Case Study of an Indigenous Teacher’s Writing Instruction: Tensions and Negotiations Among Western Discourses of Writing and 8 Ways Aboriginal Principles
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research investigated an Indigenous teacher’s pedagogy in a rural First Nation school in order to gain insight into culturally responsive writing instruction. Pre-service and in-service educators have identified significant challenges in the teaching of writing, feeling unprepared and/or lacking confidence to teach this essential skill. Additionally, many teachers feel uncomfortable and/or ill-equipped to incorporate Indigenous content and perspectives into their classrooms. Resulting from generations of on-going colonial oppression, educational disparities in literacy development have been identified between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. Along with a focus on traditional language and cultural revitalization, Indigenous families in Canada have advocated education for their children in the dominant literacy practices of schooling. With a growing Indigenous population, educators are seeking ways to respectfully and successfully integrate cultural perspectives, content, and traditional ways of knowing/learning into their classrooms. This study addressed the paucity of research on writing development in Canada conducted within rural areas and with Indigenous Peoples. Case study methodology was utilized. Qualitative data was collected and analyzed in the form of classroom observations, formal and informal interviews, and collection of artifacts (e.g., student writing, curricular resources, etc.). An initial objective of this study was to identify which of six evidence-based discourses of writing (Ivanić, 2004) were employed in the teacher’s instructional approaches and beliefs about writing instruction. Findings revealed that she utilized all six at varying times over the course of the classroom observations, reflecting a comprehensive approach to teaching writing. Tensions were revealed between conflicting discourses, some remained unresolved while others were successfully negotiated. The second question in this study sought to determine which of the 8 Ways Aboriginal pedagogies (Yunkaporta, 2009) did the teacher utilize in her writing instruction. In addition to incorporating local cultural content she utilized all instructional methods identified through the 8 Ways framework. Examination of classroom practices revealed an overlap between Western discourse theory and the Indigenous 8 Ways pedagogy framework. Utilization of Indigenous instructional strategies directly address the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s (2015d) call to action regarding the integration of Indigenous knowledge and teaching methods into classrooms.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".