Cross-Cultural Science & Technology Units (CCSTU) Project meeting of November 19, 1999.

Held at the College of Education, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon

Present: Gloria Belcourt, Morris Brizinski, David Gold, Keith Lemaigre, Shaun Nagy, Earl Stobbe Glen Aikenhead.

Visitor: Joy Starr, Saskatoon Tribal Council.

1. Welcome

Joy Starr welcomed people to Saskatoon and then talked about the Super Saturday program run by the Saskatoon Tribal Council. Super Saturday is held in an urban setting (at the U of S) for Aboriginal students and shares the same goals as the CCSTU project held in its rural settings (local schools). Joy mentioned the importance and challenges of using Aboriginal knowledge, such as a knowledge of northern lights.

2. Reaction from the Community

Teachers who had already tried out a unit spoke about:

a. the barriers to overcome (e.g. some students were shy about involving family members, and some students did not want to participate and needed to be motivated, one way or another; also some parents [especially the ones in their 30s] were split in terms of their enthusiasm for the unit);

b. overcoming the barriers (e.g. letters or phone calls to parents to explain their potential role in the school science unit, putting pressure on students to get stories from the community, having a few community-based stories to show people to begin with, and sending home some product from the unit [e.g. a small jar of rose hip jelly students made] and then asking for a story);

c. the majority of students becoming highly motivated over the unit (though the low motivated students generally were not moved too much);

d. all family members who contributed a story to the unit were very happy to do so;

e. the unit bringing the community and school a little closer together;

f. some parents who before, avoided talking to teachers when picking up their children, now initiated conversations with the teacher about what was happening at school;

g. parents being more motivated to contribute to school events such as writing a local history;

h. students having a lot of knowledge about local plants;

i. the units being very successful and needing only a small amount of fine-tuning.

j. sensitivity to various views on spirituality (Aboriginal, Christian, etc.) and the important place for these views in students' lives.

3. Work on the Units

In groups of two or three, teachers scrutinized each unit page by page to add details to maximize their usefulness to other teachers. This activity took several hours. It was decided:

a. to make cross references to other units whenever it seemed logical.

b. to pick a small number of key goals and objectives in each unit to place in the introductory portion of each unit.

4. Lunch at the Faculty Club

Dean Ken Jacknicke and Assist. Dean Alan Ryan joined the group for lunch.

5. Review our New Website

Unfortunately the new website was not available at the time we logged on to it. Its address is:

www.engr.usask.ca/itlc/capes/ccstu-new/

6. Our STF Presentation

We finalized our presentation about the CCSTU project for the McDowell Foundation conference sponsored by the STF, Saturday November 20.