Thoughts on FPPL After my First Practicum

Here I am reflecting on my first practicum experience and how I am feeling regarding the implementation of First Peoples Principles of Learning in my own practice. During my time actually teaching I found that certain principles are a lot easier to add into your lessons than others in my perspective. The obvious one that comes to mind is “learning takes patience and time”. This principle I found was very easily incorporated into my lessons because any time I was giving the students the needed time and help to meet the learning outcomes I felt this principle was being used. The second one I found super natural to include was ” learning is holistic, reflexive, reflective, experiential, and relational”. Why I found this principle so easy to connect to was that lots of my lessons had the element of learning through experience and asking the students to reflect on that learning and exploration. I did include a few of the other principles in my lesson plans but I felt that whatever content you were focusing on definitely influenced what principle fit into the lesson.

Another interesting facet to including the principles of learning is that I wonder if we are using these principles in every lesson or hope to be is this something we need to explicitly state to our students? In my perspective, it would be worthwhile to go over these principles and where they come from with students so they understand their impact. I believe this would have a positive impact on learning because it is one thing to implement these ways of knowing into our teaching but I think they would make that much more of a solid impact if they were presented fully with the students. Having said this I don’t think this means stating every principle you are using before each lesson but I do believe that it can be used to give the main idea for a lesson. For example, you could say for this lesson we are going to focus on story and memory, or we are going to focus on exploration and so on. Overall, I definitely need to work on including these principles in a more holistic way in my teaching that goes beyond just when we are focusing on indigenous content in the classroom. I look forward to the chance to work on this goal for my next practicum.

A few links to start with or refer to:

First Peoples Principles of Learning – Poster – from FNESC
http://www.fnesc.ca/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/PUB-LFP-POSTER-Principles-of-Learning-First-Peoples-poster-11×17.pdf

First Peoples Principles of Learning – Blog – by Jo Chrona from FNESC
https://firstpeoplesprinciplesoflearning.wordpress.com/

Learning First Peoples Classroom Resources – from FNESC
http://www.fnesc.ca/learningfirstpeoples/