“Walking Together” – Day of Education for Reconciliation
- Tiffany Head | April 17, 2016
Teachers and students from 50 schools around the Regina area attended the, “Walking together” - A Day of Education for reconciliation event at the University of Regina on Thursday, April 14.
The event was hosted by the Faculty of Education in partnership with the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR).
The Dean of Education and organizer of the event, Jennifer Tupper, said there was an overwhelmingly positive response from the schools that were invited and in the end they had to turn away several groups because the facility did not have the capacity to take everyone in.
“There’s certainly a desire for this kind of learning, to begin to think differently about what a reconciled future will look like,” said Tupper.
After the opening event, where the invited speakers addressed the teachers, students and esteemed guests, the school groups attended different workshops.
There were 11 workshops and 10 blanket exercises all going simultaneously.
Tupper said each workshop represents a unique opportunity for teachers and their students to begin learning, if they haven’t had any learning yet about the histories and legacies of residential schools.
“It’s building on that knowledge and really thinking about what our individual and collective responsibilities are, to take up the 94 calls to action and live in different ways alongside, First Nations, Metis and Inuit people,” said Tupper.
Facilitators from All Nations Hope Network ( ANHN) were asked to join the event to provide cultural and emotional support for the teachers and students who would find the subject matter difficult to deal with.
Gary Edwards, a residential school survivor and the cultural supporter at ANHN, says they have set up in the pit in front of the Education auditorium where they would wait for the students in-between workshops.
“My fellow support providers will be working in groups of twos, we will be going around monitoring what is called, the blanket exercise. Very essential to teaching a simple block history of what Residential schools was,” said Edwards.
“What we monitor in that blanket exercise is people’s adherence to those traditional values. We will head around in groups of two if we see people who are having an emotional response to it.”
Edwards says that if you don’t know anything about the residential schools, it comes at a shock and a threat to what people believe.
“It doesn’t make sense to what you believe what you have been taught at school and find out there’s another side to it, and there is another side to it,” said Edwards.
He believes that reconciliation in this sense means to reconcile two groups of people that have been separated by the system.
After the workshops, they had a closing event where the school groups and esteemed guests heard from invited speakers and then closing remarks were made, followed with a prayer.
If you want to learn more about the blanket exercise, visit http://kairosblanketexercise.org/about.