FNWSC communities can strengthen their law-making processes and understanding by sharing each other’s unique assertion histories and current approaches in policy and law development, implementation and evaluation.
FNWSC communities can strengthen their law-making processes and understanding by sharing each other’s unique assertion histories and current approaches in policy and law development, implementation and evaluation.
Since the late winter of 2016, delegates from participating nations in the FNWSC dialogue at strategic planning sessions about their law-making processes, education governing experiences, i.e., how they run their boards of education, for example, and what their vision of a transformed First Nation education system looks like in their respective communities.
Through think tanks held on-line through virtual meeting platforms, delegates dive deeper into governance specific topics and share their policies, ask questions and offer valuable insight into each other’s challenges and opportunities in education governance matters.
Delegates raise important questions about current law-making structures that cause even deeper recognition of the work ahead, such as:
- In what ways does our community assert education jurisdiction now?
- How do I ‘Indigenize’ the current education policies we have now because as I reflect on them they are simply mirror images of the public school system policies and do not reflect our Anishinaabek/Haudenosaunee view?
- Are there words in the language that will better express the intent of a policy?
- Does this policy take into account our key principles, values and beliefs as described in our draft frameworks
FN Communities Develop from Strengths
In a visioning exercise supported by the FNWSC in the early Winter of 2017, participating nations identified through community engagements what their vision of a transformed education system is. Culture, identity, language and our histories were key priority areas of a transformed education system identified by all participating nations.
In a visioning exercise supported by the FNWSC in the early Winter of 2017, participating nations identified through community engagements what their vision of a transformed education system is. Culture, identity, language and our histories were key priority areas of a transformed education system identified by all participating nations.
Since the Fall of 2017, FNWSC has been actively identifying each community’s assets that will serve to address the community’s respective vision of a vibrant life long learning system. By doing so, education strategic planning can take advantage of assets primed to be put to work for the community. In this way, communities drive and operate the asset mapping.
Community members named many tangible assets such as their school, library, pond, animals and forests, for example. They also named many intangible assets such as family knowledges, community social programming, and a sense of belonging.
One community prioritized the protection of 32 named species-at-risk as the asset needing more strengthening and attention in the short-term education plan.