The quote “The way that you think about the relationship (between Aboriginal and non-aboriginal peoples) has a distinctive bearing on how you take it up in the classroom” is an extremely important quote to consider as a Caucasian male like myself becoming a teacher in the future. There are many roles that come into play when it comes to people like myself and what we think about aboriginal peoples. It is known in our society for many young Caucasian people like myself to have missed pre conceptions about aboriginal peoples as a whole because of the environment of which we are accustom to. I am no exception with this as I was raised in an environment where It was drilled into my brain that aboriginal people as a whole are bad people. It wasn’t until I reached university level that I was educated properly about aboriginal people to learn that these accusations are extremely false. It is absolutely crucial to become educated about topics like this so that we don’t pass on negative false information to our youth. If these missed pre conceptions somehow got passed our university level of schooling and made its way into the work force than it would end up having catastrophic affects. To be specific, it would create a never ending ripple affect on our younger generations passing down negative persona about aboriginal peoples. In my opinion, this has already happened in our society and I am a victim of having these negative thoughts passed down to my generation. This is where I believe the education program at this university does a fantastic job of intercepting these labels and reversing them to the truth and I am happy to be apart of the generations that will reverse the labels that was placed on aboriginal peoples.
When I think of what kind of education would I have to have in order to believe that I have no culture. The only word that comes to my mind is isolation. I believe you would have to be isolated from your community, be isolated from your previous ways of life and finally isolated from your background. This is the only way because growing up with your family, culture is automatically placed upon you. Every family has their own traditions that they will do that have been passed down from generation to generation and being taken away from that as a child would have a devastating affect on the child’s knowledge on the history of their family. A prime example of this is residential schools, the children were taken away from their families and were educated in isolation. Therefore were not raised in the cultural environment of their people. This lead to them believing they had no culture, or anything they did know about their culture was forgotten.
Teaching Portfolio 