by Heather Castleden, Faculty of Management

Here in the Faculty of Management, our Dean has IDEAS! Dean Cunningham is talking about Integrity, Diversity, Experiential Education, Action, and Sustainability and I am passionate about what she is talking about.

Having come to Dalhousie with knowledge and research experience about Indigenous environment and health in Canada, as well as knowledge about teaching in higher education, I have created a course called “Indigenous Perspectives on Resource and Environmental Management”. This isn’t your standard three-hour lecture, and I think it captures the Dean’s IDEAS!

The class draws (mostly white) students out of the classroom and into Indigenous communities, often for the first time in their lives, to sit with people – Elders, Chiefs, traditional knowledge-keepers, and resource users – and talk about the issues that most Canadians know very little about: historic and modern Treaties, Aboriginal rights, Title, Four Directions, Sacred Teachings, Indigenous world views, and environmental racism.

When students come back from their week of visiting, living, eating, and sleeping in Mi’kmaq communities, they are given the opportunity to reflect deeply on their experience and then create a digital story (which is a weaving together of personal narrative, images, motion, and music, creating a multi-dimensional story). They use these stories to share with each other and to communicate back to the community-based teachers about what they learned. When students finish this class, they ask: Why isn’t everyone at Dal required to take it? It’s a good question…