The Heartbeat of Na’a: Documenting One School’s Blackfoot Cultural Learning Journey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In June 2019, students at an elementary school presented a Blackfoot/English opera and also wrote, illustrated and published Blackfoot/English books to showcase their 18-month-long Blackfoot learning journey. This collaborative story cannot be told in isolation by the researcher/designer alone. Together with the Elder who guided the work and the school principal, we will share the heart of this journey and the impact that this has had on pedagogy, school culture and relationships. Findings from this ethnographic study (Lassiter, 2005; Rappaport, 2008) within an Indigenous research paradigm (Chilisa, 2012; Donald, 2016; Wilson, 2008) highlight how wisdom and stories that are part of the land and how intentional and nurtured relationships with an Elder, with each other and with the animals led to a deeper appreciation of local place. It also created a stronger sense of engagement and belonging within the school for teachers and students. Within the conventional, privileged space of an opera, we created an open, ethical space that invited all students to thrive and participate (Ermine, 2007). Findings point to increased engagement by marginalized students in the land-based experiences, in the preparations for the opera and the book writing, and also in the opera performance itself. With video clips of the opera and samples of the books to lift our stories, this presentation aims to inspire action in the collective work of education for reconciliation. We see this journey as a gift to share with the world so that educators and leaders can create their own meaningful action across different contexts.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.039 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".