Krista Courchene - Blog 2

I really enjoyed reading this chapter after going through it a second time. The first time, it was quite overwhelming for me with all of the definitions, but as I started coming up with examples from my own life experiences to fit examples of all of the definitions, it was all starting to click together.

I am very familiar hearing the term ‘structural functionalism’ growing up because it was the one term repeated over again in unbiased research on the residential schools and found in many modern texts (from at least 2005 and on) that my mom would discuss with me. Many texts on the residential schools discuss how the church used education as their tool for assimilating First Nation children into dominant white society, which Robson explains that Durkheim states, “it is only through education that a given society can forge a commitment to an underlying set of common beliefs and values” (20). This is exactly what happened in those schools, except that a very small percentage of real academic education was happening. Instead, the children in these residential schools were being taught life skills, such as sewing, baking, farming, and other ‘disposable domestic’ skills such as doing the laundry or housekeeping in the dorms. My mother said that if she were to put numbers to the amount of actual school work they would do in residential school, it was somewhere around 2 hours of school work a day, and the rest was all of the mentioned above. These residential schools were given a lot of money for them to educate (as indicated in the 1876 Indian Act) Indian children, and that money was never used the way that it was intended.

The hidden curriculum (24) is an interesting concept to me because I feel that as teachers, we are responsible for educating children, even if it isn’t intentional learning. Children pick up on everything, and at the end of the day, what they take away from the day, or even the whole week, is the routine that is established within the classroom that does not actually involve academic work, but more behavioural and social work – listening to the teacher, lining up when the teacher requests, etc.

The last thing I found to be relatable was resistance theory discussed on page 28. Many marginalized students are deemed as rebels and delinquents, when they are probably just simply trying to preserve whatever values and morals they have left that keep them going that they have learned by their religion and/or culture. I know from personal experience, I was always insulted by my high school teachers when I didn’t want to write about how my history textbook inaccurately described Aboriginal people as being connected to the land and almost painting a hippie-like image of my people. When I corrected my teacher, I was told that I was being dramatic when I just wanted to remind my teacher that our textbook was written by a white author who probably knew little to nothing about the true spirituality of First Nation people. I was resisting what my teacher was aiming to teach me, when I ended up teaching my teacher. I remember having to talk to the guidance counselor about this, which was more traumatic for me than actually having to argue and debate with my teacher. I was deemed “troubled”.  If I was going to use these social and academic skills, and acquire this knowledge that this teacher wanted to deliver to me, I at least wanted to make sure that it was accurate because if put into the context of resistance theory, this inaccurate knowledge of my own people and culture would have been deemed useless if I knew that I was taught untrue information to be used in my career.

Question: As a former high school principal, and now, a school administrator, my mom always talks about the discrepancies between high school students who've graduated from the French Immersion school in the town beside our reserve, and the high school students that have graduated from the high school on the reserve. In terms of post-secondary success, the students who have graduated from the high school in Sagkeeng have much higher success rates and higher GPAs than the students who have graduated from Powerview. If we think about primary and secondary effects, why do you think these are the results, despite what the literature says based on socio-economic status, race, and social class?