THE LIMITS AT INDIGENOUS SCHOOLS
Teachers with Mi’kmaw Kina’matnewey, the Indigenous educational authority in Nova Scotia, are mandated to “bring the community into the classroom.” But what does that actually look like? How do you root math, for example, in Mi’kmaq culture? As Kelly GallagherMackay and Nancy Steinhauer write in Pushing the Limits, rising to this challenge has not only transformed students — but teachers as well. This is the first in a series of excerpts from this year’s Donner Prize nominees, a $50,000 award for the best public policy book in Canada. The winner will be announced May 15.
When Lisa Lunney Borden, a white Canadian, started teaching in Mi’ kmaw schools in 1995, she often asked her students: “What’s the word for …” and “Is there a word for … .”
She quickly began to understand that there are concepts in Mi’kmaq that do not exist in English, and vice versa. One example she uses to illustrate this idea is the word flat. Depending on its meaning, there are different Mi’kmaq translations. There is one word for “it can sit still.” There is another word for “you can put things on it.”
Over time, Lunney Borden realized that the Mi’kmaw language conceives of math in a way that emphasizes doing and motion, as opposed to English, which tends to be more static. She began to “verbify” math and to pay more attention to motion and spatial reasoning.
Imagining objects moving in space, composing and decomposing shapes, and understanding the relationship between three-dimensional and two-dimensional shapes are all examples of spatial thinking. And in teaching these concepts to her students, Lunney Borden was able to reach them in a new way. “Their math abilities are increasing exponentially,”
she says.
She also worked with her students on a project called “Show Me Your Math,” which engaged them in culturally based inquiry projects like discovering how to bead Wampum belts; plant medicine gardens; and make maple syrup, snowshoes and canoe paddles.
Some students learned to create paddles from their grandfathers. These men were canoe racers, but they had come to racing only as adults. Colonization and the cycle of poverty had prohibited the grandfathers from learning these skills as children. Later in life, however, they reclaimed this traditional practice and learned both to race and carve paddles. As Lunney Borden tells it, “The men found being involved in the students’ education empowering, as if they were ‘getting something back.’ ” Creating the paddles gave students opportunities to practice measurement and geometry in a real-life situation that had both meaning and consequence.
Aaron Prosper, an MK graduate who is now president of Dalhousie’s Student Union, remembers a Show Me Your Math project he took on in Grade 7, based on the Mi’kmaw game of Waltes. The game requires a carved 30-centimetre bowl, five dice-like objects traditionally carved of walrus tusk or caribou antler, and 51 counting sticks. Aaron’s project involved not only calculating the probability of different throws of the dice, but also looking at how the geometry of the bowl affected how the dice would fall.
For Aaron, it was particularly meaningful because the bowls, filled with water, had traditionally been used as a way of reading visions, and to settle disputes or make decisions. During colonization, priests would drill holes into the bowls — purportedly to make them more “aerodynamic” during a game of Waltes — while in actuality inhibiting their spiritual purpose. “The priests’ claim was kind of ridiculous, if you understand physics,” explains Aaron. The project not only had him doing quite complex math — it gave him a new tool to understand and critique a historical example of racism.
The right of Mi’kmaw communities in Nova Scotia to govern their own education system was formally recognized by federal legislation in 1998. One of the first things the chiefs did was ask themselves what it would mean to create an education system across their 13 communities that respected their language and culture. Even the organization’s name, Mi’kmaw Kina’matnewey, reflects a deep shift in philosophy, describing “the process of educating our people from birth to grave.”
The perfect storm of teaching math in a system that is committed to overcoming a damaging legacy of colonialism, by a committed group of mostly Indigenous educators working with strong support from the local university, has helped create a model for First Nations communities across Canada — and for schools everywhere.
According to John Jerome Paul, MK’s director of programs, high expectations have been a crucial part of their success. “There is no ‘hoping’ you will survive in our program. We expect you to do well. We’ve helped you develop those core skills — now it’s really you that needs to take the next steps.”
Through high expectations and higher-order thinking extended to students at a systems level, MK has made great strides in closing achievement gaps. In 2016, 87 per cent of Mi’kmaw students in those communities graduated from high school. That result is more than double the auditor general’s 2011 assessment of the graduation rate of First Nations students on reserves across Canada (41 per cent), and within one per cent of the graduation rate of all students in Nova Scotia.