Kudos to our own
In Salluit, a fly-in Inuit village in northern Quebec, the cold is bitter and isolation wearying. The Arctic community of just over 1,300 residents struggles to cope with the harsh conditions and lack of opportunity. Alcoholism, drug abuse and suicide are endemic.
This bleakness creates a vicious circle. Teachers who come to the community often don’t make it through the year, a churn that disrupts children’s education and compounds hopelessness, making life there still harder to endure.
Maggie MacDonnell, who won the prestigious Global Teacher Prize this week, showed her students and the community that there is nothing inevitable about this cycle. The Nova Scotia-born teacher persevered through her first year, and then five more after that. And she did more than simply endure.
She secured funding for a new community kitchen, and showed her students how to run it. She brought in money for an in-school nutrition program, which taught kids to eat well and cook healthy food for one another. She encouraged girls, who in Salluit are often overburdened with domestic duties, to look beyond and pursue opportunities traditionally thought to be boys’ alone. Under her guidance, her students fundraised more than $37,000 for diabetes prevention.
For this remarkable contribution, MacDonnell was given the coveted international teaching prize, which comes with a wellearned $1-million paycheque. The ceremony took place in Dubai on Sunday and MacDonnell brought along three of her students. After all, she said, she made it as far as she did in the competition only because of her relationship with the community and the work they did together.
As for the money, she plans to use it to start a non-profit with her pupils that would engage youth and teach environmental stewardship by recreating a culture of kayaking in the Arctic.
Her approach, rooted in respect for her students, their culture and the particular challenges of their community, is a model for teachers everywhere. Her conviction that kindness breeds hope holds a lesson for us all.
For her remarkable work in northern Quebec, Maggie MacDonnell won the Global Teacher Prize