Advancing Reconciliation Through Education, Language, and Theatre

Virginia Robertson is partnering with Shawnigan Lake School to teach Hul’qumi’num classes to secondary students. Recognizing that the student body is primarily settler and international students, the curriculum design will create space and time for students to learn Canadian colonial history, to engage with active Hul’q’umi’num’ language speakers, create their own theatrical vignettes based on Hul’qumi’num linguistic expression, and reflect on their own individual linguistic heritage.

The secondary student participants will document their project experience through personal learning journals, develop individual learner profiles that includes their linguistic origins and environments, noting their attitudes to the current health system, to cultivate awareness of the role that these factors played throughout the program and research process by writing their own stories in their own words.

The benefit to Shawnigan Lake School is the introduction and implementation of the school’s first immersive, Indigenous language programme that addresses the foundational concepts of Indigenous knowledge and first people’s principles of learning. Shawnigan Lake School is launching a Reconciliation Action Plan in October 2024 and the Hul’qumi’num language program is a foundational pillar of this. Shawnigan currently has 18 students who self-identify as Indigenous, and yet may never have had the opportunity to engage with their cultural and socio-linguistic identity.

Faculty Supervisor:

Amanda Wager

Student:

Partner:

Shawnigan Lake School

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Education

University:

Vancouver Island University

Program: