Cyndy Baskin. Strong Helpers' Teachings: The Value of Indigenous Knowledges in the Helping Professions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cyndy Baskin. Strong Helpers' Teachings: The Value of Indigenous Knowledges in the Helping Professions. Toronto, ON: Canadian Scholars' Press, Inc. 2010. 278 pp. $39.95 sc. As the discipline of Aboriginal studies continues to grow, an increased degree of specialization becomes evident. This book, although somewhat mistitled, is one such volume, and significantly adds useful insights to this field of study. Although the author purports to discuss helping professions per se, almost all of the chapters in the book specifically address the practice of social work. There are virtually no references to counseling, nursing, or pastoral ministry, all of which appear to be in the business of helping people. Baskin's tack in pointing out the value of First Nations knowledges (as though to imply that there are several different kinds in existence) is intriguing, to say the least. I suggest this because the 14 chapter titles seem to illuminate two distinct paths--purely academic and quite practical. Examples of academically inclined chapters include chapter three (Current Theories and Models of Social Work as Seen Through an Indigenous Lens), chapter four (Centering All Helping Approaches), chapter eleven (Pedagogy), and chapter twelve (Research). Chapters featuring a more practical bent include chapter two (The Self is Always First in the Circle), chapter seven (The Answers Are in the Community), chapter eight (Spirituality), chapter nine (Healing Justice), and chapter fourteen (The End of the World as We Know It). Baskin does an excellent job of inserting and interpreting a number of fundamental precepts of Aboriginal philosophy including the importance of the circle, value of elder input (the word Elder is capitalized for some reason), importance of the extended family, Indigenous ties to the land, the role of storytelling, and, of course, spirituality as the foundation of life. I am quite convinced that no one will grasp the intended purpose of Baskin's discourse without appreciating the underlying importance of these values. As an educator I was naturally drawn to chapter eleven on pedagogy, hoping to derive new insights for practice. Having worked in Indigenous communities for nearly a half century, I found myself on familiar ground. Baskin appropriately references the value of storytelling, particularly since Native legends are often used by elders to encourage hearers to form their own conclusions. Baskin's definition of learning steps--watching, learning, and doing are reminiscent of what I learned in Blackfoot country--are the four steps used to inculcating a concept or practice: listening, watching, participating, and teaching. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.030 | 0.011 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".